IATEFL 2014: Day One Report

Okay these are my first day thoughts on IATEFL conference. Please note that I got up very early to come yesterday and while I have made some notes on the day the quality of them deteriorated quite badly as we got towards the close of play. So my reflections are a little more focused at the beginning of the day and somewhat less towards the end.

Random thoughts on arrival well, Harrogate - in the words of a friend of mine who I asked about the place - is ‘near Leeds and damn posh’, very accurate description (especially the bit about being near Leeds).

they really love their circular motif at the centre

The conference centre? Confusing. I like the circular walkways down the centre, reminds me a little bit of Minority Report, sadly the technology hasn't quite caught up to that famous film, as usual being able to provide wireless internet to reasonably large group of people seems impossible for conference organisers. And it’s tricky to find session rooms, the conference map seem to be a design of an extraterrestrial ship from Alien 4, very pretty but not massively helpful in locating anything.

David Graddol on English and Economic Development was a risky choice for an opening plenary presentation but a good one. Graddol discussed his research into the future of English particularly focusing on the economic development and how that affects different countries around the world. Lots of intriguing insights. For me the one that blew my mind was this idea that in a lot of countries employers have little or no use for students at roughly intermediate level of English. They generally want employees to have the most basic English to be able to to conduct most basic service interactions, or they need to have a much higher proficient level of English to do high-level jobs. 

Graddol bottom right, graph centre, he did like his graphs

My first real session was on English for Academic Purposes on Short Courses. Richard Hillman showed a variety of ways to make it less tedious and more engaging. He gave lots of practical classroom tips about how to make things like linking phrases and relative clauses the more interesting to students by getting them to relate them to their own situation and their own lives. To me as an EAP teacher there perhaps wasn't huge amounts here but some of the activities I would definitely take back and try my classroom.

Fun consequences activity from Richard Hillman

Loved the next presentation, which was about Project-Based Learning in the ESL classroom by Aysen Gilroy. She is based at a University in the United Arab Emirates and the idea was give students both the academic, linguistic and digital skills they need to cope at university. they have implemented project-based learning by getting students engage in multistage projects using a variety of tools, for example getting them to create commercials through a short movie on a topic of their choosing. It doesn’t sound massively academic, but these projects were heavily guided and the assessment was clear and there was plenty of support for both students and teachers at each stage of the project. At the end the presenter showed uss one example of a students project, this wonderful advert that the students had created for a product they designed. You can see the potential here and this is something I'm going to take back to my own teaching context because I think this is something we need to be doing with our students. It's not enough to just equip them with language skills, they need to know how to integrate both language, digital and academic skills to make it possible to cope at university.

Details of one of the projects on Aysen's course

I went to see How to Publish High-Quality Apps by Jonathan Bygrave, though this is something of a misnomer as the conclusion at the end was that he didn't manage to publish any high-quality apps! Still, it was an entertaining romp through the procedure and the peaks and troughs and the pitfalls of trying to do this.

I was wilting a bit at this stage but still went along to see Nicky Hockly on Mobile Learning. Not much new I hadn’t seen before but as always she gives lots of practical tips for helping integrate mobile learning into the classroom the particular this idea that mobile learning’s not just about ESL/EFL apps, it's about repurposing generic apps to use them in the classroom for example getting students to use their phone’s camera to take pictures and share with each other to personalise their learning and share personal information about each other.

Last session, went to see Chris Baldwin giving a Whirlwind Tour of Technology, notes are pretty sketchy for this one, only ‘no internet’ (for him), ‘tired’ (for me) ‘good ideas’ (for him, I’m assuming, I rarely have any of those). 

Motivating students through website creation

Over the last term I’ve been teaching an options class called English through Technology. The purpose of the course is to combine straightforward English language learning with elements of digital literacy relevant for our students future studies at university. So, for example, students have been learning how to use different presentation software, how to create videos and edit them, how to use different search engines, and these are all designed to give them the skills necessary to cope with life when they take up their place in their departments.

As we got near the end of the course I wanted them to work on a project that would allow them to combine a lot of these skills and also to produce something which was real and meaningful for both them and would have an audience beyond the classroom. We came up with the idea of creating a website for future students of our school. The idea would be to provide a real and honest guide from current students giving information to future students about all aspects of life in Sheffield and the school. This was partially inspired by an award-winning project from a colleague of mine called Gary Wood, who got his first-year linguistics students to create a site for future undergraduates.

The homepage of our website

We started off by talking about what kinds of general topics would be relevant for the students. They came up with some general topics such as transport, family life, studies etc and then we looked at these in more detail to come up with specific areas for each of these topics. We then assign different people different areas to work on, so they worked in pairs or groups and got down to work

In terms of of the technical side of creating the website, we decided to use Google Sites. There were two reasons for this: firstly, they are available through their university accounts, so it was easy to access and use them. Secondly, they are very simple to use, they don't require any great programming knowledge, and students can just use the interface to edit and create their pages. This allowed them to spend more time focusing on the content and the writing of the webpages rather than the technical side of creating them. 

A webpage giving info about children's education

The response from the class to this task has been incredible. Over the last three weeks they have worked almost constantly on this website. My role has been just to guide them, give them ideas and occasionally check what they'd written. Most of the work has been done by them, even down to the design of the site logo. And the level of engagement has been incredible. During the lesson there is almost no time when the students concentration slips, they are constantly engaged, talking, thinking, researching, or doing something connected to the website, something I rarely see in my ‘normal’ classes. They’ve been working on the project outside of the lessons making and editing videos. I have had very little input on what they had to do, I've given them some small technical help, and some occasional structural or stylistic help with the language.

They interviewed and videoed teachers for the website

What this experiment showed me was the value of giving students real and meaningful tasks to do. This website will be sent to future students and I think that feeling of having a real audience is very motivating for students. I think this kind of project work - properly supervised and structured - can be a tremendous tool for motivating students to be creative with the language.