The Future of English Language Teaching Conference

Saturday 10 June, 2023

Current time in London (UK)

Please note: All breakout sessions are running on a first come, first served basis.

 

Breakout sessions 1

9:15 - 10:00 (UK time)

 

Select a breakout session below to reveal more details and to access the button to join.

 

For more then two decades, the trend in ESP course design and teaching materials has been towards target-situation driven ESP, with higher and higher levels of content derived from the learners’ specialisations being used in ESP teaching. This trend has resulted in a proliferation of commercially published textbooks aimed at a specific professional training markets and an uneasy balance in ESP courses between teaching content aimed at language development and hybrid content aimed to strengthen both language abilities and professional discourse capacity. This approach to ESP teaching has face validity and high credibility with many stakeholders, but are ESP learners actually being well-served by this trend?

 

This presentation will examine the advantages and potential drawbacks of narrow gage ESP course and materials design, where teaching targets, materials and tasks are heavily content-based, when applied to learner groups in contexts where English is not widely used outside of workplace or academic situations. Data from learners in a variety of specialisms (firefighting, nursing, tourism & hospitality, art & design) and text analyses of learner writing for ESP tasks designed to replicate target situation genres requiring atypical lexis and structure were used to assess the usefulness and effectiveness of highly specialised ESP teaching.

Results will help identify areas where content input is generative and areas of ‘ESP overreach’, where more generic language teaching targets may actually be more useful to the learners. This talk will be of interest to ESP teachers deciding how much specialist content to use in their teaching and teachers of work-place English working in an EFL context.  

 

Vicky Chan

 

Join

 

Very few of us working in the field of education would oppose the idea that involving students more actively in the learning process is beneficial because it increases engagement, promotes autonomy, and ensures deeper understanding of what is being learned. 

There is a noticeable shift from prioritising Assessment Of Learning (AoL), frequently used to measure students’ progress against a set of pre-determined curriculum outcomes, to integrating more Assessment For Learning (AfL) techniques, which seek to informally collect evidence of learning and re-adjust the process of teaching if this evidence shows that a different route to achieving learning objectives is needed, or that these learning objectives should be changed altogether. 

Self and peer assessment are cornerstones of AfL because they allow students to take ownership of evaluating their progress. Both types of assessments are inherent in human nature (who would deny that most people can’t help comparing themselves to others while being highly critical of their own actions) and both take time and effort to develop if we want to move beyond simply being critical and instead actively set goals for improvement. With this in mind, how do we go about cultivating these complex skills in younger primary students without making the process overly cumbersome and boring?

 

Anna Bejshovcova

 

Join

This study explores the use of short films in Multicultural Literature course among TESL teacher candidates at one Institute of Teacher Education (ITE) in Malaysia. Applying film production in the course, teacher candidates engaged themselves in producing short films; they created a plan, wrote a script, selected collaboration, practiced and brainstormed steps, filmed, edited, and produced the works.

Adopting a qualitative research design, the researcher conducted analyses of five short films produced by teacher candidates. The short films were analyzed using a priori coding of the five multicultural literature elements. As induced from the findings, teacher candidates not only gained ability in short film production but also made thoughtful content in the short films. These positive results indicate that using short films in Multicultural Literature course is beneficial where teacher candidates emotionally observe, empathize with and act in ways that may influence how they see themselves and the culture in which they live. Teacher candidates are hoped to experience positive change in their own world thus extend it to their future pupils via the provision of English language instruction, which will be tailored to be more equitable for all pupils in primary ESL classrooms nationwide.

 

Kee Li Li

 

Join

Teacher coaching and mentoring is a powerful tool for improving teacher practice. By providing targeted feedback, personalized support, and ongoing opportunities for learning and growth, coaching/ mentoring can help teachers to become more conscious educators, improve sudent outcomes, and become companions to their learning. The objective of this practical webinar is to look into why mentoring teachers can be of great help, and to understand how observation and feedback can be a game changer for many teachers. We will also look into techniques that help teachers overcome challenges when it comes to managing the classroom and the learning of a foreign language.

The content of the workshop comes from over 15 years of experience in mentoring teachers across different learning settings.

 

Lola Reeves Garay

 

Join

This eminently practical workshop aims to explore the ever-increasing range of generative AI (GenAI) tools as a means of pedagogical enhancement in Teacher Education. Amidst the present climate of uncertainty, anguish and astonishment amongst key stakeholders fuelled by the mediatic doomsday predictions for education which intensify with every startingly swift Gen AI update, the speakers aim to demonstrate ways in which such developments can be used to the teacher’s advantage particularly in the language learning classroom.

After a brief theoretical overview on the current state of play in scholarship and praxis, participants will be invited to get to grips with some of the other titular fantastic beasts on offer and engage in a range of different activities together to experience first hand the potential benefits of such tools for teaching practice from pedagogical innovation to materials creation. The application of GenAI to personalise not only teaching materials but the entire didactic experience in function of individual learner needs and difficulties will be explored together with tools which enable practically effortless learner data analysis and subsequent evidence-informed pedagogical approach implementation in a multitude of diverse learning contexts.

Furthermore, hands on experience in the creation of lesson plans, bespoke communicative and integrated skills learning materials elaboration and uses for assessment will also be offered to workshop participants. Throughout the workshop participants will be asked to take a critical stance on the Gen AI-outcomes of the interactive practical activities and their validity for Teacher Education; they will thus leave with practical ideas and strategies which they may be able to integrate in their own teaching practice going forward. The workshop will conclude with a reflective discussion on the potential benefits and shortcomings of Gen AI for Teacher Education and the developing role of the teaching practitioner in this new landscape. 

 

Peter Bannister

Dr Alexandra Santamaría Urbieta

Dr Elena Alcalde Peñalver

 

Join