The speaker’s name is John Hughes. The session is called “Personalizing the impersonal” (https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/personalizing-impersonal). I’ve chosen this topic because it is very important for a teacher to make the lessons engaging. Many teachers fail to do that and they don’t understand why. I’ve learned a lot of interesting things and tips from this talk. First of all, personalization can be shallow and deep. An example of shallow personalization is asking students “Have you done something\been somewhere?” when they need to drill Present Perfect. This approach isn’t the best for engaging students. Deep personalization is, for example, asking additional questions like “What did you do where? Did you enjoy doing it?” etc. Starting and ending lessons with this deep personalization method proved to be very effective. We often assume that certain topics (family, fashion, possessions…) are easy to personalize, but in reality, students are tired of discussing familiar topics over and over again or they feel uncomfortable discussing them. Finally, the speaker gave five useful tips for making lessons more engaging:

1. Giving students opportunities to make personal choices
2. Modeling personalization (people are more willing to share personal information if somebody has done before them)
3. An intercultural approach (students learn about other cultures and compare them with their own)
4. Personalization of content (students create content)
5. Creative thinking (creative tasks should be done outside of a classroom because students need time to come up with creative ideas and to develop them)

The speaker gave some good examples of how to put these tips into practice, and I’d like to find more examples of engaging tasks that can be given to students.Overall, this talk was really interesting and useful.