Abstracts
|
 |
David Crystal
Plenary lecture: Myths and realities of English on the Internet
The internet, the language linker par excellence, offers ELT fresh
opportunities and challenges, but to respond to these requires an
understanding of how language is evolving in electronic media. The
talk examines some of the myths about what is happening to English
in electronic communication, and discusses research realities
|
|
 |
Penny Ur
Lecture: Linking through grammar
Grammar practice isn't just gapfills and matching: it's also a
potential trigger for activities that give students opportunities
to communicate and forge real personal links with each other. This
talk gives some ideas for such 'linking' activities that practise
some of the trickier grammatical features of English at various
levels of proficiency.
|
|
 |
Joseph Lo Bianco
Plenary lecture: English, Dilemmas of Identity and Globalisation
At the end of the 19th century many intellectuals could see that
a global world was emerging and made preparations. Some tried to
create the "neutral" code of communication they believed
this world would require. The names of their projects reflect their
ideals of peaceful communication and intercultural ties: eg Esperanto.
However, today we do have the closest the world has come to a global
code, lingua mundi, or Globish, called English. It carries the name
of a specific national state in a small part of the world which
is no longer pre-eminent in global affairs. The fortunes of world
English rest on decisions made in China and India about their patterns
of communication with the rest of the world. In this talk I shall
report research undertaken over 4 years in China on language attitudes
and specifically the shifting and remarkable fortunes of a vast
country where there are more learners of English than there are
Americans. The talk will conclude by a reflection on the nature
of language and identity, how have we, and the language inventors,
imagined language and identity links in the past, and what must
we conclude from the lessons of recent globalisation.
Plus: A discussion group session
What are the practical and pedagogical implications of the topic
of the keynote ?
|
|
 |
Ramon Lewis
Workshop: Classroom Management: Are we seeking Obedience or
Responsibility? Are we getting it?
Without effective behaviour management, a positive and productive
classroom environment is impossible to achieve. Finding the most
effective techniques for producing behaviour change and preventing
the development of classroom discipline problems is a moderately
stressful part of the professional lives of many teachers, and a
major reason for job dissatisfaction. The need for confidence regarding
the impact of particular strategies is important to teachers given
that the ability to manage students effectively is a critical component
of their sense of professional identity
This presentation focuses on the results of attempts to introduce
the Developmental Management approach into all schools in the Northern
Metropolitan Region of Victoria, Australia, as part of the 'train
the trainer', AiZ project. The rationale underlying the 15 recommendations
for teacher behaviour implicit in the DMA are highlighted and examples
of schools' attempts to introduce elements of the DMA into primary
and secondary classrooms are discussed.
|
|
 |
Elite Olshtain
Lecture: Where Have All the Methods Gone?
The last few decades have witnessed changes in the approach to
language teaching that were research-based, discourse-based and
leaner-based. On the one hand changing winds and shifting sands
have done away with the basic premises of teaching methodology,
while on the other hand they have opened up our arena to creativity,
innovations and diversity. As a result, roles of teachers and learners
have changed in significant ways and policy making has had to refocus
on expected outcomes and standards for student achievements. The
presentation will elaborate on some of these changes and will provide
examples from various implementation projects in Israel and abroad.
|
|
 |
Kari Smith
Lecture: Professional development in light of standards
Standards have become the focus of education throughout the world,
some are in favor, often politicians, and others, mainly educators,
speak strongly against standards. In my presentation I will briefly
discuss the concept of standards, highlighting advantages as well
as constraints through examples from various countries. Standards
might lead to a reductive typology in teacher education, and the
final part of the presentation focuses on the place of teacher autonomy
in a standardized environment. If we succeed in finding an optimal
balance between professional autonomy and responsibility, there
is a good chance we will witness a strongly needed quantum leap
in education, and as such, also in teacher education.
|
|
 |
Wendy Henrietta Arnold
Lecture: Unshackling the ownership of English and using it to
link communities
As the flood of countries introducing English as an additional
language continues, at an ever younger age, it is time to stop and
consider what baggage (if any) comes along with English. And as
a lingua franca how we can use it as a 'tool' to link communities
rather than divide them.
