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Booking Conditions
No applications for this program will be accepted after all vacancies have been filled. Unsuccessful applicants will have their monies refunded in full. Cancellation prior to two weeks before the program date (cut-off date) will incur a 15% service charge per applicant. This program will be payable in full for cancellations made on or after the cut-off date or for failure to attend the program. All cancellations must be in writing and emailed to us. In the event of insufficient applications this program will not proceed and registration monies be fully refunded. In the event of this program being cancelled due to unforeseen circumstances registration monies only will be refunded as Critical Agendas will not accept liability for the payment of any other associated costs. Critical Agendas reserves the right to vary the advertised programs prior to commencement. Please note Critical Agendas reserves the right to transfer participants from face to face to webinar format with price adjustments (if required), should minimum numbers not be met for face to face event
From Textbook to Real Life: Re-engaging Students through Authentic Language Learning
For many language students in Australia, the textbook world can feel a long way from their own. Dialogues set in faraway cities, grammar exercises with no real-world context, and vocabulary lists that bear little resemblance to how people actually communicate. It’s no wonder some students struggle to see the point.
This workshop starts from a simple but powerful premise: when students can see the relevance of what they’re learning, engagement follows. Drawing on more than thirty years of classroom experience, Rowena will show you how to bridge the gap between the textbook and the real world, helping your students discover that learning a language is genuinely relevant to their lives in Australia today.
The workshop covers three practical areas:
- Motivating and re-engaging your students. Practical strategies for rebuilding motivation and making language learning feel relevant, interesting, and worthwhile.
- Textbooks vs real-life language use. An honest look at the gap between textbook language and the way people actually communicate, and what that means for your classroom practice.
- Authentic tasks and texts. How to design meaningful tasks and work with real-world materials that connect with your students.
You’ll also have dedicated time to develop your own materials, so you’ll leave with tasks and texts tailored to your own students, ready to use in your very next lesson.
Suitable for Upper Primary and Secondary language teachers. Teachers of all languages are warmly encouraged to attend.