This May, ELP Lecturer Ellen Gilberti was the plenary speaker at The National Executive Committee Meeting of TESOL Italy. She spoke on the topic of “Teaching Authentic Language.” The presentation was an offshoot of a two-hour seminar she presented at TESOL Italy one week later in which she demonstrated the theory she developed with Patrice Soriero and Lauren Remenyi. Ellen was also invited to present at the 2014 TESOL Spain conference, the 2015 TESOL Italy conference, and the 2015 TESOL France conference.
Through the use of scenes from carefully chosen contemporary American plays Ellen demonstrates how students can learn and respond to “near authentic language in real-time”, (Buck 2001). Teachers learn to guide their students through the process of analyzing, memorizing, rehearsing, and performing the scene. Students watch and imitate the scene performed by native-speaker professional actors. Observing, rehearsing, and performing these scenes provides the learners with “compelling comprehensible input in audio and visual formats.” (Krashen 2014) Students have the opportunity to observe nonverbal communication strategies and to practice modeling their own speech after what they see and hear. There are opportunities in each phase of the process for reading, writing, listening, and speaking assignments.
