Oxford University Press supports educators’ through webinar series on English Language Training
New Delhi: Oxford University Press (OUP), the world’s largest university press organized a week-long interactive English Language Teaching (ELT) webinar series for School teachers. The series led by OUP authors and trainers, was conducted over zoom and saw participation of over 1500 teachers across six webinars that supported participants with guidance and strategies to develop and implement age-appropriate learnings in these times, that can be integrated into the English classrooms, both in the form of new activities and as modifications to existing ones. Some of the topics covered as part of the series included: student engagement, integrating media and technology, and supporting parents during online learning from home.
The webinar series started off with the session led by OUP author Ms. Anahita Lee’s on Active Student Response Strategies for Online Learning in ELT, that focused on strategies to provide comfort and connect in online classrooms. The second webinar led by OUP author Ms. Shefali Ray, focused on Critical Reading in the Online Classroom, where she shared crucial strategies for reading and dispelled common fallacies that we have with regard to reading.
Dr Sanghita Sen, a documentary filmmaker, film scholar and OUP author, led the third webinar on Integrating Media and Films in Online ELT Classrooms, and shared her views and guidance on using media in ELT classrooms. The fourth session led by renowned teacher trainer, Dr Mala Palani, on the topic, The Immediate Future of Teaching Languages: The Takeaways from the Covid-19 Switch to Teaching Online, educated teachers on the opportunities in online learning space and how the educators can use multimodal assignments and dual coding to ensure deep learning.
The fifth session of the series was led by Ms. Sonia Relia, OUP author for early years’ learners, on Supporting and Engaging Parents, stressed on the importance of establishing a connection with parents, particularly parents of pre-primary level learners. She demonstrated easy-to-do but crucial practices that teachers could share with parents so that they could work in tandem to enable children to learn better. Dr Sonali Bhattacharya, OUP’s ELT consultant, led the last session of the series on Designing Backward Plans for Outcome-driven Lessons, highlighting the importance of repurposing content-driven traditional lesson plans that focussed on what the teacher had to do rather than on learner takeaways.