 Okay, let's start. I'm very warm welcome to you all and thank you for coming today. My name is Emma Mezziti and I'm the academic director and director of studies here at the Slaving Language Center and I'm a full-time teacher as well. This is my colleague and fellow teacher, Susan Doyle. And we'll be presenting this EL head talk jointly. So at the Slaving Language Center we offer small-sized classes and a typical range of course programs such as academic year, family and culture course programs. We operate a rolling enrollment system whereby short-term students and long-term students attend classes together and we often have and teach mixed-level classes as well. So A2, B1, B1, B2 together. And while we acknowledge that we have fantastic course books and teaching resources to meet the challenges of teaching students with different needs and abilities, what we'd like to talk to you about today are additional resources we have designed and developed, tried and adapted. And to enrich, this is to enrich our teaching program but also to provide a varied learning experience to our students for departments. Okay, so we regularly take our students out of the classroom but should we, you know, this is a school, students pay good money to go to school, sit in a classroom, work with a teacher and classmates. It's what they expect. Can I just ask how many of you teach your students out of the traditional classroom setting? Can you just? Like how? Like how? Okay, so. Yeah, what do you think, I guess, out of the traditional classroom setting? Yeah, so as I imagine quite a number of you and you know, Richard spoke about taking the students out as often as possible to pubs and cafes and programs. Okay, so, I mean, most likely, you know, you've all heard of or probably tried some of the activities we were talking about today. But what I really want to share with you is why and how we have implemented our ideas here and how they've worked for us and for our students. You know, as we all know, students left to their own devices, they tend to hang out together according to their classroom or nationalities. They hopefully talk to their host families in the evening, squeeze in that bit of homework before hitting the pub. You know, but we want to give them opportunities to go beyond that, school, host family, et cetera. And, but we are teachers, you know, and we need to have clear objectives and use those to evaluate our activities. So what are our objectives? We have a few. So first, really, is to take that full advantage of teaching in an English-Swedan country. Irish people are really friendly and they do talk to students. So we give our students structured opportunities to interact with the locals so they can put when they've learned to practice. We like to give them a sense of accomplishment by completing these tasks so they really are quite complex and regardless of their level, all students participate and a low level student then can be part of a winning team. We also like to get them to work together to facilitate peer learning and also foster that culture of independent learning. And sometimes just give them a break from our lovely coursebook and our very nice classrooms and another reason is that it allows us to end the week or the course on a high with a finale, like a debate or perhaps a quiz. So those were our intentions, but what have we done? So we have selected a number of general English and business English activities and simply changed the context in which and the way in which we've taught them. So we would have some activities where students would simply come out of the classroom and come into the common room here or even go outside. They would do this with other participants from one or two other classes or indeed all of the students here at the school. We would ask them to otherwise go on activities which would take place off the school premises completely. So with all these lessons, what we would have in mind though is to mix levels, sorry, mix classes and mix groups ensuring that language levels and nationalities are, you know, totally mixed. So we would have them then work on collaborative activities, projects, such as group presentations, debates, mock interviews, business meetings. We would also have them do an activity called story in the bag or some letter writing. The school use letter writing. They would sometimes script and shoot movies, devise. Soap operas, they would often add rounds to and take part in our spending 100% of quiz. We would also then off the premises do a coffee club. We would take them on a business tour. We would have the odd one-to-one item about in town and we would conduct street lessons as well. So to further promote and ensure that English was spoken at all times, including at break times, we would often post language questions or bring teasers on the board here in common room. And we would see that students ask a lot of questions about these among themselves and also that they ask teachers and we would find that they would engage and would in fact volunteer to then post up their own riddles. So that was a success. Okay, so as you can see, we have quite a number of nice activities that we do outside the classroom, some here and some as Emma said, completely off the premises. But how do we make them work? It does take time and effort and willingness to give it a go. It's a significant process which involves file and error. We choose and plan an activity together with colleagues. We try it out with the students. We take notes on timing, energetics, collect feedback, make adjustments and so on. And we regularly review these activities to make sure that they run as smoothly as possible and that they're still relevant. They're keeping up with the times and technology, etc. So as Emma has mentioned, we carefully root the students but other things that need to be considered are planning, types of preparation, timing, logistics and of course cost. Most of our activities can be run in 90 minutes but other ones require a longer time frame depending on the activities. So for instance, students sometimes need to build towards an activity, say a presentation for example and they need to do it in manageable, bite-sized chunks. They're not just going to get up and do it off the cuff like we did. It is time to process information and to build confidence