What happens when a teacher poses a great question to a group of students who have internet access, and then walks away? Can formal learning happen in the absence of teachers? In this talk, Mike Lyons will discuss his experiences with self organized learning environments (SOLEs), how to form a "Big Question", and how teachers in Japan can use SOLEs in their classrooms.

Many students are familiar with the immersive nature of online and real escape room games. The presenter, a 2021 ELTon awards finalist, has created a course which attempts to bring the atmosphere of an escape room to her classes, both face-to-face and remote. This presentation will offer an overview of escape rooms and how puzzle-based learning can motivate students as they compete, cooperate and communicate in English class.

Target Audience: General English, Higher Education, Remote Teaching. Language of the Presentation: English

This presentation will show how the spiral syllabus designed into all e-future course materials, helps students learn through, linking, reviewing, and expansion. Additionally, the proven EFL focused phonics system included in five separate phonics courses will be explained.

e-future is a progressive publisher of EFL materials based in Korea with global reach. e-future provides a suite of course materials from pre-school, up through elementary and high school, all of which are comprised of a systematic curriculum that supports teachers and EFL learners. e-future provides extensive teacher and curriculum support and all core materials have comprehensive and easy to use digital support.

Doris is back with her popular presentation on natural speaking for very young learners (VYL). The presenter will cover a few easy steps for how to scaffold lessons so that VYL can use some of the same sophisticated language that native speaking kindergarten children use daily in a fun and easy way.

This presentation will focus on the use of various collaborative storytelling activities to help develop the interactional competence of very young learners (ages 5 to 7 years old). The social co-construction of narratives in such contexts can lead to classroom experiences that are communicatively authentic, thematically supportive, and fun! I will share exemplary video data and offer my own insights into the potential value of these activities through analysis of excerpts from said data.

EFL Magazine was founded in 2015, and since that time has published over 700 articles from hundreds of teachers, managers, recruitment professionals and school owners across the globe. Our aim from the outset was to bring excellent, free content to teachers and school owners/managers, and we’ve achieved those aims to some extent, having over 40,000 readers visit the website each month.

Recently, we held the first EFL Magazine TOEFL® Summit for Teachers and School Owner/Managers. We also have an ongoing podcast called The EFL Magazine Business Podcast, in which Philip Pound interviews entrepreneurs in ELT.

The talk will introduce the magazine, where we’ve come from, give you a sneak preview of what we have planned over the next few months and show you how you can get involved.