IATEFL Birmingham 2016: What I missed

I was very sorry to miss these presentations, but at a conference like this there will inevitably be some sessions that you can’t get to. Luckily, the online conference has filled in a couple of the gaps for me.

Creating classroom materials

John Hughes is a teacher trainer and materials writer who has a useful blog and has also written the excellent ETpedia book [affiliate link]. He spoke about visual literacy in creating classroom materials.

Barefoot with beginners

Ceri Jones has an excellent blog, and I’ve enjoyed reading her ‘Barefoot with beginners‘ series. Here she talks about the process in more detail:

Here are some tweets from Ceri’s talk:

Ceri Jones uses @SoundCloud for pronunciation models for her beginners #elt#iatefl@viniciuslemos#ctjiatefl

— Clarissa Bezerra (@Clarissamfb) April 16, 2016

 

Ceri Jones’ lesson summaries contained the very language taught in narrative of the lesson itself #metacognitive#IATEFL@viniciuslemos

— Clarissa Bezerra (@Clarissamfb) April 16, 2016

 

Ceri Jones looked back w ss to the learning, reflecting on what ss were happy w, identify areas 4 develop #IATEFLpic.twitter.com/IRMcN8ZYgw

— Clarissa Bezerra (@Clarissamfb) April 16, 2016

 

Ceri Jones listening to ss and their perceptions of their learning as a map to feed learning forward #IATEFL#hackefl#ctjiatefl

— Clarissa Bezerra (@Clarissamfb) April 16, 2016

 

English for the Zombie Apocalypse

English for the Zombie Apocalypse might sound like a crazy topic, but the idea behind Lindsay Clandfield and Robert Campbell’s book from the round is to show how functional language can be interested in an entertaining way, tapping into the current fashion for zombies. I really wish I could have been to the session, as by all accounts it was a lot of fun! Lindsay speaks about the book in the interview below, and you can also read a review of it by David Dodgson.

These too…

Also high up on my wishlist were:

• Using images to engage and motivate the ‘multiple-stimuli generation’ (Fiona Mauchline)
  Fiona is one of my fellow eltpics curators and I’m pretty sure there would have been some familiar images in there, plus Fiona always has great ideas about how to work with teenagers (like the ones from the MaWSIG pre-conference event)
• Using smartphones to let our learners tell us what they think (Tilly Harrison)
  After her session, we discussed Kahoot (which I love) and Socrative (which I’ve heard of but never used), and she also recommended NearPod (which was new to me). I’d like to have seen how she suggested using these in the classroom.
• Practical writing tips for Arabic learners (Emina Tuzovic)
  I don’t teach Arabic learners any more, but I think Emina’s tips are also useful for anyone teaching students with low levels of literacy. She wrote a very good guest post a couple of years ago, and will hopefully be following that up soon 🙂
• How to speak British (Martyn Ford)
  Because I love these postcards 🙂 [affiliate link] and I wanted to hear more from one of the men who created them. I’d often wondered if one of them was an English teacher!
  

General tweets from other people

Throughout the conference, I always retweet anything I think is interesting from other tweeters. In no particular order, here is a selection of those tweets  which don’t fit into the topics of any other my other posts.

Sample pages of our new methodology book Teaching Lexically now up online: https://t.co/f8SPQWB4gJ

— hugh dellar (@hughdellar) April 11, 2016

 

@SophiaMav talks about Edmodo #iatefl2016 #pce #ltsig #yltsig #iatefl pic.twitter.com/9GLs2PCqML

— Angelos Bollas (@angelos_bollas) April 12, 2016

(I love Edmodo, though I haven’t used it for a while – thanks for the reminder Angelos and Sophia!)

 

An interesting question from @hughdellar ‘at what point do super-fluent second language speakers become considered bilingual?’ #IATEFL

— Rachel Daw (@racheldaw18) April 13, 2016

 

#noticing examples for outside the classroom. Encourage students to notice for themselves #iatefl2016pic.twitter.com/9BNt85guDo

— Gemma Young (@GemmaKoo) April 14, 2016

 

True test of intelligence… Is how we behave when we don’t know the answer! John holt #iatefl#iatefl2016

— Sarah Caton (@sarahcaton66) April 14, 2016

 

McCarthy: 4-word chunks in ACAD SPOKEN corpus #IATEFLpic.twitter.com/qFpoQb7ias

— Dan Ruelle (@danrmitvn) April 15, 2016

 

#iatefl#oupelt Nina Prentice: students are struggling with reading, they don’t don’t have fluency or automaticity.

— Naomi Moir (@naomi_moir) April 16, 2016

 

#iatefl#oupelt Nina Prentice: average reading speeds L1 & L2. Reading at abt 180 words per minute is pleasurable. pic.twitter.com/ledFoV9rWL

— Naomi Moir (@naomi_moir) April 16, 2016

 

Tom looks at what technology teachers currently use in class #iatefl2016pic.twitter.com/Eo61FS14CI

— macmillanelt (@MacmillanELT) April 16, 2016

 

How would you respond critically to recent quotes? Gr8 task to generate authentic critical lang. #iatefl#tleappic.twitter.com/uuUiDWdWbc

— Tyson Seburn (@seburnt) April 16, 2016

 

Tweets on management

How managers become managers. Click on the tweet to see the ones before and after:

@IATEFL_LAMSIG#iatefl2016#IATEFL management: innate qualities + education + learning on the job

— Rachael TESOL (@RachaelTESOL) April 15, 2016

 

Managers need more development opportunities and support! Turn to @LAMSIG! #iatefl2016#IATEFL

— lorainekennedy (@lorainekennedy) April 15, 2016

 

Thought provoking perspective #IATEFL#iatefl2016@IATEFL_LAMSIGpic.twitter.com/hGYi34ENhj

— Rachael TESOL (@RachaelTESOL) April 15, 2016

 

@IATEFL_LAMSIG#iatefl2016#IATEFLpic.twitter.com/RS6DiMOUmO

— Rachael TESOL (@RachaelTESOL) April 15, 2016

 

Take @BrunoLeys ‘s word for it ….. #iateflpic.twitter.com/T7au0yUy6F

— JorisEAL (@JorisEAL) April 15, 2016

 

In case you need more…

As Lizzie Pinard does every year, she has put together a summary of all of her IATEFL 2016 posts, this time in enjoyable narrative form. It includes a few talks I wanted to go to but couldn’t, most of which I’ve linked to in my post ‘We’re all teachers’. The only other one I didn’t make it to was What makes an outstanding ELT coursebook? The publisher’s perspective (Heather Buchanan and Julie Norton), but if you’re interested in English for Academic Purposes you’ll find a lot more there.

British Council recorded the plenaries, 37 conference sessions and over 50 interviews and made them available for the 10th year in a row – great work! In addition, all of the Cambridge English talks were recorded and are available for you to watch. Some presenters also took recordings into their own hands. Jaime Miller shared her presentation How to Fix Fossilized Errors, and you can see a recording of my time management presentation in my post about it.