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.

Truly understanding reading provides the opportunity to get students engaged and actively involved with a text and helps them to discover deeper layers of meaning. Research shows that people who have low reading comprehension ability have more challenges to reach academic, professional or personal goals. It is vital for students to develop solid reading comprehension skills and to develop strategies to expand their learning of English vocabulary.

The goal of this workshop is to learn useful strategies for B2 and C1 Reading and Use of English exam preparation and put them in practice using collaborative and metacognitive strategies. The use of metacognitive strategies will allow teachers to be more sensitive to the learners needs and to better adapt their teaching strategies to exam preparation. .

Has taught English for 14 years. She is currently doing her dissertation at Instituto Franklin at Universidad de Alcalá. For her doctoral work, she is developing a training program for native English language assistants for Bilingual Education Programs in Madrid. She teaches Language Awareness and teaching grammar methods at the Master in Bilingual and Multicultural Education at Instituto Franklin at Universidad de Alcalá She is Teach & Learn in Spain Graduate Students’ Advisor.

She also teaches Service Learning in Bilingual Schools, Introduction to Spanish Education System and Spain and its Gastronomy to American undergraduate students in the Study Abroad in Spain Program at Instituto Franklin-UAH.   She works on teacher training courses at teacher training centers for public and charter schools (CTIF center in Centro Territorial de Innovación y Formación de Madrid-Sur and Este at Consejería de Educación y Empleo de la Comunidad de Madrid) related to teaching grammar methods, co-teaching and collaboration strategies in the classroom and reading strategies for teens.
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This seminar aims to develop teachers’ awareness of the assessment of writing at the CEFR level C1 and the Cambridge Assessment English Writing Scales, using samples of students’ writing.  The talk will also address ways in which different types of classroom assessment can be used to help develop learners’ writing skills and provide teachers with activities to use with their classes..

Caroline has been a speaking examiner for Cambridge Assessment English exams since 1985 and is a Cambridge Assessment English examiner trainer. She is also an examiner for IELTS speaking papers and Cambridge Assessment English writing papers. She has worked on various publications for exam preparation material, primary and secondary school texts, reviewing, editing and writing. She is also an experienced presenter for Cambridge Assessment English.

Caroline lleva siendo examinadora de los exámenes orales de Cambridge Assessment English desde 1985 y también es formadora de examinadores de Cambridge Assessment English. Además es examinadora de la prueba oral de IELTS y de las pruebas escritas de Cambridge Assessment English. Ha colaborado con varias editoriales como comentarista, editora y escritora de material para la preparación de exámenes y textos de primaria y secundaria. También tiene muchos años de experiencia como ponente de Cambridge Assessment English.
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