Humor4u

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...

Penny Ur was awarded an OBE (Officer of the Order of the British Empire ) for services to English Language Teaching earlier this year and as my last gig for the British Council I organised an event in her honour at the annual summer  ETAI conference in Jerusalem. Knowing that events of this kind can easily slide into a sentimental outpouring of endless congratulations and knowing that Penny is not the kind of person who would like that, we were keen to keep it professional, elegant and not too gooey (Amanda Caplan, personal communication, 22 March 2013). The event opened with footage from Windsor Castle showing Penny receive her award from the Queen. At this point, quite unexpectedly, the packed house broke into a rapturous applause. We wanted to avoid soppiness but this was indeed very emotional and I swear quite a few of us had tears in our eyes. After the standing ovation had subsided, Caron Sethill, Deputy Director of the British Council Israel officially opened the event wi...

Yesterday I completed the online feedback questionnaire for the IATEFL 2013 conference, which took place earlier this month in Liverpool , and, inevitably, started thinking back to the conference. It was the fourth IATEFL conference I've attended - superbly organised as ever - and probably the most intense one. Whether it was the fact that my hotel was not so close to the venue or the number of sessions on offer every day or the number of sessions I wanted to go to every day – but at the end of the week I was absolutely exhausted. New format   I don't know whether the new format –  30 minutes for talks, 45 minutes for workshops – is the way to go. I felt 30 minutes presentations (including mine) were somewhat rushed while 45-minute workshops didn't have anything workshop-y about them. I stupidly put myself down for a talk and had to cut my presentation by half from its original 60 minute length - as it was given at TESOL France 2012. To do so I had to get rid of all ...

A summary of the closing plenary (Mis)-Applied Linguistics at the TESOL France colloquium on 18 November 2012 Chia explaining 'stealth pair work' Chia Suan Chong started her plenary at the 31 st annual TESOL France colloquium by warning us there would be 65 slides in her PowerPoint and introducing the concept of stealth pair work – speaking quietly, in a muted voice with a person sitting next to you. Considering the fact the audience consisted of about 200 ELT teachers, this wasn't an easy task. I had been really looking forward to this talk, so I was prepared to shut up for 60 minutes. I had expected Chia to debunk ELT myths and show how certain findings of applied linguistics research have been misapplied in ELT. Instead, the talk went in a different direction as Chia took us on a journey through the history of ELT. From all translation to no translation Her colourful account of different methodologies started from the Grammar Translation method. According to this oldes...