Conference-Reports

These reports are from presentations and talks we have attended and are intended to let you know what was going on at various conferences if you weren't able to attend yourself.

TESOL France: Tom Farrell on reflective practice

Blog - hancockmcdonald.com/blog/1

The mid-conference plenary from Tom Farrell was a reflection on reflective practice. To begin with, Tom distinguished reflection-in-action – split second reflections made during the course of an activity; reflection-on-action – evaluating an action after the fact, and reflection-for-action – evaluating options for possible future improvements.

TESOL France: Gabriel Diaz Maggioli on effecting change

Blog - hancockmcdonald.com/blog/1

The thrust of the opening plenary from Gabriel Diaz Maggioli was neatly summed up in his title, 'Change is Good: You go first'. In other words, while most teachers will agree that there is room for improvement or change, it's easier said than done.

GRETA Granada (Spain): Review of conference

 - hancockmcdonald.com/blog/archive/201210

DIGESTED READ

A conference truly focused on the pressing current concerns of local teachers, particularly the implementation of CLIL/bilingual programmes in schools.

THE EVENT

GRETA Granada (Spain): Round Table on Bilingualism

 - hancockmcdonald.com/blog/archive/201210

Moderator: Antonio Vicente Casas Pedrosa

Participants: María Jesús Fregols, Diana Hicks, Marisa Pérez Cañado, Victor Pavón, Natividad Martínez Marin

GRETA Granada (Spain): María Martínez Lirola on teaching writing with genre awareness

 - hancockmcdonald.com/blog/archive/201210

María, who is a professor at the University of Alicante, began by asking the participants whether they had had explicit instruction in genre during their schooling. The answer for everybody was no. At school, we tend to have experience only of essay writing, with no awareness that there are many different genres of text, nor of how context and purpose shape the structure of these.

GRETA Granada (Spain): Diana Hicks on thinking skills

 - hancockmcdonald.com/blog/archive/201210

(Photo: Greta president Charo Reyes - right - introduces Diana Hicks) Diana began her thought-provoking session with the observation that, although education involves preparing people for the future, many pronouncements on the topic of education are dressed in nostalgic references to golden times past – phrases like “Back to Basics”, a reference to a British programme of putting more e

Simon Andrewes on new needs in the EFL classroom.

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 - hancockmcdonald.com/blog/archive/201210

Simon posited that, by comparing traditional and ‘newer’ course book series, we can identify a tangible shift from what he termed ‘classical communicative language teaching’ to ‘post-communicative language teaching’.

GRETA Granada (Spain): Christopher Roland on discipline

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Christopher opened the session by imploring management to make sure that the spirit of an institution is behind its teachers so they know they have supported when it comes to issues of discipline. He then gave an entertaining and thought-provoking plenary on how to deal with challenging teaching situations and defuse tension in classrooms with primary, teenager or adult students.

GRETA Granada (Spain): Victor Pavón on the use of mother tongue in CLIL

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 - hancockmcdonald.com/blog/archive/201210

Victor began by projecting articles from the press highlighting the benefits of multilingualism.  Articles quoting research showing that bilinguals are smarter, for example. He pointed out that the benefits can be classified into two kinds: a. social advantages, b. cognitive advantages. Victor went on to list 8 types/models of bilingual education, one of which was called “Transitional”.

GRETA Granada: María Jesús Páramo Gutiérrez and Anthony Bruton on vocabulary uptake from reading.

Blog - hancockmcdonald.com/blog/66

This was very much a participative workshop session, based on classroom research material being developed by Mª Jesús. We began with group discussions on the importance of vocabulary and the most effective methods of learning it. Suggestions included relevance and motivation, repeated exposure, visual support, richness of context and test washback.

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