Daniel Corks is a long time member of KOTESOL and an active presenter at various conferences and chapter meetings. He’s a member of the Daejeon-Chungcheong chapter and currently an assistant professor at Woosong University in Daejeon.
Daniel graduated from Sogang University in Seoul with a master‘s degree in applied linguistics specializing in second language acquisition. He has over ten years of experience working in South Korea across public & private education settings ranging from elementary school up to university level students and adults of all ages.
Daniel has a wide range of professional interests and presented and conducted workshops on a diverse set of topics that reflect those interests, both theoretical and practical. A detailed list can be found below.
✦ Speaking ✦
Novel Pair Information Gap Activities for Mixed-level Classes (with a Wide Range of Language Ability)
Information gap activities come in all shapes and sizes, but I find these activities often are not especially engaging. Students may find their language skills put to the test, but not their other cognitive abilities.
Those same information gap activities, if done in Korean, wouldn’t be able to hold their attention. This is a principle that I try to hold myself to when designing materials: An activity should be engaging to students even if done in their first language.
Coming up with tasks that can hold a person’s interest independent of language ability solves two major issues I often have in my classrooms. The first is mixed level classes with a very wide range of abilities, and the second is very low level students that have significant trouble understanding the teacher’s instructions.
For mixed level classes, the advantage of a cognitively stimulating activity is clear. While an activity may be designed for the class’ median language level, higher level students won’t be bored by the activity or mentally check out. In addition to that benefit, I find the high level students will use the upper ranges of their language ability - even if the activity doesn't require it - to make sure their ideas are getting across effectively.
A cognitively stimulating activity can also benefit very low level students who have trouble following what their teacher is saying. If the core idea behind an activity is simple enough, then it can be explained for low level learners with just a few simple words. The students will understand the goal of the activity, but it’s up to them to decide the best way to go about it, finding clever ways reach that goal despite lower language ability. These learners, rather than feel like they’re struggling to keep up with their peers in a mixed level class, also feel a sense of accomplishment for completing the task. Ideally, all learners push their language ability to its limit in order to complete the task.
In this presentation I’ll explain the basic structure I use to create simple activities of this nature and show a number of examples. I'll also demonstrate with the attendees two of the more involved activities I’ve made. One focuses on reading and interpreting song lyrics, and the second focuses on remembering, describing and drawing faces.
Suitable for teachers of all levels.
Smoother Conversation Practice
Life (or at least our tests) demands conversational speaking ability, so in class we want to give our students time to practice conversations. But if we just give our students a topic and ask them to talk with each other, the conversations are short and simple. Students are often reluctant to speak with their partner in English, and they don’t sustain the conversation beyond the bare minimum the teacher requires.
To improve this situation, I will demonstrate my approach to daily fluency building and exam practice as achieved with a set of carefully developed but easy to copy resources and techniques. These include sets of personally interesting conversation questions, a speed-dating style rotation system that keeps conversations fresh by using the same topic but with different partners, and even a random student picking method where the students feel they’re in control, all while strengthening social bonds between students and creating a team atmosphere in the classroom.
Through years of trial, error and fine-tuning, I will cover all of the potential pitfalls of this approach to conversation practice and how I’ve overcome them, including student apathy, students saying they’re “finished”, having the same partners day in and day out, lack of activity variety and more.
On the first day of the term my students spend 30 minutes having free-flowing, self-directed conversations with each other without switching to their first language, and they enjoy it.
Intended for teachers of conversation classes with learners who are high school aged or older.
✦ Writing ✦
Is It Worth Your Time To Correct Students' Written Grammar Mistakes?
For teachers of L2 writing, correcting errors in students’ assignments is a part of the job that one learns to dread. Even after correcting an uncountable number of errors, neither student nor teacher can say for certain whether any improvement has been made.
Over 20 years ago, Truscott (1996) summarized these observations and called for a moratorium on providing written corrections on grammatical errors until such time that researchers could prove that students indeed benefit from them.
His paper struck a chord, but despite thousands of research papers published since then arguing either for or against grammar corrections, the only clear progress in the research community has been to agree on what exactly they disagree about.
While researchers seek an answer to the question, “Does grammar correction work?” the teaching community requires an answer to a different question: “Does grammar correction work well?” That is, does it have an effect that is both strong enough and broad enough for it to be of use for general use language teachers? Is it really the best use of our limited time for responding to students’ work?
With a grounding in research findings, this presentation will consider the practical aspects of grammar correction in L2 writing and what types of feedback are most beneficial to students at all levels.
Participants will have ample time to discuss with each other and share observations from their own classes.
Intended for teachers of writing.
✦ Technology Assisted Language Learning ✦
How To Use Google Classroom: For Beginners and Experts Alike
Do you use an LMS in your classroom? What exactly is an LMS, anyway? Maybe you’ve heard people talk about how they love Google Classroom. They say it’s an LMS that’s actually worth your time to learn. But you're hesitant to get on board. You can get a lot done with pen and paper, and learning any new technology can be a chore.
