With handouts and video clips of movies and students' performances, she demonstrates activities created for these vehicles. Paraphrasing is a difficult skill to learn as well as teach, especially in one group of lessons. The presenter demonstrates a variety of activities which building grammatical and vocabulary skills used in paraphrasing. These activities provide students with skills that make paraphrasing more doable. Because skills are learned and practiced in a unified context, their use will be more effectively sustained in subsequent academic courses.
Demonstrations illustrate how course materials are developed and implemented.
The presenters discuss the process of developing and implementing authentic oral assessment instruments. Participants review several sample instruments and learn how they were created. Essential and preferable principles of authentic assessment are extracted and participants are encouraged to apply them to their own contexts. The presenter reports on research examining the major factors affecting readability of texts for ESL students. The relationship between ESL student reading problems and the vocabulary of English narrative texts is discussed, followed by findings indicating that an analysis of lexical density is an effective predictor of difficulty.