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Training with Mary Osmaston

About Mary Osmaston

Mary OsmastonMary Osmaston is an experienced ESOL teacher, teacher trainer and manager. She works in teacher education at the University of Central Lancashire, on both the generic and the subject specialist (level 5) training programmes, and she is an external assessor for CELTA courses.   She has led professional development workshops for ESOL teachers and teacher trainers for many years, focusing on practical teaching and learning as well as teachers’ knowledge about language and language learning.

Mary is offering the following NATECLA Training sessions:

English spelling is not crazy!  

There are always some students who struggle with spelling, and sometimes we as teachers struggle to help them. Is it a case of providing plenty of practice and teaching some memory strategies, or do they really need to understand something of how English spelling works? In this workshop you will stretch your own awareness of spelling patterns by trying out some classroom activities, and then look at how you can use these ‘discovery’ methods with your own students at a variety of levels.

Latest resources for ESOL

In this workshop you will find out about new resources that you can use with your learners, evaluate some of the latest resources available online and elsewhere and share ideas and information with colleagues about useful and effective resources

Improve your students’ writing at E3-L1 

Many students have interesting things to write about, but need to improve their skills to raise the level and complexity of their writing to achieve at Entry 3 and Level 1. This workshop focuses on some of the grammatical features that you can work on with your students at these levels, helping them and you to analyse their writing for its strengths and areas for improvement. The focus is mainly on using complex sentences to convey more complex meanings and relationships in a written text.

Teaching grammar – inductive methods

Research has shown that we learn better what we have worked out for ourselves. In this workshop you will try out some
discovery methods to help students at a variety of levels to understand grammar, and stretch your own understanding too.


Descriptions of the following workshops are coming soon: 

  • Basic literacy for ESOL learners (reading, writing or both) 
  • Teaching pronunciation 
  • Listening and speaking
  • Grammar for literacy teachers