Bulgaria

Bulgaria - Vocabulary Seminar

The seminar tour started in The English - German School, Plovdiv, Feb 22, 2008     

Many thanks to Marianna Gencheva, senior English Expert at the Regional Inspectorate of Education in Plovdiv for her assistance in making this even happen and bringing in nearly 30 teachers to the workshop.
The topic of the workshop was 'vocabulary'.

Many thanks to Marianna Gencheva, senior English Expert at the Regional Inspectorate of Education in Plovdiv for her assistance in making this even happen and bringing in nearly 30 teachers to the workshop.
The topic of the workshop was 'vocabulary'.
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Marianna and Yordan wish I'd stop taking pictures...

It's great to be able to participate in something like this.  Some of you may know that I worked for 8 years at the English-German School in Plovdiv and this was a great opportunity to meet up with former colleagues and friends.In fact, I spoke with school director, Valentin Karaminev, about coming back and since have arranged to go in to the Prep classes once every two weeks to help with the work of the 6 colleagues who teach their.  I'll report on how that goes.
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Very bad technique standing in front of the projector...

=13pxI'd prepared my workshop based on work with subject teachers and the difficult job they have in dealing with the heavy load of new words each class that they have to teach to their learners.

Though I had my materials ready, Yordan Stoyanov - macmillan_bg@abv.bg, sent me a chapter from the Scrivener publication 'Learning Teaching'.  The chapter was on vocabulary.

I followed ideas from Scrivener in my presentation.
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You can download the PPT here below if interested.

I particularly liked what Scrivener writes about organising words to facilitate learning and so I rewrote my workshop to incorporate many of his ideas.[/userfiles/files/BG-Mac_Pl-Vocab4.JPG]
One of these was the idea of mapping words.  I decided to prepare a mind map based on the chapter.

You can download the mindmap from here below.

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We covered many things, concordancing, total cloze tasks, concept mapping software, discourse analysis, terrible materials students are expected to work with in learning in English and many others.But I don't want to give all my secrets away!  You'll have to get in touch and ask me if you'd like to know more, or better still come along to one of the workshops.  Next stop Sofia at Knazhevo TT institute on 14th March.After that, Blagoevgrad on the 21st March.