June 2011 Workshop 

We have invented an innovative, one-year course for teaching beginning students to write competent, graceful prose. We provide easy lesson learnable units of instruction that are specifically targeted, progressively graduated in difficulty, and cumulatively effective in improving the skills of students to master the full range of sentence forms, paragraphs, and essays.   

The course is user friendly for both students and teachers. Students know from the outset the schedule of their assignments for the entire year, and teachers likewise are provided full lesson plans for the year. Teachers are also given a variety of suggestions for employing several alternative and proven pedagogies for teaching writing. Thus, teachers also have ample time to develop and use creative lesson plans of their own.

The course gives -- for the first time -- comprehensive coverage of all the sentence forms of the English language, identifying the eleven essential forms of the English language with their 128 sub-forms. Moreover, students are taught to understand and to use sentences as vehicles of critical thinking.

Richard Dowling (RDowling@asia.umuc.edu) is an associate professor with the Asian Division of the University of Maryland, where he has taught English Composition, History, and Government courses in Asia for 20 years. He received an M.A. in History from Duquesne University in 1968 and completed two years of doctoral work in History at the University of Connecticut from 1968 to 1970.

Stephen Watson  (stedawa@gmail.com) has taught English at universities in Gumi, South Korea and Guangzhou, China for more than 9 years. He completed his M.Ed. in Teaching Second Languages from the University of Southern Queensland, Australia in 2002.

May 2011 Workshop

Student-centered and task based learning have proved again and again to be better teaching methodologies then the traditional teacher-centered classroom. However, when it comes to teaching listening, too often the teacher-centered classroom is the norm. Teachers are unsure of how to teach listening using the principles of task based learning or how to give students the ability to take control of their learning through listening. This leaves the teacher with the sensation of only being responsible for pressing the button on the cd player and often bores both the students and the teacher with endless repetition.

This workshop will discuss the basic principles behind good listening instruction. The workshop will then go on to showcase several different approaches to listening tasks applicable to all levels and ages.

Peadar Callaghan graduated from the University of Limerick with an Ma in ELT. He has been working in Korea for over five years. During which time he taught many conventional listening classes. The classroom techniques in this presentation are a distillation of his attempts to move away from the teacher led listening classroom.

Peadar is best known for his presentation on the use of comic books in the classroom. This presentation brings the same practical and imaginative approach to the teaching of listening.

April 2011 Workshop

March 2011 Workshop 

Eunhee Park has been working as an English teacher since 1997. She received two Masters degrees majoring in English Education in 1996 and  2002. She received the SIT Best Practices in TESOL certificates in 2008 and also completed the Teacher Education Consultant Course in 2010. She co-authored "Classroom English," a book targeted to English teachers in Daegu. She made a presentation at KOTESOL National Conference with Michael Griffin on May, 2010. She received a TEE Master Certificate issued by Daegu Metropolitan Office of Education in December 2010.