The Hornby Schools are run with the support of the A. S. Hornby Educational Trust, UK. The Trust was established in 1961 by A. S. Hornby, popularly known for the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary. In the UK, Hornby Schools are recognised as one of the most prestigious activities in the field of English Language Teaching (ELT). Each year these schools have enabled teachers to develop their expertise and upgrade their English teaching skills. In Sri Lanka and India, Hornby schools have been running since 2000 and have helped directly train many teachers, who have gone on to cascade the workshops to hundreds of teachers across the region.
Using action research structure the Hornby School will include these topics:
- Speaking skills development – exploring the most effective activities for developing confidence in speaking in a low resource classroom
- Listening skills development – exploring the most effective activities to develop the sub skills of listening in a low resource classroom
- Learner, teacher and coursebook as resources for developing these skills in the classroom
- Listening and speaking skills activities:- analysis, criteria, design and implementation – this looks at quality low resource speaking and listening activities and ideas, establishes what the core criteria for them are, then looks at their design and implementation
- Practical application - this explores the practical application of the above topics, resulting in the participants producing a booklet of low-resource activities and ideas that can be distributed more widely after the course
- A review of the action research process will also be undertaken. Participants will be asked to reflect on the process and evaluate how useful a process it is