The Gateway Teacher Training Programme of Language Education for Hearing Impaired Adults

30 lessons per week

including 2 Half Day activities (Valletta by night & Mdina Tour)

This course takes trainees through a holistic development in their dual roles as language teachers and as themselves students of English.

The aim of the course is a three-pronged approach to trainees’ development in the following areas:

• General methodology – trainees are introduced to a variety of innovative ideas concerning lesson preparation, adaptation of existing materials, exploitation of authentic resources, effective error correction and task-based activities among others, which, while general-purpose, are creative enough to be of great use in the special needs/hearing-impaired classroom.

• Special methodology – participants can explore teaching techniques, methods and approaches tailored to the specific needs of their hearing impaired students and can easily be added to their own toolkit of lesson plans, resources and ideas. This ensures that they are ever up-to-date with the specifics of their particular area, and that they continue to retain a sensitive approach throughout, from materials selection and preparation, to classroom strategy and lesson delivery, to concept/instruction checking and error correction.

• Language enrichment – trainees are granted several opportunities to improve their own English language skills through various tasks that can all be adapted for use in their classrooms with hearing impaired students. This will allow them to refresh their grammar base and add to their lexico-idiomatic repertoire in functional, topical contexts relating to their area of inclusive education.

Who is this course for?

• Practising or former teachers in foreign language education for the hearing impaired;

• English/foreign language teachers who would like to revisit aspects of both general and specialised teaching methodology, the latter as relevant to their specific target audience;

• Language teaching practitioners whose priority is to keep themselves up-to-date with the latest trends in teaching with the intention of ensuring sensitive application/transfer of innovative techniques to their own classroom for the maximum benefit of their students;

• English/foreign language teachers who are fully aware of their own continuing development and permanent status as students who ultimately never really stop learning, and who choose to use this to the advantage of their students by keeping in touch with their own inner learner and regularly putting themselves at the “receiving end” in a classroom, in order to become better teachers;

• Teachers who are sensitive to the reality of hearing impaired adults struggling to keep up with the demands of modern society, both professionally and academically, and who are therefore willing to do their bit to make the process of learning a language as enjoyable as the successful outcome is rewarding, regardless of the challenges posed by impairment.

Objectives:

• To provide participants with an opportunity to update their teaching techniques to better cater for the real-world language needs of their hearing-impaired students, and discover new and different ways of improving their students’ language learning experience;

• To help trainees find out how they can make lessons more engaging, student-centred, learner-empowering and effective for students whose hearing impairment typically presents obstacles that can negatively influence learner motivation, classroom participation, self-study efforts, communicative performance and the overall language learning experience;

• To give trainees the possibility of improving their own English language skills, by refreshing their grammar base and adding to their lexico-idiomatic repertoire of functional language in topically relevant contexts relating to their professional area of inclusive education;