Previous For REEAL Webinars

When Our Students Speak their Truth: Engaging Critical and Creative ESL Teaching Through Spoken Word Poetry

For REEAL Webinar, 2 May 2024, by Jennifer Burton

In this webinar, Jennifer shared research-based creative and critical approaches to teaching ESL to center the lives and languages of multiple language learners through spoken word poetry. Jennifer also shared strategies to promote critical engagement, cross-cultural understanding, and linguistic flexibility for multilingual learners and also activities that scaffold learners’ language development in diverse teaching contexts.

Note: We included resources shared by Jennifer for your reference.

Picturebooks in Elementary English Education to Promote Empathy and Social Justice

For REEAL Webinar, 10 April 2024, by David Valente

In this webinar, Valente shared insights from the ICEPELL project which focuses on intercultural citizenship education through picturebooks in early English language learning. He demonstrated how picturebooks were used in this project to enhance empathy and social justice. Using ‘We are Water Protectors’ by Carole Lindstrom and Michaela Goade as an example, he presented creative teaching ideas. Additionally, Valente also shared other teaching resources created by the teachers and the research team that teachers easily adopt and adapt for their own classroom use.

Building Secondary Student Confidence To Communicate From the Nunavik Context

For REEAL webinar, 14 March 2024, by Gillian Warner

In this webinar, Gillian Warner, an educator with Kativik Ilisarniliriniq (school board) shared strength-based teaching practices as a secondary ESL teacher to create psychologically safe spaces and narrate success with students to ensure they thrive in the learning environment.

Drama Techniques for Language Teaching

For REEAL webinar, 7 February 2024, by Trevor Gulliver

In this webinar, Trevor Gulliver, Associate Professor of the School of Education at Bishop’s University, shared various drama activities that can be used in second language classrooms. Trevor also discussed the value of these activities with reference to pedagogical insights from the second language acquisition

Note: We included a PDF of drama activities for the language classroom.

Teaching ESL From an Anti-Biased Anti-Racist Perspective

For REEAL webinar, 18 January 2024, by Mimi Masson

In this webinar, Mimi Masson, Assistant Professor at l'Université de Sherbrooke, focused on teaching language from an anti-biased, anti-racist perspective and provided ideas to in-service and pre-service teachers on how to develop this stance in their practice. Mimi also shared examples of the work she did with ESL and FSL teachers in Ontario and drew parallels to the Quebec context.

Note: We included Mimi Masson's PPT for your reference.

Warriors and Rebels for Peace: Cultivating Social Agents of Change in English Teaching.

For REEAL Webinar, 6 December 2023, by Yecid Ortega.

In this webinar, Yecid Ortega, Assistant Professor at Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland, shared a case study on social justice and peacebuilding curriculum taught in an English classroom in Columbia. The pedagogical focus potentialize students to learn English skills through discussing in/out of school violence and resolving social problems relevant for their communities.

Stories to Tell: ESL Teachers and Pre- Service Teachers Experiences in the French Language Schools of Quebec

For REEAL Webinar, 9 November 2023, by Philippa Parks (Université de Sherbrooke) and Caroline Riches (McGill University).

This webinar shared data collected from pre-service and in-service ESL teachers through surveys, interviews, and focus groups over five years to create four stories i.e., The Two Solitudes, Mistaken Identity, Forbidden Languages, and The Trolley Teacher. Participants’ quotes were used as the basis of these stories and each of these emblematic stories represented the trials and tensions ESL teachers encounter within Quebec school system.

Working Towards Decolonizing ESL

For REEAL Webinar - 4 October 2023 by Jacqueline Mallais and Ingrid Jasor

This webinar shared insights form two ESL teachers committed to working toward decolonizing and Indigenizing language teaching practices. Jacqueline discussed how her teaching helped students to address essential questions within the context of Canada’s history of colonization. Ingrid talked about her work towards decolonizing ESL through her current doctoral research and how the plurilingual approaches can be used to foster linguistic diversity and support the decolonization process.

Note: Due to technical issues, we retained only part of the video-recording. We included Ingrid Jasor's PPT and Jacqueline Mallais's website for your reference:

https://sites.google.com/csmb.qc.ca/chalk-n-coffee/home

A closer look at the lives and literacies of gamers as second language users and teachers

For REEAL Webinar - 6 June 2023

Raúl Alberto Mora is an Associate Professor at the School of Education and Pedagogy at Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana in Medellín. He chairs the Literacies in Second Languages Project (LSLP) research lab, working with prospective and practicing teachers as #TeamLaV in Colombia. Through this webinar, Raúl talked about how his team of gamers as actual researchers study the connections between gaming and second language literacies and shared the work done by his team. Raúl also explained what it means to "gamify" ESL teaching and learning and what "winning" means in the learning process.

