Hi there, my name’s David Read and I work at the English Language Teaching Centre at the University of Sheffield in the UK.  Along with my colleagues Beth, Manuel, Will, Nick, Laurie and Matt I’ll be one of the tutors on this online language improvement course organised with TEFLIN and funded by the British Council. 

In this short welcome video I’ll go over the main objectives of the course, explain a little about how the course is organised and give you information about this site you will use to access the course. 

Ok, let’s talk about the main objectives of the course. The main objective is to help you improve your language skills and increase your confidence when using English, particularly the classroom language you use in the lessons with your learners. On the course you will work through a lot of interesting and interactive content to help you achieve that. We will also be using some of the materials you use with your students to make sure the content is connected to your teaching situation.  

But there are other objectives as well. We want you to be able to connect and communicate with other teachers in your country as well as the course tutors, so there will be chances for you to use apps such as Whatsapp and Zoom to discuss language and work in small groups. 

In Whatsapp you will be together with a group of around 25 teachers and a tutor and each week there will be several topics to discuss based on that week’s content. Each week you will practise and think about the language you use in your normal classes with your learners and share ideas and progress with each other and the tutors. 

Each week there will also be a live Zoom lesson you can attend with around 50 other teachers. This will be run by one of the course tutors and within the lesson you will have the chance to work in smaller groups to discuss a key topic from that week’s content. 

Ok, but how do you access all this? At the moment you’re on the course homepage and this is the starting point to access all the information about the course. But how do you get here? Well, whenever you come to our site, make sure you login on the front page, then click My Foundry, you should then see the button to take you to the TEFLIN Language Improvement Course. And here we are back again on the course homepage. 

Please remember that you can access this course using either a computer or a mobile device, so please use whatever is best for you.  

On this homepage there are different sections. You can see any course news or updates at the top here. Moving down, you can see a section giving information about the Zoom sessions for that week. You can find the link and information about which class you need to attend that week.  Under that you can see a Frequently Asked Question section about the course and you can click on them to find answers to common questions about the course. 

Now, it’s at the bottom where you can find the course itself. The course is eight weeks long and a new unit will be released each week. Each course unit will be available on Thursday, and it will tell you on the unit when it is available.  

To get started, you click on the title of the unit. This now goes into a slightly different view where only information about the course is visible. You can see an overview of the topics on the page and you can click on the first one to get started. You can now work through the topics by working through the content on the page and then using the buttons at the top or bottom to navigate between them.

You will also see a menu on the left here. You can use this to quickly move between topics. You can also use to move back to the course homepage by clicking on the blue button. This can be hidden by clicking the arrow to give you a bit more space on the screen. 

Ok, well, I think that’s enough for you to get started. We look forward to virtually meeting you on the course. If you have any problems, please contact our support team on eltc.tel@sheffield.ac.uk and they will do everything they can to help you.