Accademia Britannica International House 50th Anniversary Conference, Rome, 22-23 October, 2010

DAY TWO

What a GREAT day! I think I enjoyed it even more than yesterday. I'm looking back over the programme, and I think the presentation I enjoyed the most was "CLIL - Herstory", by Deborah Withworth and Jo Glaiser, both of   Accademia Britannica International House. As has long been noted, text books to tend to focus on HIS-tory, with only token females (Amelia Earhart? Marie Curie?) appearing now and again - and those tending to be white and European. The presentation began with an exercise for students - nine women from history, of different cultures and colours. I felt ashamed that I knew only two of them - but I wasn't alone. We were then given the names of the women, and the countries, and had to match them to the pictures. I recognised more at this stage. The women were Rosa Parks, Ci Xi, Pocahontas, Anita Garabaldi, Truganini, Miriam Makeba, Aung San Suu Kyi, Jacqueline du Pré and Hypatia. We then were given a list of what they were famous for, and had to match again. The task then focused in on Jacqueline du Pré, with a listening (audio/video) taken from youtube, with some questions for the first listening, then a braille-coded gap-fill type exercise, where we had to reconstruct the text (listening). A very clear lesson plan.
We were then shown how to do something similar with a reading text about Truganini.
This was such a valuable presentation as it reinforced what I'd learned while doing the CELTYL - when teaching our young learners (or anyone, really), it pays to be creative with materials, instead of relying on the text book.

Jeremy Harmer spoke again this morning (and autographed my copy of The Practice of English Language Teaching! I'm such an ELT groupie!). His presentation was based on a series of short videos he'd made using a flip-cam. At several different ELT conferences, he'd asked teachers to talk about a successful lesson they'd taught recently, and we used their responses to think about the beliefs we bring to our own teaching.

There were two presentations in praise of the IWB (interactive white board) again - I even got to try one out! Yes, I want one. As with any tool, they don't work by themselves. The teacher still needs to put in the time for preparation, perhaps even more time than before, at least at the beginning. It seems that they might take some getting used to. You have to think about where you stand, so you don't block the beam, and you have to write very neatly on the board. That being said...I STILL WANT ONE!

The after lunch speaker, Paul Roberts, from the Centre for English Language Teaching at the University of York, offered a theoretical presentation entitled "Fixed Standards and Language Flows" which raised questions about how the type of English we teach our students. He talked about problems he has had with groups of students from different cultural backgrounds trying to negotiate and make decisions in English. One culture's way of showing respect may be another's way of showing disrespect - so are we trying to teach a "culture" while we teach a language? He ended with  two tentative conclusions and a question...
"Fixed standards may only be slightly relevant."
"Native speakers are probably irrelevant."
"Where are the new teaching materials?"

And I will leave you to ponder those while I make my way to bed.