I would like to invite everyone to my talk – Study Skills: Teaching Learners How To Learn – on the first day of IATEFL conference: Wednesday 2nd April 2014 at 5.10 pm, in Hall Qb at Harrogate International Centre. To find out what it will be about, read on.

Teaching study skills is worth incorporating into language lessons. In this talk I will share some of my tried and tested activities whose purpose is to encourage language learners to work independently and enable them to do it more effectively. This can be achieved by drawing the learners’ attention to some common bad study habits, helping them realise why these are ineffective, and presenting them with alternative solutions. The activities are centred around building up the learners’ vocabulary in such a way as to make a newly acquired expression become an active element of their communicative repertoire. Attention will be given to learning language chunks, working on spoken performance and listening comprehension, as well as making good use of some selected on-line resources. The ideas that I will present have been inspired by CLIL, teaching unplugged and coaching techniques, and are intended to instil good study habits in language learners.

You will come out of the talk with teaching material to try out in your next class. My goal is to inspire language teachers to make teaching study skills a permanent element of their lessons. The talk is intended for inexperienced teachers, but experienced practitioners are also very welcome to see how my ideas compare with their teaching practices.