I only spent half a day at the conference as I had planned for a quick trip to see my mum in Manchester before the working week starts again.
This morning's plenary session was given by Letizia Cinganotto, who summarised some of the recent developments in ELT as well as teaching other languages (LOTE, languages other than English). This acronym is commonly used in Italy but not elsewhere. Despite the clarity of the surrounding context, I suspect that some in the audience might not understand what LOTE stands for and would therefore benefit from a brief explanation. Having said that, one theme that emerged from her talk was the shift towards pluralism in language teaching and learning. In addition to her listing the approaches and the competencies already familiar among the ELT circles, she mentioned several classroom projects under 'plural-lingual' approaches with which her university in Siena had experimented in different countries. She argued against monolingualism and suggested a change of our mindset away from monolingual perspectives. Finally, she made a reference to the PISA 2025 Assessment Framework, which aims to include 'plural-lingualism' as one of the key competencies.
Marianne Jones shared her experiences of dealing with emergent language under the following three approaches/methods: weak-end TBL, strong-end TBL and Dogme. She used a fitting analogy of 'chips' for the target language and 'mayonnaise' for the emergent language. (I personally like salt and vinegar in real life.) She walked the audience through a sample task under each of the two TBL lesson frameworks, explaining her criteria for responding to her students' emergent language: 1) errors leading to miscommunication (i.e. communication breakdown); 2) the lack of 'task'-specific language. Finally, she invited teachers to consider their own filters when it comes to the achievement of learning aims in a lesson. This affects the way in which teachers respond to their students' emergent language in the classroom, if at all. On a personal note, having experimented with all of the above approaches extensively, it was an excellent opportunity for me to compare notes with her. I also found out she had worked as an English language teacher in Rome, Italy, whereas I am based in Milan.