Break It Down! Key Principles for Teaching Beginners

Friday, October 16, 2026
1:00 PM – 3:00 PM (online via Zoom)

In this workshop, teachers will acquire a few key principles that make teaching beginners more effective: giving multimodal directions, breaking tasks into achievable pieces, narrowing the focus to reduce cognitive load in reading and listening, and providing scaffolds to support oral and written communication. Participants will learn how these principles apply to teaching speaking, listening, reading, writing, pronunciation, and vocabulary, and will leave with many activity ideas for teaching that cater to beginner English learners. Veteran teachers will learn new activity ideas that incorporate these principles.

Workshop Learning Objectives:

• Develop authentic speaking activities such as info gaps and mingle activities that support fluency through repetition and the need to communicate

• Identify and teach the importance of word and sentence stress to improve speaking and listening

• Give effective, focused feedback on writing that does not overwhelm learners

• Use translanguaging and Google Translate to leverage students’ L1 in teaching writing

• Amplify and chunk text to support reading comprehension

• Help learners set a purpose for reading and listening

• Use multimodal instruction to give directions and teach vocabulary

Presenter:

Brendon Albertson is an English language educator who has taught in adult, college, and K-12 contexts over 17 years. His students have included adult immigrants, international college students, high school students in China, and kindergarteners and business professionals in Japan. His other experience includes leading adult ESOL programs, curriculum design, developing educational apps, teacher training, and academic research involving student participation and the use of technology for language learning. Brendon speaks Japanese and Mandarin Chinese.

Micocredential Categories:

• Fundamental Skills (F)

This workshop is free to staff of all Massachusetts non-profit ABE and ESOL Programs.

First Literacy does not receive any state or federal funding and we work very hard to raise 100% of our budget from private sources. Please consider making a donation to First Literacy so we can continue to offer FREE high quality professional development workshops.