Graham began with the premise, based on the work of Andrei Aleinkov (1989), that creative pedagogy leads to motivation and promotes lifelong learning. It leads to fluency of idea generation, flexibility, originality and elaboration (building new ideas on what is already known).
Robin Walker (read our review of his latest book here) began by positing 3 stages in acquiring pronunciation: 1. the cognitive stage - becoming aware of a feature; 2. the associative stage - training yourself to be able to deal with the feature; 3.
Hakan Senturk began his presentation with a contextualization of his ideas within the development of the Dogme movement. He traced the origin of Dogme to Scott Thornbury’s call for a more conversation-driven materials-light approach to teaching which focuses on language that naturally emerges in the lesson rather than a pre-conceived syllabus as laid down by a coursebook.
Leo Selivan’s presentation was founded on the insight that synonymy in English can usually be traced to the hybrid history of the language. In most synonymous pairs, one member of the pair can trace its history to Germanic influence, and the other, to Latinate influence. An example of the might be ‘buy’ and ‘purchase’.
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’.
Can pedigree lion pamper kitekats? In adverts, brand names, slogans, strap lines – English is all around us in Poland, but we barely notice it or question what it means. Maria Heizner makes the point that this is a very rich resource, and that by focusing on it, learners can discover that they already know many English words without even realising it.
