BELTA goes to Glasgow: 51st IATEFL Conference (Part Two)
04/04/2017 - 22:26
The first day of this four-day conference is always the busiest. You try to attend a session for each time interval, you learn to familarise yourself with the venue (especially where can you get coffee), you do a cursory tour of the Exhibition Hall so you can decide what you will come back later to purchase (and – good news – you can ship your purchases home for a small fee; most purchases are 20% off, so what you save you buy for shipping – saving a lot of hassle when packing on Friday morning), and running into old friends and making new friends. Today, I talk about the various sessions I attended and who I ran into!
So, today was the official start of IATEFL 2017 in Glasgow. This four-day conference is as exhausting as it is exhilarating. The begins at 9 am with a plenary, and the last session ends at 6:35 pm. Of course, there are break-in coffee breaks and a lunch break, but I have found that it is just as important to say, ‘I am going to skip a session’ to recharge the batteries. Luckily, my hotel is a two-minute walk from the venue, so I can come back to the hotel at lunch time and rest a little. This is my 6th IATEFL Conference, so I know that if I don’t pace myself, then by Thursday I will run out of steam.
Today, I did a fun run through all the time slots but one (I skipped the poster sessions.) This was well worth it because, while picking up a coffee, I ran into two of the many Belgians here in Glasgow. Mario Lecluyze and Mark Van Dongen were finishing their lunch when we met up. It is also great to chat up these two English advisers. As we were going our separate ways, we decided to meet up for dinner at the end of the conference. I had made a reservation an American diner (of course), so I modified the reservation and they joined me for so good old fashion American food with no talk of Trump. Very, very enjoyable!! Earlier in the day I ran into two colleagues, with whom I worked on some course books: Marleen Peters and Chan Roovers. Both are teachers from schools in Turnhout. Tomorrow, I am hoping to see more of the Belgian participants!
I was also fortunate enough to run into Tyson Seburn, whom BELTA used to collaborate with on the summer webinar conference, and Rob Howard, who I met last year at BELTA Day and who will be returning to BELTA Day 2017 to present. It is always great to see familiar and friendly faces. I hope to connect with both Tyson and Rob in the next couple of days.
Enough about my socializing; let’s move on to the great presentations I saw today. I won’t go into too much detail; if you want to know more about a particular session, drop me a line at my BELTA email, and I will be happy to share.
The day began with a great plenary by Gabriel Diaz Maggioli. I met Gabriel a few years back, and I have read one of his books on observing and mentoring teacher trainees. I had expectations because his work usually hits home for me. This plenary was no exception. The theme was continued professional development for teachers, which is something I believe we need more of. (By the way – shameless plug here – don’t forget about BELTA Day on 13 May 2017!) We need to do more PD for teachers; and the PD must begin with the teachers and offer sufficient resources and follow-up. Interestingly, he said that many teachers get their PD from webinars. (That is good news for the Sundays with BELTA webinar series!). If you want to watch Gabriel’s plenary (and I suggest you do), you go here to IATEFL Online which contains a recording of the plenary and recordings from 5 sessions, including Scott Thornbury’s session.
The first breakout session was ‘Accelerating fluency in monolingual classes.’ The focus was Romance and Germanic language students (so perfect for my audience). The main idea was to determine what English words and phrases are ‘free’, meaning recognizable from their mother tongue and don’t teach this ‘free’ English, just show it to increase fluency. Next, I went to ‘Developing creative and critical thinking skills in teachers in training’ by Marisa Constantinides from CELT Athens. I have attended presented given by Marisa before and these usually focus on technology, so it was nice to attend a presentation that had a different focus. The session offered some great ideas for building creativity and critical thinking skills in students like mine. Some of her presentation came from a British Council publication entitled ‘Creativity in the English Language Classroom’, which you can download for free.
Marisa’s session was immediately followed by a session on ‘Feedback, feedforward, motivation, trust: coaching and interpersonal classroom skills’ by Ben Dobbs. One of the things he mentioned I found very interesting. It is an approach to prepare students for developmental feedback: BACK: bin (what should be removed if the task was done again?), add (what was omitted that needed to be added based on reflection), change (what requires some adjustment/alteration to improve the performance?) and keep (what was good and worked well?). The slides for this presentation can be found at Ben’s website.
After lunch and coffee with Mario and Mark, I went to a product workshop. As a tech guy, I am always looking for that new product that will be useful. Reeza Awoodun introduced the audience to a product that was initially designed for notetaking purposes but (as is the case with any good product) as been taken over by language teachers. I was very impressed with the functionality of this product and how simple it was to use. Tomorrow, I will hopefully sign up for a pilot project (Don’t tell my school, yet!)
This year, I teach in the Communications and Interactive Multimedia Design departments at my university college, and both groups use a discussion-based model of classroom instruction. So, I attended Margit Szesztay’s session ‘Discussion, debate and dialogue in the ELT classroom.’ Margit, who will be the new president of IATEFL as of Wednesday afternoon, gave some great DO’S for managing these types of classes. Then I said in the same room for ‘Activating games – in-betweens or teaching essentials?’ given by a Belgian, Filip Dedeurwaerder-Hass, who works in Germany. After some boring brain research (a little too technical for my taste), we engaged a copy of great games that can be used for revision purposes. I will be busy creating materials for my summer Beginner’s Level class in Antwerp after BELTA Day!
My colleague and I have been using a corpus-based approach with our future teachers for two years now. I have always wanted to get them to create a corpus based on a thematic unit for English taught in the 1st or 2nd grade; I have had this idea to create a corpus of menus from the UK and the USA and to compare them to determine the specific lexical units we should teach. I never fully understood how to do until today. I went to Michael Jones’ ‘A beginner’s guide to creating vocabulary lists with corpus software.’ He demonstrated a site called ‘AntConc’ which seems easy enough to use. So, after I develop some new games, I need to work on the new project for my English 5 teacher trainees. Next year already sounds super exciting! Finally, the last session I attended was given by two teachers from Sydney, Australia. Wow – what a commute! Lesley Speer and Jose Lara introduced us to four websites and four apps (mostly free) for extensive reading. ER is one of the themes of my English 5 class, so now I can add the technology element!
All in all, it was a productive day that ended with an excellent American meal (for me, a Philly Cheesesteak with Scottish cheddar!). I am sure that tomorrow will be just as exciting!
Don’t forget to check tomorrow evening for an update. I hope to have posted tomorrow by 8 pm Belgian time, but I still need to my presentation for Thursday! If it is a little late, it is because I was working on my presentation!