along the way. So when we want our students to make a group presentation we schedule it for Friday. And we build it into the weekly schedule. So they're in class doing their regular thing but we take them out. So on Monday, we give them structure presentation and vocabulary and we explain what's required for Friday's presentation. On Tuesday, the students in class they deliver a short individual presentation normally on a subject of their own choosing to safe environment and they prepare that for homework on Monday and we have a question and answer session and give them feedback. Then on Wednesday, take them all out again give them time to work in their mixed groups on the presentations and finally on Friday the groups deliver their presentations normally here in front of the whole school. Now every student in the school is involved and this process kind of creates a sense of excitement. Students are working on the posters and the PowerPoint presentations that are asking us to check my part before the presentation and we see them doing this in the real times. And honestly, we're often amazed at the quality of the presentations. On Thursday, they look about what already and then on Friday they're always always ready and they do it, they deliver it and that's really exactly what we want. It's clear to us that a lot of work takes place after school and we're careful with our tasks. We want all of our tasks to cover work on four skills reading, speaking, writing and listening of course and if you can see so here's, I don't know, it's a bit burlary but this is one of our group presentations from our business program so you can see we've designed it to incorporate reading of course brainstorming, writing their parts and presenting their presentation and then in order to interact with listening while they're making their presentations each student has to fill out our Dragonstone-like evaluation sheet so they take notes on each presentation and they have money that they offer to the projects for each business presentation in this case and they offer money, we will give money to this idea because we think it's going to work and the team which gets the most money is the winner. Of course we give our input as well and not only that we want our students to ask questions like our street lessons for example they do require quite a lot of logistics and planning you know, criticism on smoothing so prior to being brought into town students will spend a session or two in class with their teachers on related vocabulary in practice, role play, opportunity to build confidence and then during the street lesson each group has a different itinerary to follow so they have to find their way to a number of places in town and the students take turns asking for directions and then again they take turns completing the different tasks now you have to plan it carefully and be mindful of people working going about their daily business in town you know, you just can't have a group of eight or ten students tripping into spec sabers to ask and how it involves it's really not wrong so outside the group they prepare and write the questions to go in, get the information and relate it to the others who write it down on their sheets when they go back outside now teachers monitor groups from a distance and we've also factored in time that when the groups are finished they have time to share their findings with each other before returning to the school and this activity for us requires two different drop off points for students and two different collection points so as you can imagine with 50 students this takes quite a bit of jigging around to make sure that it works well and all groups finish at the same time but it does work and it's a really popular activity with students a few words of advice more about this activity you know the school or ideally the school needs to obtain permission from agents if you're taking students out of the school premises during class time you need to check that's okay again group leaders and importantly parents if minors are involved print teachers mobile numbers on the students' worksheets so they can make contact if need be if there's a crisis somewhere and finally it is Ireland after all always have a plan B because bad weather could ruin this lesson thank you so that gives you an idea of how we run a couple of our activities so what was the response and what we have observed as teachers is that these activities benefited the students but ourselves as well so on the whole students engaged in these lessons and they engaged with enjoyment they managed to successfully complete the task so they took great pleasure in that and weren't actually surprised it was nice to see higher level students supporting their lower team members and enabling them to fulfill their part students clearly gained fluency and confidence they got to know each other which created a very warm atmosphere at the school they expressed themselves more freely especially when out and about in the one-to-ones or at the coffee club so we got to know them better as teachers how did we benefit well we benefited for the same reasons we enjoyed collaborating and peer teaching it allowed us to share ideas and so of course we were peer teaching but also peer learning peer observing it was all in a relaxed setting so we helped it provides very teaching experiences basically for everyone and it's very enjoyable for all it also helps introduce new teachers to certain of our activities of the way we teach it was nice to see them use these activities develop them and maybe offer new ones we now have we now have minimal preparation because we've worked on these over the years we've prepared laminated kits with materials worksheets so we can draw on them to sort of deal with unexpected teacher absences as well an additional benefit to the school this time is that of course it is so we deal with unexpected absences but it's an affordable way of also offering perhaps extracurricular activities some of these can be used for that so in addition to the advice Susan has given you about the street lessons our advice for today excuse me I forgot to show you all the benefits our advice for today is simply to try it out and to take your students out of the classroom to more often so thank you very much and we know you have questions