Before you can improve your learning/study habits, your teamworking habits or your approach to sitting exams, you have to identify the strengths and weaknesses in your current habits. Improvement begins with self-awareness and awareness of other people’s working, learning, teamworking and studying styles. Having an understanding of different habits and styles and how these both complement and clash can boost confidence, increase motivation and lead to improved performance in exams.

The purpose of this seminar is to enable participants to articulate at a higher level why they work and study the way they do and also identify skills and strengths they would like to improve. In addition, it prompts participants to consider the way in which their styles impact upon team and classmates.

You will broaden your understanding of different study, learning and teamworking styles; learn how to teach the concept to teenagers and go away with tips on how to motivate those preparing for the Cambridge exams.

Kate Walder has been working and living in Madrid for the past 12 years. With a Masters in training and development, she has taught and examined English at all ages and levels. More recently, she has been focusing her attention on training teachers, lifeskills coaching for both teenagers and adults and enabling her clients and students to use their English as a meaningful and powerful communication tool. Her mission is to enable individuals to achieve his or her maximum potential in an inspiring, fun yet challenging learning environment.

Our students’ performance in speaking and writing often belies a much broader range of vocabulary and a much better understanding of grammar than they actually demonstrate. Put simply, they often know more than they show. At intermediate levels in particular, when the tendency of many learners is to rely on more familiar language, one of the challenges for any teacher is to help students say better what they can already say more basically. How, then, do we encourage students at B1 and B2 levels to express themselves as fully as possible? How do we get them to speak and write with more variety, more nuance, more cohesion and, importantly, less grammatical and lexical repetition? This seminar will look at activities that can help students hone their productive skills, with a focus on paraphrasing, organising stretches of speech and text, varying usage of grammar and vocabulary, and distinguishing and employing different registers..

Daniel Vincent has taught English for over 20 years in the UK, Japan and Spain, and has recently finished co-authoring a new ELT coursebook for teens. He has a wide-ranging interest in language pedagogy, with an MA in Endangered Language Revitalisation. He currently works as a teacher and materials writer for the British Council in Madrid.