QTEL director, Aída Walqui, will be presenting and conducting a workshop at the 2019 Languages Without Borders (LWB) Conference organized by The Canadian Association of Second Language Teachers. The conference will be held at the Fredericton Convention Centre in New Brunswick, Canada from May 2–4, 2019.
Friday May 3rd, 2019
Time: 10:00 a.m.
Name of Presentation: High challenge and high support: Amplifying the opportunities offered English Learners to engage in generative academic activity
Description: To successfully and responsibly navigate the twenty first century citizens require complex skills: navigating uncertainty, collaborating with others who have very different perspectives, using multiple languages, advocating for themselves and their communities, moving among different identities, and solving novel problems. During this presentation five principles that guide the quality learning for English Learners and will prepare them for this complex future will be unpacked and illustrated with videos from classroom instruction. Shifts in understanding and practice required by the implementation of these principles will also be addressed, redirecting some common misconceptions in the field.
Saturday May 4th, 2019
Time: 11:00 a.m.
Name of Workshop: A focus on oracy in the development of subject-specific academic practices
Description: With the goal of offering multilingual, intercultural learners quality opportunities to learn, it is indispensable that we invite them to engage in sustained discipline-specific oral interactions as they read through texts and work with disciplinary ideas. These invitations weave a) listening to interlocutors as they propose ideas, b) responding to them, offering reasoned agreement or alternatives, c) reading together and problematizing both texts and their understanding of texts, d) developing metacognitive skills that will prove useful throughout their learning lives, and e) writing in a variety of formats. This workshop focuses on how to enact these five aspects of quality conversations in classes with English Learners and multiple other students. Guidelines, examples, and practices, as well as video clips from instruction will be used to illustrate proposed ideas.