Fall Featured Speakers
Tan Hunyh
We are so fortunate to have Tan join us for three sessions on Friday! Tan Huynh (@TanKHuynh) is a secondary school teacher specializing in English language acquisition, an author, podcaster, and consultant. He has taught students from 5th to 10th grade in domestic public, private, and charter, but the bulk of his experience has been in international schools. He also taught social studies and spends much of his days co-planning and co-teaching. Tan is trained in sheltered instruction, WIDA, culturally-responsive instruction, International Baccalaureate Middle Years Program, and the Collaborative Instructional Cycle. Tan shares his application of research-based strategies on his blog, podcast, and online courses with the hopes of celebrating teachers who answer the calling to serve multilingual learners. He holds a master’s degree in curriculum and instruction specializing in language acquisition. You can learn more about his work by going to TanKHuynh.com
FRIDAY MORNING KEYNOTE: CREATING THE CONDITIONS FOR LONG-TERM SUCCESS
Let’s shift beyond the limits of the long-term English learner (LTEL) label to embrace a new way of honoring secondary multilinguals’ valuable life experiences and academic potential. By focusing on experienced multilinguals’ strengths and what teachers can do, we will create the conditions for long-term success. In this keynote, Tan will share the conditions where experienced multilinguals can thrive. While the examples will be from secondary schools, these conditions are applicable to elementary school MLs as well. The goal of this keynote is to affirm what participants are already doing to serve their MLs and to offer additional approaches.
60-MINUTE SESSION: ESTABLISHING COMPREHENSIBLE INPUT
One condition for academic success is when instructions are accessible to students. When instruction, text, videos, and other forms of content delivery are inaccessible to MLs, they experience significant barriers. Fortunately, there are strategies and approaches to make instruction more comprehensible. After attending this interactive session, participants will leave with additional methods to establish comprehensible input. Though the examples will mainly be from Grades 5-12, the principles can be applicable to elementary as well.
TWO HOUR WORKSHOP: STRUCTURING ACADEMIC OUTPUT
Social and academic language are equally important. However, MLs often use social language when the task requires academic language. Therefore, it rests upon educators to explicitly teach and structure academic language output if MLs are to communicate proficiently like scientists, historians, musicians, engineers, and business people. By the end of this interactive session, participants will learn approaches so that MLs can effectively communicate in an academic register at the word, sentence, organization, and context level. While the examples come from Grades 5 – 12, these approaches can be modified for the elementary school.
Saturday Keynote
SPEAKER TO BE ANNOUNCED SOON!