You are invited to a Zoom meeting.
When: Dec 2, 2026 08:30 PM Warsaw
Hugh Dellar
Towards better outcomes: satisfying students' needs (and wants).
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.
Dear Colleagues,
IATEFL Poland and Hugh Dellar, teacher, trainer, and materials writer,
have the pleasure of inviting you to the webinar which will take place on Wednesday, 2nd of December 2026, from 20.30 to 21.30 CET.
This webinar is titled: “Towards better outcomes: satisfying students’ needs (and wants).”.
Summary:
For language teachers and coursebook writers alike, the importance of providing students with the language they need is self-evident. Whilst these needs may vary, they generally tend to revolve around academic and professional fields: local or internationally-recognised exams may need to be passed, e-mails may need to be written, telephone calls may need to be made, and so on.
At the same time, however, we would do well to also bear in mind students’ wants. What learners want to do in English invariably involves speaking. Indeed, the Common European Framework encourages us to see our students as “social agents” – and places great stress on facilitating this agency through ‘can-do statements’ and the setting of clear ‘communicative goals’. These competing demands upon our time and energies clearly raise many questions.
This talk explores one approach to answering them – that adopted in the new Heinle Cengage series, Outcomes, of which I am the co-author.
I will consider how we can best give students clear models and clear directions to spoken fluency; what kind of language is worth teaching (and what isn’t); how we can set clear, achievable goals – and how we can best hope to strike a balance between meeting students’ needs and satisfying their wants.
Hugh Dellar Bio:
Hugh Dellar is a London-based teacher and teacher trainer with over twenty-five years’ experience in the field.
He is also the co-founder of Lexical Lab and has co-written the methodology book Teaching Lexically. Hugh has given teacher training and development sessions in over twenty countries including Brazil, Mexico, Peru, Argentina, Spain, Italy, Japan and Thailand. He has spoken on such wide-ranging topics as the nature of English as a Lingua Franca, the uses and abuses of corpora, approaches to teaching grammar and vocabulary, and many others. He is also the co-author of two five-level General English series, Innovations and Outcomes, both published by National Geographic Learning, as well as the Upper-Intermediate level of the Perspectives series.
