CPD Opportunities Autumn 2024

 Innovate ELT online conference 2020

Selections from Innovate ELT online 2020

At last year’s Innovate conference, in his mini-plenary from the wall in the Oxford TEFL garden, Daniel Barber declared a climate emergency in the ELT industry. This declaration led to the creation of ELT Footprint, https://eltfootprint.org/, an online community which promotes discussion and action on climate change, nominated for the British Council’s ‘ELTons’ award for Innovation in Teacher Resources. Continuing the call for action, this year’s online version of the Innovate ELT conference was based around the theme ‘Be part of the solution’ and a large number of talks and presentations dealt with topics related to the environment and sustainability

This post consists of summaries of talks that I found particularly useful, thought-provoking or memorable for various reasons. It is not possible to include summaries of all the talks I attended, as I don’t want to test your patience, so what follows is a highly personal and unscientific selection.

Day 1 Friday 18th September

After an introduction by the director of Oxford TEFL, Duncan Foord, Innovate 2020 kicked off in established Innovate style with a couple of mini-plenaries. Christopher Graham @christophergrahamelt, one of the founders of ELT Footprint, talked about ‘Tracking our Footsteps’ looking back at progress and developments over the last year. In the next mini-plenary ‘Why you should be speaking instead of listening to me’ Teresa Bestwick, @TeresaBestwick discussed imposter syndrome and why we should value ourselves as ELT professionals.

Both speakers have summarized these talks themselves far better than I ever could on their respective blogs here (Chris)

https://eltfootprint.org/after-the-plague-elt-post-covid/

and here (Teresa)

https://viewsfromthewhiteboard.edublogs.org/2020/09/21/the-imposter-phenomenon/

Nicola Meldrum and Mark McKinnon

Taking aim: zeroing in on a great lesson

In this talk, Nicola and mark proposed a structure for lesson design based on communicative tasks. They began by defining the characteristics of an ‘Authentic Task’:

1. …has a clear communicative goal. Instructions include verbs such as, describe rank, persuade, agree, solve, analyse, conclude, etc.

2. …includes information and/or opinion gap between speakers.

3. …relates to ‘real life’.

4. …focuses on meaning rather than form.

5. …has sufficient and appropriate cognitive complexity to challenge learners.

6. …provides opportunities to negotiate meaning.

Using tasks of this type, they propose STC (Supportive Task Cycle) as an alternative to the PPP (Presentation, Practice, Production) model. In STCs, learners should be given opportunities to Notice, Analyse and Apply the target language:

The following three columns are suggestions for promoting noticing (red), target for analysis (blue) and practice/application (green)

Nicola and Mark have observed teachers putting this task cycle into practice in online training programmes. Teachers tend to focus predominantly on Form and Meaning, while Function, Pronunciation and Register are often neglected.

The presenters are fond of acronymns. New to me in this talk were TLT – Teacher Listening Time and FFP – Feedback Focused Planning, which basically involves anticipating the types of problems learners will have and incorporating into the lesson plan opportunities for them to use the language again – but better.

The format and length of this talk did not allow time to answer some of the inevitable questions raised on Twitter, for example: How are tasks selected and designed; What constitutes TL? Does achievement of communicative goal take precedence over language used to complete the task? I suspect Nicola and Mark cover these areas within their training courses, but there certainly seems to be an appetite for a follow-up talk.

Day 2 Saturday 19th September

Ceri Jones
Plenary - Lockdown and Learning Curves

Ceri Jones, trainer, materials writer and one of the founders of ELT footprint gave the second mini-plenary on Saturday and managed to pack a great deal of content into her 10-minute slot. She introduced the talk with some sobering statistics about education during the pandemic:

Ceri continued by highlighting how the Digital Divide has been brought into stark relief by the current situation:

More than the loss of school hours and educational content, the loss of human contact is probably the biggest impact of the pandemic.

She concluded with possibly most repeated takeaway message of the conference overall:

'If there is a solution, it's human'.

Fiona Mauchline 
The Eyes Have It

The conference organisers kept Fiona busy on the second day of the conference. Her opening plenary From the front: faces, hearts and voices managed to touch on subjects as diverse as quantum physics and modern history.

Her second session of the day was a highly interactive and practical workshop on how knowledge about how the brain interprets visual information can help us to create effective classroom activities.

The session opened with this intro. Fiona showed us the following picture of six different faces. Choosing one, she elicited adjectives of personality to describe that person. She then revealed the names of six different professions and asked us to match the faces to the jobs: pilot, ballet dancer, midwife, police officer, fire fighter, anaesthetist.

