After my first IATEFL conference in Brighton last year, I knew what to expect with the timetable and the event format of Edinburgh 2025. It was lovely to visit the capital of Scotland again after my last day trip in 2007 or 2008. The heatwave caught me by surprise - it was 19 degrees in early April, which is virtually summer for me. As one of my British Council colleagues says, it's always sunny in Bonnie Scotland!
I joined the conference from Day 2 afternoon as I had examining work in Italy in the days running up to it. Here are the notes on the sessions I attended at the conference:
Forum on translanguaging pedagogy for multilingual learners in global contexts
I wanted to learn more about plurilingualism as this is one of the current hot topics in ELT. At the forum on translanguaging, Lina Mukhopadhyay reported on a classroom research project in low-resource primary schools in India. This project was sponsored by the British Council and conducted by researchers from the University of Cambridge. Lina mentioned that monolingual pedagogy, such as English as a Medium for Instruction (EMI), is very challenging as the students in that part of India speak different first languages and grow up in multilingual neighbourhoods.
The aim of the classroom research project was to discover whether translanguaging, or a multi-/plurilingual approach, would enhance the students' reading comprehension skills. To this end, expository texts were preferred over narrative texts as the latter type of text usually has a predictable textual structure, hence an unreliable instrument for measuring reading skills in this context. Lina then recounted the procedure for using a plurilingual approach to developing reading skills:
Planning
- Step 1 - the teacher carries out a lexical analysis of the text to identify any 'blocking' vocabulary.
- Step 2 - the teacher writes bi-/multilingual instructions for the reading tasks.
Teaching
- Step 3 - pre-task discussion with pictures of the 'blocking' vocabulary as prompts to 'enhance lexical coverage' (breadth or range)
- Step 4 - reading tasks, e.g. comprehension questions, vocabulary tasks to 'enhance lexical depth', etc.
- Step 5 - post-task discussion about the text
Lina also mentioned some scaffolding tools that are compatible with a multi-/plurilingual approach to teaching and learning, including 1) multilingual glossaries, 2) personal vocabulary banks (with 'words in English', 'example of use', and 'words in another language'), and 3) mediation of the students' ideas in the first language by the teacher (i.e. translating such ideas into English) in discussion tasks.
The result of this preliminary project, however, is inconclusive as the controlled group (monolingual pedagogy) actually performed better than the experimental group (multi-/plurilingual pedagogy). Only 25-30% of the students in the controlled group exhibited issues in their reading comprehension, whereas 45% of those in the experimental group did. Lina argued that the reason behind the contradictory result was that the students in the controlled group came from more privileged social backgrounds.
Forum on social and emotional learning: insights, challenges, and implementation (SEL)
After the forum on translanguaging, I joined the second half of the forum on Social-Emotional Learning (SEL), at which Sanaa Makhlouf identified some overlaps between five SEL competencies and four CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) competencies. She showed us some lesson activities that integrate both teaching methods/approaches:
- researching and spoken presentations about Nobel Prize winners
- spoken presentations on the theme of 'I understand each other'
- spoken presentations or role play on the theme of emotional intelligence (EQ)
- mindfulness activity with self-awareness (SEL competency) - writing a list of own emotions
While SEL is said to benefit the students' academic success and enable them to build meaningful relationships, Sanna suggested that this method also requires a change of mindset on the teacher's part. Leticia Moraes further pointed out that teachers are role models in the classroom, especially in Young Learner (YL) classes, as children often mirror adults' actions and behaviour. In terms of teaching techniques, she suggested that students be given choice in their learning process, e.g. the ability to choose between two options of a task.
Responding to a question from the audience, the panel of speakers, which included Suha Khader, pointed out that teachers should take cultural differences into account when integrating Social-Emotional Learning into the classroom. For example, teachers should look out for any students who, due to their personal background or belief, may not initially feel comfortable with group work.
Learners' video production: key competencies in the attention economy era
In her talk, Sylvia Karastathi, who was representing LanguageCert, described how she used spoken presentations to raise her students' awareness of the 'attention economy'. She outlined the characteristics of this new kind of economy, such as low attention spans and low threshold of boredom, among other things. Regarding the material for spoken presentations, Sylvia introduced us to the educational resources designed by the European Association of Viewers Interests (EAVI).
In some of the spoken presentations that Sylvia showed us, the students explored various themes in a film, discussed the social context of specific objects in use, and reflected on the messages behind films.
What teachers love about cohort-based asynchronous teacher development courses
Katja Preston from International House World Organisation (IHWO) shared three key elements that contribute to successful asynchronous group courses for in-service teachers. These elements are taken from the Community of Inquiry Model (Anderson, Garrison and Archer, 2001), which explains how a classroom community can contribute to the successful construction of personal meaning.
For an asynchronous group course to be successful, Katja took us through the three elements one by one: 1) teaching presence (e.g. tutor support), 2) social presence (e.g. discussion forum), and cognitive presence (e.g. flexibility of time). At each stage, we were shown excerpts of the participants' feedback on the teacher development courses they had done with IH Online Teacher Training Institute (OTTI). The course participants' feedback attests to the presence of each element so that there is evidence of meaningful learning experiences in an asynchronous online environment.
Task-based learning for teachers and trainers: demystifying practices, exploring principles
In this workshop, Jane Willis, author of A Framework for Task-based Learning (1996), revisited the original conception of the TBL(T) approach.
- Pre-task
- Task - Planning - Report
- Analysis - Practice
She emphasised that the greatest amount of learning comes not from the 'task' itself but from the post-task stages: 'planning' (for the report) and 'reporting' (on the completed 'task'); feedback is given during the planning stage as well as the post-report 'analysis'. These stages are said to be overlooked by many language teachers who (claim to) use TBL in their lessons, or series of lessons.
Judith Hudson suggested how teacher trainers can incorporate TBL elements in the teaching practice (TP) part of pre-service training courses, such as CELTA or CertTESOL. The procedure she has used with her trainees is as follows:
- Pre-task: some relevant background reading and short video clips of a similar lesson
- Task: lesson planning
- Planning: assisted lesson planning with input from the tutor/trainer
- Report: mock teaching practice (TP)
- Analysis: feedback on mock TP
- Practice (adapted): written feedback to the trainee