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  Penny Ur shares research she finds interesting at IATEFL 2023 Penny Ur posting for photos with fans after her IATEFL talk (19.4.23) This is the second instalment of my two-part post about Penny Ur’s session at IATEFL matter-of-factly entitled Interesting recent research , in which, in a span of 30 minutes, I learned more than during the rest of the conference.  Click HERE for the first part. The reason why it’s taken me so long to publish this (IATEFL took place in April ) is that it’s not merely a summary of the talk. Upon my return I did some digging into the sources Penny Ur cited; the result is a summary combined with some personal reflections. By her own admission, she whizzed through so many studies in the talk that I only focus on those that are interesting to me . The previous part covered the age factor, the use of L1 and error correction; in this one we turn to the following three strands of research: inferencing meaning from context, the flipped classroom and the...

Insights from Penny Ur’s IATEFL 2023 talk in lieu of a proper conference report Few people in the industry can make research sound sexy the way Penny Ur and Scott Thornbury can. But it’s probably only the now retired Penny Ur who can get away with a conference session entitled Interesting recent research and the blurb that goes:  “One of the advantages of being retired but still involved in ELT is that one has more time to browse through recent books and journals in search of interesting research studies. In this session, I’ll share some of the ones I’ve found on a variety of topics…” Penny Ur started her session with some caveats: not all the research is applicable or practicable for the classroom while not everything that goes on in the classroom is supported by research – a sentiment she has often expressed elsewhere .  After defining what is meant by recent (the last 5-10 years) and what is considered interesting (what she personally finds interesting), in what follow...

Some highlights from the annual IATEFL conference, which took place in Belfast on 17-20 May The first post-pandemic 'in-person' IATEFL conference saw a slight dip in attendance figures – about 1600 delegates compared to the pre-pandemic figures of nearly 2500 attendees – but it didn't detract from the electric atmosphere, which was largely due to the ability to interact face-to-face again. Indeed, I didn't see members of my PLN for three long years! Between networking and catching up with friends and colleagues I managed to see some sessions. Here are some highlights. In her first IATEFL presentation, the proud IATEFL scholarship winner Rachel Tsateri shared a framework for planning collaborative and reflective online lessons she had devised during the period of emergency remote teaching. She referred to the framework – or at least the main portion of it – as a jigsaw-gloss . As the name suggests, the framework combines two collaborative lea...

A report from the 24th TESOL Macedonia-Thrace convention, which took place in Thessaloniki on 11-12 February Earlier this month I had the pleasure to attend and the honour to present, for the first time, at the TESOL Macedonia-Thrace international convention in Thessaloniki. While the best thing about the conference - like with most ELT conferences lately - was catching up with teachers from my PLN, making new friends and connecting with professionals from all over Europe, here are highlights from some of the sessions I attended. Plenary talks are not discussed in this post With its unusual title,  Joan Macphail and Angeliki Apostolidou's workshop Trendy Terminology in the Flipping Classroom! (shouldn't it be Flipped Classroom? I thought) really caught my eye. And it lived up to the expectation. The presenters had just come back from TESOL summit On the Future of TESOL Profession - an exclusive, by invitation-only event organised by TESOL International in Athens. Apparently, ...

A report from the International ETAI Conference "Engage Enhance Energize" which took place in Ashkelon, Israel, between 4 and 6 July 2016 When Naomi Epstein asked everyone who was planning to attend and present at ETAI 2014 Summer conference to sum up their teaching career and life in seven words, I wrote “Let’s put the L back in ELT” as my 7-word bio . Nobody seemed to mind or make a big deal. This is unlike LexicalLab 's similar-sounding strap-line "Putting the Language back into Language Teaching" which has drawn criticism from some who found it arrogant and insulting.   This year’s International ETAI conference  really put Language back into ELT. It was truly one of the best ELT conferences I’ve ever been to (but then I’m biased because I was one of the conveners). With a wide variety of talks, workshops, forums and symposia, the topics ranged from energizing Business English students with exciting activities to promoting learner engagement through literatu...

Rod Ellis presenting While in Toronto for TESOL 2015 convention  last month, I also attended - for the first time - the AAAL (American Association of Applied Linguistics) 2015 conference . The annual AAAL conference is conveniently held right before TESOL which gives ELT professionals travelling from all corners of the world an opportunity to attend both events back to back: the more classroom-oriented TESOL and its more highbrow cousin AAAL. Here are some highlights: Good news for incidental vocabulary acquisition Speaker: Rod Ellis , University of Auckland Renowned applied linguist Rod Ellis described an experiment he conducted with his PhD student to see whether students can pick up new vocabulary while listening. The answer is yes. Although relative gains (in receptive knowledge) were small, repeated listening (3 times) had an overall positive effect. As if anticipating an argument from the audience that repeating a listening task might seem as unauthentic, Ellis defended the ...

Image by @sandymillin via eltpics on Flickr For the first time since it was last held in Harrogate (2010), I didn’t go to the annual IATEFL conference this year and - like thousands of other English teachers who couldn’t afford to go to the largest EFL conference in the world - settled in comfortably in front of my computer to watch it online. All plenary talks and selected presentations are streamed live on the IATEFL online website thanks to the partnership between IATEFL and the British Council. I was particularly looking forward to the talks by Prof Michael Hoey on 4 April ( "Old approaches, new perspectives" - click HERE to watch the recording) and Prof Sugata Mitra on 5 April ( "The future of learning"- click HERE for the recording) and highly recommended them to all my students (teacher candidates). With Prof M. Hoey at the Lexical Conference in London, May 2013 (Photo by Ela Wassel) Michael Hoey's theory of lexical priming, which grew out of his work...

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 inspi...