AOK Basic Skills Project
Portland, Maine
E: kirkjohnb5@gmail.com
W: www.aokbasicskills.gratis
7/1/2021
Re: Workshop – “The Internet, the CEFR, & Learning Styles & Strategies for University English Professors teaching at levels A1-B1”
Dear English Dept. Director:
I’m a semi-retired ESOL teacher over 65 and lived in Ecuador for over 10 years before recently relocating to Portland, Maine in the U.S. I am the director of AOK, a charitable educational effort that was connected to my English school in Quito. It is my personal retirement project; it isn’t an organization.
AOK specializes in teaching life skills. During the past three years, I have written 20 AOK Life Skill Workshops and before the Pandemic presented many of them throughout the Ecuadorian Sierra. AOK received 1,000 positive, informal, anonymous, and voluntary evaluations during this time. Included is an English workshop for the university level that I would like to share with your professors without cost.
Workshop summary
The workshop lasts 50 minutes and is for university professors. Through Power Point, I explain how to connect the basic skills objectives of the CEFR standards with free online materials and student texts in English, and how to use learning styles and strategies in the classroom.
In the workshop I focus on introducing free materials from the Internet to the students for extra study and helping teachers teach learning strategy skills in daily lessons. At the end of the workshop I also distribute a large archive to share with the students with free English study websites for levels A1 – B2.
Depending on the time allowed, there are a number of possibilities for follow-up activities and I would be happy to work with the workshop director in this regard. There is a series of handouts to support the workshop instruction with a detailed bibliography.
The long-term purpose of the workshop
The long-term purpose of the workshop is to encourage ONU to provide an ILL website that provides ELP training and list the websites to facilitate it. They would provide a site in support of their 2030 Sustainable Development Goal 4: Quality education. To motivate ONU to do so, I will ask the workshop host if the participants can take part in the project by completing voluntary and anonymous workshop evaluations. If not, I would still appreciate the opportunity to present the workshop to the professors.
Registration
Because the language study materials I use are written for non-commercial purposes, I do not charge for the presentation. In Quito I was registered with the Human Talent Government Office…
Looking forward to hearing from you.
Sincerely,
John B. Kirk, Director
E: kirkjohnb5@gmail.com