This blog has gone a long time without an update, but lots has been happening at SLB – read on to find out the SLB news September 2019!

New edition of our TBLT course

At the end of 2018 we launched our online learning platform learn.SLB and started our first online tutored course—a course on task-based language teaching (TBLT) for teachers and course designers—in March 2019. That course went very well, and now we’re launching the second iteration to start on November 8. Please head on over to the course page for more information and to book your place. Neil McMillan, the course director and a tutor alongside Geoff Jordan, Mike Long and Roger Gilabert, has also just written a blog post summarising the first course and looking forward to the next one.

SLB contribute to Freeed.com

At SLB we believe in sharing language-teaching materials produced by our talented teacher members, and we curate an innovate in-house materials bank to that end. SLB socio Myles Klynhout has taken these principles and become involved with an international lesson-sharing platform based in Finland, https://www.freeed.com/. Recently, a few of our soci@s have been sharing some of their lesson plans on Freeed, and we highly recommend taking a look. There’s a Twitter thread here showcasing our lesson ideas, or head on over to the platform itself to sign up and join the ELT community.

SLB extend contract with EF weekly lessons

On a related note, for a while now we’ve been writing lesson plans designed for schools for EF Class, in particular their Weekly lessons section. We are delighted to have recently extended this contract into 2020. Our members Neil McMillan, Mandeep Locham and George Chilton help design freely available (on signup), tablet-based language lessons covering a wide variety of topics of interest to teens—for example, here’s a recent one we did on knife crime in London. We also started doing teacher-training sessions for the platform, including this one on feedback and error correction. Well worth a look!

SLB have also renewed many of our contracts to supply language courses and other services for the coming academic year, including to Glassworks Barcelona, l’Institut Català d’Oncologia, and Signes, with more to confirm in the coming weeks. If you or your company have any need for language services—including teaching, training, translation and proofreading services—please get in touch for a competitive quote.

Soci@ and managerial movements

Firstly we’d like to thank Marc Jones for his recent involvement with SLB. Marc has decided to move on due to other commitments, but it was a pleasure to work with him. Also moving on to new challenges, but staying within the co-op, are Tom Flaherty and James Venner. Both have recently taken up full-time jobs—congratulations boys!—which shows you can combine membership of SLB with regular employment (although the bulk of our members remain freelance).

As far as new soci@s are concerned, we’re delighted to welcome Anita Derecskei, an English teacher and teacher-trainer, who has recently moved from Hungary to Catalonia. Anita has an excellent CV and is also promising to ply us with Hungarian liquor, so she’s very welcome! We’re also in the process of finalising the membership of Roger Gilabert (University of Barcelona) and Mike Long (University of Maryland). Roger and Mike are renowned academics and guest tutors on out TBLT course, so we are very lucky they are coming on board as honorary members. They will give a huge boost to our in-house CPD programme, for which we are already planning events for the coming months.

Finally, we recently held elections to renew positions in our Consell Rector, the body that looks to drive SLB forward towards meeting its members’ objectives. The positions for the next five years are:

  • President—Neil McMillan
  • Vice-president—Alan Ritchie
  • Vocal—Alice Copello
  • Secretary—James Venner
  • Auditor—Aislinn Lambert

Good luck to all involved!

And finally

  • If you feel you can benefit from or contribute to SLB as a freelance language teacher, materials designer, translator or proofreader, please contact us for more information or get your application started now!
  • If you use LinkedIn, please follow our recently refreshed company page.
  • You can also follow us on Twitter or Facebook for updates. Admittedly, the former is much more active than the latter at present …

That’s it for the SLB news September 2019 … we hope the next update won’t be so long in coming! Thanks for reading.

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