Explore various ways in which drama can inform English language teaching in this experiential workshop. The session begins with community builders and their role in reducing affect. This orientation is followed by activities for working on pronunciation, including prosody exercises to help deliver implicit messages. Participants then “move” on to drama-based kinesthetic grammar practice and a discussion of embodied learning. Next attendees engage with sketches and character driven scenes to explore the hidden language of pragmatics. Playing the role of students, they will apply this awareness of social signaling to improvisation games and roleplays. Finally, participants will discuss possibilities for staging and even writing short plays with their students.

The five-paragraph essay (5PE) continues to be very popular, particularly in ESL/EFL circles: however, considerable research has determined that this pedagogical template should not be the center of writing instruction. In this workshop, we will discuss why the 5PE is inadequate but still persists and then turn to alternatives to this form by presenting genre-based tasks, completing genre analyses, and designing assessment. Participants will be actively involved and questions and comments will be encouraged.

With the aim of improving transfer-level English completion by degree-seeking students, many CA community colleges are re-designing their credit ESL pathways to integrate reading, writing and grammar instruction. Are you ready to teach the new curriculum? This workshop will engage instructors in designing integrated reading-writing assignments for ESL classes across a range of skill levels, from high-beginning through advanced courses that transition students to transfer-level English. Participants will explore ways to select level-appropriate reading materials; develop and scaffold meaningful, text-based writing prompts; and incorporate contextual, just-in-time language instruction.

Incoming L2 graduate students who learned English in EFL classrooms usually have considerably more experience reading and writing in English than listening and speaking. When such students arrive in North America, however, they are surrounded by English spoken in a range of accents and paces containing unfamiliar colloquial expressions. Many are also new to the genres of graduate communication. Since speaking and listening are first-order processes – processes acquired in a first language without formal instruction (Emig, 1995) – international L2 students may have trouble participating in English conversations without having strategies to improve.

To address the needs described above, the University of Toronto offers a course called Academic Conversation Skills (ACS) that helps graduate students develop strategies for increasing their clarity and confidence when conversing in English: strategies related to conversational microskills, paralinguistics, and tacit cultural assumptions. This workshop will outline the course’s curriculum and give participants opportunities to try out some of the strategies that have proven most popular with students.