Olé Academic Partnership

Nurcan and Nadiran's Academic Partnership project was presented at the annual INTED conference in Valencia last week. Well done Nurcan!!

Day 2 (part 1) - My reflections from the 11th International METU Conference - Embracing Challenges

During the conference, I stayed in the Aysel Sabuncu Guest House with many of the overseas presenters. This guest house is a little isolated and situated on the outskirts of the campus forest. For the duration of the conference, we had our own little guest house 'family'. Here we are, bright and early on the conference shuttle on day 2 of the conference. Fond memories and a 'big' hello to you all  :)



On day 2, June 1st, the first plenary speaker was Simon Borg who talked about Teachers' Beliefs about Learner Autonomy (LA). Simon discussed how students beliefs on education play an important role and how conceptions based on previous educational background affect their university education. 

Based on his Learner Autonomy research carried out in Oman some points Simon discussed were:


How do teachers promote LA?

• Talking to students about it
• Encouraging learners to be autonomous
• Getting learners to reflect
• Using autonomous activities in class
• Setting autonomy activities out of class

What obstacles do teachers face?

• Institutional factors- syllabus, assessment
• Learner factors- lack of incentive, focus on passing tests, low proficiency in English, limited outside contact with English, limited experience of autonomous learning, dependence on the teacher 
• Teacher factors  - underestimate students capacity for LA

Conclusions:

• LA is valued as a concept
• LA is strongly associated with choice
• Most Teacher's feel they promote LA
• There are multiple interpretations of LA

Simon's Report for the British Council on Learner autonomy: English language teachers' beliefs and practices can be found at http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/publications


Tony Gurr's plenary on Embracing the Challenge of 21st Century Teaching  was colourful and entertaining. Tony started his plenary by talking about today's younger generation born after 1990 or  Generation C....

• Connected
• Communicating
• Content centric 
• Computerised
• Community-oriented 
• .... Always clicking

He quoted Friedrich, Le Merle, Peterson & Koster (2012) 'In the course of the next 10 years, a new generation - Generation C - will emerge…As they grow up, this highly connected generation will live “online” most of their waking hours…' So where does this leave  the teachers? According to Tony, the good news is -  technology won't replace teachers...but teachers who use technology will replace teachers who do not.

But beware... are we a) language teachers or b) technology teachers? We need to be careful and always keep 'language' in the forefront and not get too carried away with technology. The roles of today's teacher include - the learner, the model, the risk-taker, the collaborator and the 'adaptor'. 

Many thanks to Tony for the entertainment. For more information visit Tony's blog at http://allthingslearning.wordpress.com/2012/05/06/allthings21c/ or follow @tonygurr

Day 1 - My reflections from the 11th International METU Conference - Embracing Challenges

The 11th International METU Conference - Embracing Challenges was held in Ankara, 31 May - 2 June.

The conference kicked off on May 31st with Eli Henkel's plenary on Academic Writing - the Vocabulary Connection.


How important is vocabulary?
Eli quoted Wilkins to emphasise the importance - 'The fact is that while without grammar very little can be conveyed, without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed' (Wilkins; 1972). She stressed that if use of vocabulary is good, grammar tends to be overlooked.


How about our learners?

Eli explained that early vocabulary learning is easy because it includes highly frequent words but, less frequent words are harder to learn and need to be taught i.e. academic vocabulary because it  does not occur in daily interaction and conversational exchanges. 

How do we teach academic vocabulary?

The secret Eli stressed time after time throughout her plenary is review review review! Encourage your learners to use flash cards - they are easy to carry and are practical to review vocabulary. In fact, research shows that flash cards reflect the single most efficient way to learn vocabulary.  Give learners a writing activity and encourage them to use the new vocabulary. Have vocabulary quizzes in class, this encourages learners to review vocabulary outside class. 

Eli's final words of wisdom for vocabulary teaching - review review review!!

Nicky Hockly, the second plenary speaker of the day, talked about Digital Literacies.  

Do we really need to be digitally literate? The answer is 'yes'. Nicky had most of the audience fooled with the internet information she presented on the tree octopus. Conclusion - be careful with the information you find on the internet - show students how to analyse web sites. For example - look at hyperlinks (beware if there are many within one paragraph), style of the language (is the language accurate?), the url (does it look official or suspicious?) and images (are the images real?)

Nicky referred to Mark Pegrum's four main areas in digital literacy:

1) Focus on Language

2) Focus on Information

3) Focus on Connections

4) Focus on (re) design

and suggested how these can be integrated in the language classroom. 

An example of (re)design would be to 'remix' something. Nicky illustrated this by showing a literal video of a Harry Potter trailer http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MahTKZDHXaA. We then discussed how remix can be exploited in class.

The tree octopus lesson plan can be found at http://www.theconsultants-e.com/resources/ToolsResources/DigiLit.aspx

In Talip Karanfil, Erhan Guzel and Steve Neufeld's workshop on  Lowering the Affective Filter with Text-To-Speech Animations in Class Dialogues they demonstrated how to use GoAnimate.GoAnimate is a free online tool for preparing self-made videos and works in collaboration with YouTube. Students prepare their own dialogues and then transfer this to GoAnimate. There are a variety of scenarios to choose from. In the workshop, we used wild animals and watched our self-created dialogues being brought to life on YouTube with wild animals.