Obviously, this big reveal (below) leads neatly into a discussion of gender and racial stereotypes:

This activity also has a nice little twist. The colours used to frame the faces in the first slide (and block out any clues) also help to jog visual memory. Later on in the talk, Fiona tested this by asking us if we could remember where on the slide the woman in ‘green’ had been situated, etc.

In another activity, Fiona flashed up the image below for a few seconds only. 

Afterwards, she asked us to describe details we remembered. Most people could remember details from the left side of the photo. Descriptions of the right hand side of the picture were sketchier: nobody noticed, for example, that Melania Trump was in the group on the right.

Apparently, for people in cultures who read from left to right, the focal point of an image should be on the right (and vice versa for readers of R-L languages), as can be seen in this public information poster, from a school In Oxford, published in different languages.

Professional photographers use knowledge of the way our eyes process an image to create a narrative. Fiona demonstrated this by showing a number of famous photos from recent news stories. One of them was this iconic image of the BLM protests.

In all the images, the ‘victim’ (usually a woman) is on the right of the shot, faced with (what appears to be) blocking, intimidation or attack from men on the left. Interestingly, if you flip the image R-L (below), the interpretation shifts subtly, as it appears that the riot police are retreating from the woman rather than moving towards her. 

In the next activity, Fiona discussed the use (and misuse) of colour in images. She asked us to study an image of four sisters in brightly-coloured saris for a few moments. Once the picture was taken away, we had to identify one of the sisters without using adjectives of colour. Harder than it sounds, this activity naturally required the use of comparative and superlative adjectives, as well as prepositions of place.

Colour is obviously also an issue for those who suffer from colour-blindness (1 in 12 men: 8% and 1 in 200 women). Fiona pointed out that black and white or muted images can be a far more successful prompt for any activity based on imagination, as they are less ‘cluttered’ and distracting.

Whichever image you choose, and however you choose to use it, Fiona recommends bearing this simple teaching checklist:

Follow Fiona on twitter @fionamau or read her blog http://macappella.wordpress.com/ 

She recommends using the photo archive ELT Pics: https://www.flickr.com/photos/eltpics/

Julie Moore

Changing Language for a Changing World

Julie @lexicojules on Twitter is a Freelance ELT materials developer and lexicographer, whose projects include the series of Collins’ dictionaries for learners of English. Most (if not all?) English language teachers have a touch of the ‘word nerd’ about them, so this was a particularly enjoyable talk about recent developments in English.

Needless to say, the current pandemic has had a considerable impact on the English language. Julie began her talk with some examples of 'Corona Vocabulary' (see slide below). While lexicographers need to wait to see if these new coinages will last the distance before including them in a dictionary, for a language class, this can be a fun, topical way to introduce concepts of English morphology.

She continued with examples of change in language use. In the last few years, the verb 'identify' has developed from having only transitive meaning to intransitive use. 'Identify as' race, gender, sexual orientation, activism, neural diversity, etc.

Corpus linguistics used to rely heavily on written records for analysis, as it is easier to process than spoken corpora. On the whole these samples were produced by educated professionals. However, the increase of language use on social media has blurred the boundaries between spoken and written language and opened a window on ‘ordinary language’. As Gretchen McCulloch states in Because Internet (2019), linguists now have access to ‘a vast sea of unedited, unfiltered words that might once have only been spoken’. 

Julie illustrated this with expressions serving pragmatic functions of interaction between speakers, transferred from spoken to written form, e.g. ‘I kid you not’ ‘You and me both) in the exchange below.

Also, unique to social media, abbreviations such as FYI, IMHO, have been shown to have an introductory function, easing interpersonal interaction, or to be related to tech e.g. 'to DM'.

Furthermore, the online world loves phrasal verbs. Julie reminded us of some recently added examples, pointing out that it seems strange to call these recent additions, as they are already so familiar.

For more by Julie, read more on her blog posts:

lexicoblog.blogspot.com

news.collinselt.com

or follow her on Twitter @lexicojules & @ELTjuleswords

Conclusion

iELT2020 managed to maintain many of the features that attendees are familiar with from previous conferences: the mini-plenaries, the Friday Night Quiz (it helps to have insider Oxford TEFL knowledge!) and the coffee breaks in the ‘garden’. While we are all missing the personal interaction with students, colleagues and peers in our professional lives, the online version of the conference used the Zoom platform and breakout rooms to allow us to get together and chat with old friends and new faces. Hats off to the volunteers who coordinated the technical side of the proceedings.