Dayna House

English Language Fellow in Buenos Aires will be giving a workshop.

 IPES Asilo 3255

Thursday, November 8 from 1:30 to 5:30 PM 

1:30 to 3:15 PM
TESTING - CREATING VALID EVALUATIONS FOR ALL 4 SKILLS (brief explanation below).

Finding a better way to evaluate the student's proficiency in the target language rather than evaluate a simple display of the student's grammatical knowledge. Effective testing requires careful planning.  Can we 'measure' the ability of a person to understand (listen, speak, read and write) a foreign language?   Are we evaluating knowing how to use language or the knowledge of language?  The best way to identify what the goals of a course are is to look at the tests a teacher produces.  If  tests are purely grammatical in spite of the fact students are taught communicative skill at least 30% of the time during class, one can conclude that the real purpose of this class is to teach the student grammatical competence.  This workshop will give teachers strategies for designing tests that are contextualized, integrative, interactive, communicative and that require cognitive processing on the part of the students to facilitate learning English in the EFL classroom.

3:15 to 3:45 PM – Coffee break
 3:45 to 5:30 PM –
THE ECRIF FRAMEWORK - A WAY OF LOOKING AT HOW STUDENTS LEARN (brief explanation below).
ECRIF is a framework that allows teachers to see activities and content from the perspective of student learning. ECRIF is a useful tool to analyze lessons plans so that teachers and know they are providing students with what they need to learn the language. This workshop will focus on understanding what the ECRIF framework is and how to apply it to textbook activities and lesson plans through pair and group practice on course book pages and lesson plans the presenter will provide.
*NOTE: Teachers should bring their current classroom book and sample lesson plans to the workshop
**Note: The ECRIF Framework was developed by Josh Kurzweil and Mary Scholl between 2004 and 2005 as they wrote the book Understanding Teaching through Learning for McGraw-Hill and the School for International Training.

Dayna House holds an M.A., Applied Linguistics & ESL certification from California State University Fullerton (CSUF) and a B.A., Spanish and Portuguese languages from San Diego State University in California (SDSU).  Mrs. House has been working in the field of ESL/EFL for 23 years. She was an ESL instructor at Cal State Fullerton University in Southern California (1989-1992) and has conducted teacher development, seminars and workshops at several Colleges and Universities in Southern California, Brazil, Korea, México, Ecuador, Costa Rica and Peru.  Mrs. House served as a Junior English Teaching Fellow in Monterrey, Mexico, sponsored by the Ministry of Education (1996-97) and as Senior English Language Fellow in Quito, Ecuador (2006-08). She has also served as an English Language Specialist in Jakarta & East Timor, Indonesia (2000) and Trujillo, Peru (2008).  From 1998 – 2006, Mrs. House taught EFL at Instituto Técnico de  Sonora (ITSON) Sonora, México and administrated her own Language Institute; teaching English and Spanish and offering interpretations and translation services to the community in Guaymas, Sonora, Mexico.  Currently, she is the Senior English Language Fellow in Argentina, a program sponsored by the U.S. Department of State and the U.S. Embassy in Argentina.  

Veronica Perez Urioste l Educational Programs & Academic Exchanges
Cultural Affairs Office l U.S. Embassy Montevideo, Uruguay - (598) 1770-2423