Saturday Seminar Series 2020/2021 (Sem II) - Cohort 3

Due to technological advancement and its growing affordances, English learning beyond the classroom with technology has received enormous attention. The presenter calls it Informal Digital Learning of English (IDLE). This talk highlights what new roles English teachers should play in the digital age and how they can leverage the power of IDLE to complement the limitations of formal language education.

Multimedia play an important role in language learning, especially vocabulary learning. In this seminar, we will share research findings on multimedia-enhanced English learning and discuss effective use of multimedia annotations in English learning.

Conventional classroom writing assessment is predominantly summative in nature. Such a focus on performance outcomes might not contribute to effective student learning. In the past decades, there has been a paradigm shift in assessment with a move towards a formative orientation. The main aim of this workshop then is to provide teachers with practical ideas on how to use classroom writing assessment and feedback effectively to promote student learning in the writing classroom.

Digital storytelling (DST) has been regarded as an important way in English language education in the 21st century and it has positive effect on students’ oral proficiency, language literacy and communicative competency. Based on our Quality Education Fund research findings, we will introduce important principles in DST and practical strategies in making digital stories with the aim of enhancing teachers’ digital literacy and integrating DST into current English language teaching. (Target: upper primary)

Rapidly evolving technology has brought fundamental changes to reading and writing practices in contemporary society. Helping students to acquire new literacy skills to enable them to understand and create texts incorporating multimodal elements is of greater relevance than ever. In this seminar, participants will be introduced to ways in which teachers can support students' engagement with multimodal texts in the English classroom. Possibilities in using a variety of multimodal texts which students encounter in their out of school lives such as picturebooks, graphic novels and digitally based texts with audios, videos, hyperlinks, etc. will be explored.