Create engaging ELT materials for fun and profit! This 6-week practical course explores the creation of graded/leveled readers for English …
Create engaging ELT materials for fun and profit! This 6-week practical course explores the creation of graded/leveled readers for English language learners, including original fiction, adapted classics, and non-fiction. Turn your classroom experience and creativity into materials to engage and motivate learners—in your own classroom and beyond.
We’ll explore these areas in depth:
- The existing market for readers: What’s out there, and what’s selling?
- What makes an engaging text
- How to adjust grammar and vocabulary for different levels
- How to write appropriate exercises and ancillary material to accompany the text
- Options for getting your work published
But we’ll do more than just talk about all this—each participant will plan and begin writing a graded reader during this course. Whether you finish it in 6 weeks is up to you, but you’ll at least be well on your way!
Each week combines live sessions on Zoom (always recorded and available forever) with hands-on workshop tasks that include analytical tasks and discussion, writing practice, and peer feedback.
Six live online sessions will be held in the iTDi virtual classroom. Live sessions will happen at 04:00 UTC/GMT, which will be Saturday in the Americas, and Sunday in Asia (and early Sunday in Europe). Don't worry if the time doesn't work out for you to join the live sessions. We will send all registered participants a recording and a copy of Dorothy's slides after the session ends.
Six live online sessions will be held in the iTDi virtual classroom. Live sessions will happen at 04:00 UTC/GMT, which will be Saturday in the Americas, and Sunday in Asia (and early Sunday in Europe). Don't worry if the time doesn't work out for you to join the live sessions. We will send all registered participants a recording and a copy of Dorothy's slides after the session ends.
Live session dates: February 15, 22, and March 1, 8, 15, and 22
The live sessions on February 15, 22 and March 1, and 8 will happen before daylight savings time begins in the United States. The UTC time never changes. If you are affected by US daylight savings time, your time will change.
Time for February 15, 22, and March 1: 04:00-05:00 UTC. Check your local time
Time for March 15 and 22: 04:00-05:00 UTC. Check your local time
Cost: $240 USD*
*We can provide receipts for research funds, if needed.
Registration includes six live sessions, resources, unlimited discussion in a private forum, peer and instructor feedback in the forum and in a shared Dropbox folder, and access to Dorothy for six months after the course ends.
About Advanced Skills Live Courses
Advanced Skills courses are workshops and tend to be very hands on. You learn skills and apply them in. In order to provide an exceptional experience, registration is limited to 25 participants. Registration includes six live sessions, unlimited discussions each week in a private forum, and access to a private Dropbox folder. Participants will be expected to submit work for peer feedback and provide feedback on other participants' work, in Dropbox. If you are not planning to complete a book but wish to receive a certificate, you will be expected to submit an .epub of your project to demonstrate competency with the publishing tools.
As a registered participant, don’t worry if you ever have to miss a class or if the time for the live sessions doesn't work well for your time zone. You’ll receive weekly recordings of each class, full transcripts of the text chat during class, assigned readings and a PDF of the PowerPoint slides. Furthermore, the online community will certainly become a wealth of ideas and information, and it will remain private and online for your use anytime in the future.
Scholarships
iTDi believes that all teachers deserve the same opportunity to improve themselves. From our experience, teachers who pay something towards a course more often make greater effort and are more likely to complete the course. Therefore, we do encourage teachers to pay something toward the course if at all possible. We prioritize partial scholarships, but a limited number of full scholarships will also be available for this course. Please apply through our scholarship application. Scholarship applications will be available two months before the course begins and will be awarded one month before the course begins.
Meet your instructor
Dorothy Zemach
Dorothy Zemach holds an MA in TEFL and has been teaching English for 30 years. Since turning to materials writing, she has penned everything from the Teddy Bear's Magic Music teacher's book to the lowest and highest levels of Macmillan's flagship course Open Mind to the groundbreaking English for Scammers (self-published). She’s worked with CUP as an in-house senior development editor, and has written and/or edited as well for OUP, Macmillan, Pearson, Cengage, and University of Michigan Press, among others. In 2012, she founded Wayzgoose Press, an independent publisher of fiction, literary non-fiction, and educational materials. Dorothy’s website: https://www.dorothyzemach.com
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