|
|
 |
Batia Laufer
Lecture: Quantity, quality, opportunity: three dimensions of
second language vocabulary learnin
Three main issues in vocabulary learning and teaching will be addressed:
quantity - selecting the optimal number of words to be learnt, quality
- acquiring different degrees of word knowledge, and opportunity
– the nature and frequency of pedagogical activities that lead
to effective learning.
|
|
 |
Zoltán Dörnyei
Plenary Lecture: Communicative language teaching in the 21st
century: The principled communicative approach
Over the past two decades “communicative language teaching”
(CLT) has become a real buzzword in language teaching methodology,
but it is highly questionable as to whether the term covers a well-defined
and uniform method. In fact, since the genesis of CLT in the early
1970s in the UK and the US, its proponents have developed a very
wide range of variants that were only loosely related to each other.
Therefore, in the first part of my talk I will summarise the psychological
foundation of the communicative approach and explain the reasons
for the rather fluid nature of the method. I will then argue that
CLT is currently undergoing a major transformation, characterised
by a move towards a more principled way of developing communicative
competence in the learners. Based primarily on psycholinguistic
research, I will outline the main features of the emerging new CLT,
with a special emphasis of three key issues that lie at the heart
of the changes: (a) focus on form and form-focused instruction;
(b) fluency and automatization; and (c) formulaic language development.
In conclusion, I will offer six general methodological principles
that are in accordance with the state of the art of our research
knowledge of instructed SLA.
|
|
 |
Richard Curwin
Lecture: Why students are so hard to teach and what we can do about
it.
Students today are harder to teach; they talk too much, are more
defiant, less motivated and pose greater challenges. I am frequently
asked "why". I have some answers, and for those with courage,
some suggestions to improve this situation.
|
|
 |
Gunther Volk
Lecture: Boosting speaking and writing skills through ethical dilemmas
By tapping into the ethical issues at the heart of a short play,
several short stories and newspaper articles this workshop aims
to show how EFL teaching can be turned into a motivating platform
for combining values education and the teaching of speaking and
writing activities in an integrated way.
|
|
 |
Elisheva Barkon
Lecture: Fluency Fitness! One larger size fits all!
Research has established fluency as a critical factor in smooth,
efficient language processing. In this presentation, I will discuss
approaches to language acquisition and reading that encourage recognition
and use of chunks/multi word units as a way forward in the promotion
of fluency.
|
|
| |
Dr. Lily Orland-Barak
Touching base in learning to teach English: Assumptions and expectations
revisited.
In this presentation I discuss foreign language teachers’
assumptions about teaching EFL , focusing on how these are revised
and refined as a result of reflecting on their own classroom discourse.
Drawing on studies from novice language teachers’ analysis
of their classroom discourse through authentic transcriptions of
their taught lessons, I focus on how they interpret the use of L1
in a communicative language lesson; the function of teachers’
moves for pupils’ language production and participation, and
the planning a communicative language lesson.
|
|
 |
David Ian Hanauer
Towards Meaningful Literacy: Poetry Writing in the Language Classroom
This lecture has three main aims: 1) To introduce, develop and
exemplify the concept of meaningful literacy as an approach to teaching
in the language classroom; 2) To present descriptive data on the
process of writing poetry in a second language; 3) To describe an
approach for using poetry in the ESL/EFL English language classroom.
Central to the approach developed in this lecture is the idea that
the construction and expression of personal meaning with emotional
salience is at the heart of ESL/EFL literacy learning. The lecture
will follow the structure of the three aims. In the first part of
my lecture I will define the core principles of meaningful literacy
and how they can be manifest in the language classroom. This will
be followed by a review of qualitative and quantitative data collected
in a series of studies that deals with the process of writing a
poem in a second language. The last part of the lecture will describe
the process of teaching poetry writing to language learners and
exemplify this process through the analysis of some selected second
language poetry.
|
 |
Rick Rosenberg
Title: Fostering Communities of Practice for Interaction
This session will demonstrate how to access online tools for
interaction and how to foster increased communication through
participation in communities of inquiry and practice.
|
|
| |
Ofra Inbar
Title: Time to Move On: From Theme to CLIL Based Approaches
This session will argue for the implementation of content-based
approaches such as CLIL (Content Language Integrated Learning) for
teaching English in Israel. The talk will elaborate on the reasons
for this recommendation as well as on the feasibility of implementation
in terms of curriculum considerations, teaching materials, and teacher
education
|
