This CPD course for MFL teachers will provide delegates with a deeper understanding of the cognitive mechanisms involved in language acquisition and processing and will offer a wide range of evidence-based instructional strategies for accelerating learning. Our focus will be on modelling and enhancing listening and speaking instruction, explicitly integrating the two skills. Gianfranco will share and demonstrate a substantive repertoire of classroom strategies which are readily applicable to a variety of languages and topics.

Morning - Teaching Listening as Modelling

In this workshop Gianfranco will provide a wide range of evidence-based strategies and techniques aimed at modelling language through aural input. In his approach, listening instruction, both unidirectional and interpersonal, primes and prepares the language learner for oral production through a focus on micro-listening skills such as:

• Decoding
• Lexical retrieval
• Syntactic parsing
• Holding chunks in working memory
• Meaning negotiation and construction

Afternoon - Developing oral proficiency with novice to intermediate students

Building on the previous workshop, this session focuses on the levels of cognitive processing involved in oral production providing a framework which:

• Integrates more explicitly and seamlessly listening with speaking instruction
• Addresses the development of CAF (complexity, accuracy and fluency) through a principled approach to oral instruction steeped in current wisdom and research

Gianfranco will also share and demonstrate a substantive repertoire of classroom strategies and instructional strategies in the process.

Presenter Profile

An applied linguistics MA and PhD graduate with lexico-grammar acquisition, listening skills, metacognition, error correction and learner autonomy as his main research interests, Gianfranco Conti has been teaching MFL for over 25 years both at secondary and tertiary levels.

Formerly head of languages at various schools in England and abroad, he is currently a French and Spanish teacher at an international school in South-East Asia where he has been implementing his methodological approach: Extensive Processing Instruction (EPI).

Dr Conti is also a renowned conference speaker and CPD provider mostly active in England and Australia. This is what CEO of researchED and educational influencer Tom Bennet has written about one of his workshops:

“As an organiser of research conferences I am constantly looking for individuals who can do something very special- disseminate a broad field of complexity, in a way that is intelligible to practitioners but loses little in the process; simplification without reductivism. Gianfranco was wonderful in this regard: witty, literate, personable and very, very engaging, but all the while absolutely focussed on content, quality and the effective transmission of useful information and techniques. As such he was one of the most popular speakers of the day, and in my opinion one of the best presenters I have seen in the UK. I wish he was available more often, as the impact he has on his audience is palpable.”

He is well-known internationally for his teaching resources that have won him the TES Best contributor award and have been downloaded over 3,500,000 time by over 100,000 teachers around the world. His blog on MFL pedagogy, The Language Gym, is one of the most influential in the world and has won him several international awards.

Dr Conti is also the founder of the interactive language learning website www.language-gym.com and the co-author of the best-selling handbook for MFL professionals, ‘The Language Teacher Toolkit’. He is currently co-writing with Steve Smith his second book ‘Breaking the sound barrier: teaching listening bottom-up’ based on his own classroom research.

Feedback from teachers on Gianfranco’s courses

Amazing ideas. This will change my way of teaching!
Fascinating and very detailed. I can’t wait to try these out.
Thank you very much. Lots of ideas. I feel very inspired/motivated. So many ideas, I’m buzzing!
Very informative and thought-provoking.
Outstanding. Very enthused and can’t wait to take back to school.
Excellent presentation, which links to real practice and feels feasible in real life! Very much enjoyed the course, thank you!

Cost: £165 per delegate which includes lunch and resources

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