A year ago, on my way home from the XXVI Jornadas GRETA, this blog was born. Yesterday the XXVII Jornadas GRETA ended, and I have a moment to post the links to the presentations of my talks before heading back to Madrid.

But before talking about my own presentations, I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone for a very enjoyable conference. Thanks to the speakers whose talks and workshops I attended – Dr Jesús García Laborda for his insights into the new Bachillerato test which is causing so much uncertainty at the moment here in Spain, Jane Skellett for her wonderful hamburger analogy for a genre approach to FCE writing (and a welcome reminder of how great the Meg and Mog books were!), Trinidad Jerez for sharing her ideas for getting the most out of IWbs and iPads in the classroom, Natàlia Maldonado for eight guiding principles for teaching CLIL science, and of course the irrepressible Chris Roland for more insights into the thorny issue of classroom management and discipline. And very special thanks to the organisers – the ‘girls in black’, particularly Rocío, who looked after me so wonderfully in my sessions, Antonio and most particularly Charo Reyes, without whose titanic efforts none of this would have been possible.

This year I gave two presentations, one o Friday and one on Saturday. My Friday session was on the use of cohesion and Halliday and Hasan’s idea of ‘texture’ to help students to improve their reading and listening comprehension. You can access a PDF of the presentation here.

On Saturday, my workshop was on speaking activities which I have used with teenagers, from practising questions to games involving extended speaking. A PDF of this presentation is here, and there are links within the PDF to other posts in this blog where the different activities are explained in more detail.

Now I’m off for a brief visit to this beautiful city, before once again I have to head back to Madrid.