Going experimental at TESOL France

A summary of the TESOL France’s  32nd annual colloquium  which took place in Paris between 22 and 24
November 2013.

ELT conferences often have a title or theme with various presentations
loosely related to it. TESOL France’s annual colloquium held in Paris in
November isn’t one of them. However, this year’s colloquium, my third, had an underlying
theme for me – experimental practice. Here are highlights of some of the
sessions I went to.

What do you need? A bit of TPRS, perhaps?

After this year’s unusual opening on Friday - instead of a traditional opening plenary
the organisers decided to experiment with a brief welcome address by the chair of TESOL
followed by mingling - the first session I went to was Judith Logsdon-Dubois's on TPRS. I had virtually got to know Judith through Twitter and her comments
on this blog, but TPRS turned out to be not quite what I’d expected. It is not
a twist on TPR (Total Physical Response), an “alternative” ELT approach of the
1970s inspired by Krashen’s theories. TPRS stands for Teaching Proficiency
through Reading and Storytelling, which is again strongly influenced by Krashen’s
input hypothesis. Just to remind you, according the input hypothesis we acquire language when we receive a lot of comprehensible
input, i.e. input which is just above the current level of our language competence.

After briefly outlining Krashen’s model of language acquisition - it was interesting as we had just covered Krashen’s five hypotheses with my students on a SLA course I'm teaching - Judith
demoed a TPRS lesson with the participants taking on different roles. I was
given the role of a structure counter and had to count the number of times the
target structure occurred in the lesson - whether in the teacher’s input or
learners’ production which of course, in accordance with Krashen, was not
forced. The chosen target structure was I need + noun phrase (NP) and its
variations (do you need... / what do you need etc.). Need + NP poses a difficulty for French speakers as the equivalent
idea is realised in French by the verb "have" + noun: avoir besoin de (I have the
need for).

I counted 39 occurrences which Judith admitted wasn’t enough for
acquisition (subconscious acquisition as opposed to conscious learning in
Krashen’s terms) to take place. In TPRS a target item or structure has to occur
70 times! Hmmm I wonder if there is research to support this figure but TPRS
is something I’d definitely like to experiment with, especially with lower level
students. To find out more about this method, check out Judy's blog: http://tprswitch.jimdo.com

Dipping your toes into something new

Mike Harrison started his Saturday morning session on experimental
practice by asking us to close our eyes and take a mental screen capture of a
recent class we taught. We were then instructed to go through a series of
modifications by zooming in and out of the image, putting ourselves in and
taking ourselves out of the picture, reducing the light and making the image
clearer - Mike is a great believer in using images in ELT.

Mike Harrison in action.  This room was assigned this year

to all my favourite presenters  (including myself)

After clarifying what experimental or exploratory practice means, Mike shared
the results of a recent poll he conducted in the IATEFL group on Facebook to
see what methods teachers have experimented with throughout their career. Task-based
language teaching (TBLT) came at the top of the list. Mike’s main message was
that teachers – whether novice or seasoned – should constantly push themselves
to try something completely different. Some of the ideas he elicited from the
audience included:

- Keeping a journal: when you embark on an experiment, jot down what you
think is going to happen and then see what really happens

- Ask students what they would like to do differently

- One idea (which came from Rakesh Bhanot) was regarding attending conferences:
try going to the most “unlikely” sessions (not the stuff you are normally interested
in) – this is what I certainly did at TESOL France this year.

It was an engaging session that really made us think and Mike’s Power
Point with minimalist, impactful (yes, I said it!) greyscale slides made me
green with envy!

Welcome to the jungle

After a comfortably long lunch break (they always are at TESOL France) funky
jungle music greeted us upon entering the same room for Christina Rebuffet-Broadus
and Jennie Wright’s session Walk On The Wild Side: The Experimental Practice
Jungle. Their workshop picked up where Mike left off and was practical,
entertaining and heavy on audience participation. We were divided into groups
and asked to experiment with the methods we were the least familiar wish, such us CLIL, Flipped classroom, Dogme, Translation 2.0 (a revived interest in Translation in ELT)

The presenters confessed that their session was also in a way an experiment before presenting their
new book on the topic which has just come out on theround.

Body talk

Although it may not seem immediately obvious, Scott Thornbury's plenary
The Learning Body fit nicely into the experimental theme. Starting with a
philosophical premise that mind and body are all one, Scott extended it to
language learning showing how the mind is:

• embodied - metaphorical language we use is closely linked to our
  physical experience of the world, e.g. the choice of particles in phrasal verbs:
  things are looking UP, grow UP,  prices
  went UP etc.

• embedded - how language is embedded in the physical world, i.e. it is
  developed, applied in and adapted for context, e.g. how by “mirroring” other
  people we accommodate to our interlocutors and adapt our language accordingly, e.g. I switch between “flat” and “apartment”
  depending whether my interlocutor is British or American

• extended - our body is used to help us organise our thoughts, for example, we use gestures when we talk on the phone although our
  interlocutor cannot see us, which goes to show that gestures are not accompaniments but rather components of speech.

Interestingly, IELTS candidates tend to score higher on the speaking test
when they use more gestures.

  

Scott Thornbury (sorry, couldn't get all of him)

using gestures at his plenary talk

Also, contrary to the recent trend of plenaries at ELT conferences leaning
more towards entertaining rather than educating, this talk kept the balance
right. It was thought-provoking and informative. In addition, it was delivered with Scott’s signature wit and accompanied by aptly chosen video clips and insightful quotes ranging
from Descartes to Mae West.

Overall, a very satisfying conference again - my third and I thought, probably, last year in a row but then I found out that next year's one falls on my birthday again - like last year!