Arts-Based Pedagogies for Language Education: Potential and Problems

For REEAL Webinar - 2 May 2023

Monica Waterhouse is currently director of ESL teacher education program at Université Laval. She has over 20 years of English language teaching experience in diverse contexts. Through this webinar, Monica talked about arts-based pedagogy in the context of language education through diverse examples drawn from classroom-based research. Monica illustrated how various art forms such as music, poems, drawings, among others, can be used to support language teaching and learning.

So my students are using technology outside of the classroom, what does that mean for me in the classroom?" Connecting Research to Practice

For REEAL Webinar - 4 April 2023

Melanie M. Wong is an Assistant Professor of Teaching at the University of British Columbia. Through this webinar, Melanie talked about how to utilize different technological tools to maximize student engagement and learning and to bridge home and school environments. Using concrete examples, Melanie illustrates how digital technologies, such as padlets, ChatGPT, digital community mapping, among others, can be used in language and content learning in critical and thoughtful ways.

Children’s Literature with Emergent Bilinguals

For REEAL Webinar - 7 March 2023

Geneviève Brisson is an assistant professor in the Faculty of Education at the Université de Sherbrooke and director of the ESL teacher education program (2021-2023). In this webinar, Geneviève talked about how to use children’s literature with emergent bilinguals, mobilizing their plurilingual knowledge and resources to read English and/or bi/plurilingual books and engage in learning activities that can promote their metalinguistic awareness

Building a Strong Sense of Self – Owning the Words You Use: An adaptation of the Aware-Explore-Apply Model for the classroom

For REEAL Webinar - 7 February 2023

Joanna Rowe is Education Consultant for Nunavik School Board Kativik Ilisarniliriniq. Through this talk, Joanna shared an adaptation of Niemiec’s Aware-Explore-Apply model to help students read and explore the strengths of characters in novels or short stories. Students have the opportunity to reflect and discuss how they use their own strengths in various aspects of their everyday lives. Joanna also shared how to design lessons to engage students in comparing and contrasting strengths and values as conceived by the English and Inuktitut cultures, and how they themselves reconcile the two worlds.

Plurilingual approaches to ESL teaching and learning – what, why and how?

For REEAL Webinar - 10 January 2023

Sunny Man Chu Lau, Full Professor in the School of Education at Bishop’s University, Québec, is Canada Research Chair (Tier 2) in Integrated Plurilingual Teaching and Learning. Through this talk, she explained what plurilingualism means and its implications for teaching and learning. Multilingual students come with a wealth of linguistic and cultural resources. Yet traditional ESL classrooms often default to “English only” as the best teaching practice. While there is merit to monolingual practice and target language models, students’ language competences developed inside, and outside school can be more fully leveraged to support higher-order complex language learning and concept development. This webinar answered various queries asked by in- and pre-service teachers and educators as to how we can utilize students’ plurilingual competences for in-depth learning while promoting target language development and overall metalinguistic awareness and skills.

21st Century Second Language Learning: The eTandem Approach

For REEAL Webinar - 6 December 2022

Susan Parks is an Associate Professor at Université Laval and is mainly involved in ESL teacher preparation and practicum supervision in Quebec schools. In collaboration with colleagues, Sabrina Priego and Laurence Capus, she co-founded the Tandem Canada Platform. In this webinar, she explained the principles of the tandem approach to pair ESL students with English language speakers who are learning French or another language. The paired classes will be engaged in activities that maximize learning of the respective languages. Dr. Parks also discussed how the Tandem Canada Platform could serve to facilitate the management of such exchanges.

Using Virtual Reality in the Language Classroom: A Task-based Virtual Journey - Robin Couture-Matte

For REEAL Webinar - 1 November 2022

Robin Couture-Matte is a sessional lecturer and a PhD candidate at Université Laval (Quebec, Canada). In this webinar, he introduced participants to the use of high-immersive virtual reality (HVR) for language learning. Through using head-mounted displays (e.g., Occulus Quest 2, Windows Mixed Reality, Oculus Rift), his HVR based projects enabled ESL students to carry out engaging communicative tasks and creative writing projects. The speaker also discussed the challenges and opportunities for HVR use in the language classroom.

A stranger on Indigenous Land: Indigenous Perspectives in Language Teaching - Nancy Griffith- Zahner

For REEAL Webinar- 4 October 2022

Nancy Griffith- Zahner is the Head of the Languages Department and core French teacher at Charles Hays Secondary School in Prince Rupert, British Columbia. She started this workshop with her story of gradual decolonization as a white settler who engages Indigenous ways of knowing and Indigenous content to create a classroom which values local culture and place- based learning. The webinar also delves into the ways that second-language classroom can be used as a vehicle for holistic learning and deep appreciation of indigenous content and ways of knowing.