Don't fret! Even diehard luddites can easily learn and benefit from using G Classroom. The best part is that you can pick up everything you need to know in under an hour. Did I mention it’s free?
For beginners, I'll demonstrate everything by making a classroom live, right in front of you, to show you the teacher’s perspective. You'll get to join the class and try out everything from a student's perspective as well. For experienced users, I’ll show you my best practices and clever tricks discovered from my own experiences. For beginners and experienced users alike, I'll also show new activities and ways to interact with your students that G Classroom enables and have you time to share your great ideas with the audience.
Don’t forget to bring a smartphone or a laptop!
Appropriate for any teachers who wish to use an LMS in their classes.
Online Language Learning Should Be Easy and Free, But It’s Not (Yet)
The term is over, but some of your students want to continue learning English on their own time. What do you tell them? Teachers likely have a few well-meaning answers they give regarding approaches to language learning or resources for practice, such as, “Focus on meaning” or “Try graded readers”. Unfortunately, most of it isn’t concrete or specific enough to be of much use, and learners leave the class without a clear sense of what they should do next.
In today's online world, someone with time and an internet connection can learn anything for free. This is true in principle for English as well, and students who are intermediate level or above often know how to find material that suits their level and interests. For lower level students, e.g. the typical university student, however, the picture is much different. Resources that these learners can and actually would use independently are hard to find. Online content that is at their level is buried deep within websites that are directed at teachers, not at learners, and more often than not the material itself just feels like another textbook. There's a knowledge gap to fill on both the part of the teachers and learners.
To fill this gap, this workshop will present an extensive list of websites, apps, social media channels and other online resources suitable for lower-level learners, and invite participants to share their own recommendations as well. Participants will also discuss and compile a simple set of language learning principles to guide students who are engaged in independent language practice.
Intended for teachers of learners who are mature enough to engage in self-study. The resources can also be easily put to use by teachers in class.
✦ Grading and Assessment ✦
Quality, Effort and Improvement Based Grading for General Skills Language Classes
Students come into a general skills language class with often a wide range of ability levels between them, and it is our task to help all of those students improve their language proficiency. When creating a marking system to assess these students, we want to be fair and make sure everyone has a chance to excel in our class. But, the most straightforward thing to evaluate – ability – is often the least fair in this situation, and we can end up rewarding students for ability they had before ever enrolling in our class. This can end up just discouraging low ability students who know they can’t realistically catch up to the high ability students within the span of just a few months. It doesn’t help the high ability students either as it doesn’t encourage them to improve.
An assessment system that rewards effort, improvement and quality of work over ability can resolve this problem by giving low level students a fair chance of receiving a high grade (important in situations where there’s a limit on how many students can receive an A or B). More importantly, however, it encourages all students to cultivate and demonstrate the skills and habits of effective language learners that will help them continue to develop their ability after the course is finished.
This presentation will expand on the rationale for this type of assessment and present specific techniques for doing so. Participants will be encouraged to share their assessment techniques with the audience as well.
Appropriate for teachers - independent of levels taught - who have at least some flexibility to set their own assessments.
✦ Second Language Acquisition Theory ✦
Popular Language Learning Beliefs vs. SLA Research
“How does language learning take place? How should languages be taught?”
Everyone has their own beliefs surrounding these two questions - sometimes quite strong beliefs. Some you make ourselves from observing language learners, and others you hear regularly in the media or in your personal lives. These beliefs can shape how we teach, so it’s important that we take the time to look at them critically to see if they really hold up.
The field of second language acquisition (SLA) tries to address exactly these issues, so I will draw from SLA research and the audience’s knowledge to take a critical look at 14 (if time allows) popular beliefs about language learning and teaching to see which are true and which are not so true.
Some examples of these beliefs:
Highly intelligent people are good language learners
The best way to learn new vocabulary is through reading
Teachers should teach simple language structures before complex ones
SLA is a particularly jargon-heavy discipline, but this presentation will use everyday terms to discuss the relevant concepts.
Appropriate for teachers of all levels.
✦ Classroom Management ✦
Classroom Management 101
Managing your classroom isn’t fun. It’s the ‘eat your vegetables’ of teaching. But it’s equally important as your teaching ability, because all the work you’ve done in planning lessons and preparing materials goes to waste if your students don’t (or can’t) listen to you and follow instructions. The bad news is that only way to really become good at classroom management is through practice. The good news is that being proactive can help you avoid most problem behaviour, and a well-planned reactive management plan will help you deal with the other 10%.
Classroom management is a large topic and you can spend years reading about affective factors, motivation, cultural differences, effective leadership, etc. and incorporating those fields into your classrooms to improve student participation. It’s worth looking into when you’re ready for it, but for now this presentation will give you a set of basic tips and strategies that can get you through your first few years.
Intended for NSETs working in Korean public schools who have not previously received training on classroom management.
