Resilience and learning English

5.7.2018

Integration of Resilience into English Language Learning is a topic of training for English teachers, held in June 2018 in the city of Svyatogorsk.

The event was run by RELO (Regional Office for English Teaching) at the US Embassy in Ukraine. The training was opened by Alyona Sukhinina, Assistant Cultural Relations Department of the US Embassy in Ukraine and John Silver, specialist in RELO. The participants of the training are English teachers from the areas of the front-line zone.

At the beginning of the training, the participants, together with the trainers, discussed the concept of resilience, which implies the formation of skills for positive adaptation to disagreements and the use of opportunities for understanding problems, panic attacks, anxieties in overcoming these states. Resiliency also means not just coping with the difficulty and returning to the previous state but, most importantly, moving forward to a new stage of life, in search of new opportunities for self-realization.

The work during the training was very rich, productive and fruitful. Interesting and motivating sessions were held by Crystal Bock Thiessen, an experienced teacher who, by the way, worked some time ago in Lugansk. The topics of the sessions included such issues as activities that contribute to the formation of resilience; infomerical project; development of critical and creative thinking in English classes; reflexive approaches to language learning; use of infographic. The training ended with the delivery of certificates and the drawing of instructional and methodological literature from RELO and from Crystal Bock Thyssen’ s American colleagues.