Humanising Language Teaching
Year 4; Issue 5; September 02

Summer 2003 Teacher Training Courses

Mario Rinvolucri, UK

The new brochure for our 2003 courses is now out and you can order one by emailing my colleague, Jim Wright at sales@pilgrims.co.uk. You can also read full course descriptions in the TT section of our main site. To hyperflip across click HERE.

In this piece I would like to draw your attention to a few of the many courses we offer.

Teaching Advanced Students is a course we ran for the first time in 2002 and it drew in a thrilling crowd of teachers, very clued-up and keen as mustard.
If you come on this course in 2003 you are likely to learn a great deal from the other participants, as well as from the tutor. One of the 2002 participants was so outstanding that we have invited her to join the Pilgrims Faculty group.

When we ran The Lexical Approach and Spoken Grammar back in the last century there was only a thin trickle of takers. This last summer a full group of trainees came together and learnt a whole load about the corpus revolution and the work of Nattinger, Lewis and Mike McCarthy. Back in the last century we were running too far ahead of where people's interests were. Who knows, the 2003 course might demand the creation of two groups. ( To find out more about this area, read Ideas from the Corpora across the 20 + back numbers of HLT)

As the European Framework gets taken up by more and more Education Ministries in Europe we reckon it won't just be people from Italy who decide to come on Taking the Stress out of Modular Teaching. So far, Italy has led the implementation of the European Framework in her classrooms. We hope to see many people from across Europe on this course in 2003.

An exciting new course in 2003 will be Creative Drama for the Language Classroom. Of all the "feeder fields" that have enriched EFL over the past 40 years, drama training has perhaps had the strongest influence. In a way it is amazing that Pilgrims should be offering this as a new course. Maybe we are slow learners!

Another new course in the summer of 2003 will be Making exam Classes interesting. How often have you given up doing interesting exercises with your students as the exam time looms nearer and nearer? Keeping up the students' momentum and building their confidence is vital at just that sort of time. Should be a brilliant course, though, this one.

I have mentioned just 5 of the 18 courses we have to offer you next Easter and Summer so please click over to our main site and read what's on offer. You might find something just right for you or for that friend of yours…….