OVERVIEW
Practice is very important for meaningful learning to take place. However, in this academic talk, I will argue that it is not enough to simply practice language skills. We also need to show our students how to carry them out. The strategies that we use to understand are called subskills and I propose that we need to develop these to help our students to interact with a wide range of texts. We will make reference to the receptive skills and strategies proposed in the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) to investigate how we can include these in our online lessons. In this way, our students will know the concrete steps they can follow in order to understand the main ideas of a text as well as the specific information and the detail in an author’s arguments.
DARRAGH O’GRADY
As a consultant, Darragh specializes in teacher recruitment and training, market research for publishers, and curriculum design for universities. He has specific knowledge about the teaching of languages for academic purposes, assessment, and the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages updated to 2018.
His company, Dara Idiomas, specializes in the management of language teaching projects, they work with organizations in the filter of prospective collaborators so that talent with the ideal linguistic level is hired. They teach English, Portuguese – Brazilian and European variants, Spanish as a foreign language, French, and German.
Additionally, in 2017, Ceneval in Mexico invited him to collaborate as a synodal in the evaluation of teachers for the Bachelor of English Teaching.
