‘ELT - the what and the how’
9th-10th March 2013
Pleasant weather, an excellent venue, edifying and entertaining presentations, good facilities and a warm, friendly atmosphere – all of this and more characterised the TESOL Macedonia-Thrace, Northern Greece 20th Annual Convention.
The American College of Thessaloniki hosted the event and not only allowed us full use of their excellent facilities but also provided valuable support.
For a non-profit Teachers Association, this kind of sponsorship is vitally important and enables the organisation to offer its members speakers with international reputations as well as a wide range workshops and presentations from local practitioners in an appropriate setting.
Bright and early on Saturday morning the first plenary presentation entitled ‘New Literacies: Teachers & Learners.’ was given by Gavin Dudeney in which he examined how the digital age has forced teachers to re-assess their approach to the traditional 'three rs' (reading, writing and arithmetic), long considered the cornerstones of basic literacy/numeracy.
By Roger House, Chair person
He gave some suggestions as to what it means to be digitally literate and explored the new types of literacy that have emerged with the advent of Web 2.0.
He followed this up later in the day with a practical workshop demonstrating these kinds of on-line tools. As a teacher, materials developer, IT manager and web/user interface designer based in the UK, Gavin is at the cutting edge of learning technologies.
Later on Saturday Tom Godfrey, the second plenary speaker, talked about ‘Whole Person Learning: The New Way’ and explained what a whole person approach to language learning was and that some traditional values need to be re-examined.
He focused on the practical issues of developing skills in a mono-lingual classroom environment by recognising the importance of satisfying our students' physical, psychological and linguistic needs.
Tom, who is based in Turkey, shared his experience as a teacher trainer in his Sunday morning workshop which explored using drama techniques in English language teaching.
After a morning round of workshops, Nicos Sifakis, who is an assistant professor in the School of Humanities of the Hellenic Open University (HOU), gave the third plenary presentation on ‘Differentiated Instruction: a way forward for teachers.’ which is an approach to teaching that takes into account learners' differences.
He reviewed the essential principles of differentiated instruction and considered the practical aspects in terms of ways in which teachers can reflect on and evaluate the impact of their own practice, which he developed further in his follow up workshop.
David A Hill is a free-lance consultant and teacher trainer based in Budapest with a lot of experience in writing educational materials for both language and literature work.
All of which he put to good effect in the final plenary presentation, which was on the topic of ‘Language Play & Creative Language Learning’ According to David, playing with language is one of the fundamental ways in which humans learn to speak their mother tongue and it has been seriously neglected in the EFL/ESL classroom.
In both this plenary and his workshop he worked his way through a series of example and see how these might be used in class to develop learners language awareness.
What really lies at the heart of a convention such as this is the rich variety of workshops and presentations that go on throughout the two days. Those attending had the opportunity to listen to both their own colleagues from the region and speakers from Italy, Bulgaria, Serbia and Turkey talking on a range of topics of professional interest and relevance to their teaching circumstances.
Rock and roll in the classroom, Dickens and the price of education, cartoons, on-line courses, TED talks, story telling, dictation, the feelgood factor in teaching and fairy tales were just some of the themes touched on. The opportunity to learn and share is what made the convention such a success and this is all down to the people who participated.
The Pecha Kucha evening has now become a regular feature of the convention. In a highly entertaining sequence of consecutive six minute twenty second presentations the audience enjoyed a poem about moths, the history of pecha kucha itself, a celebration of 20 years of TESOL Macedonia-Thrace, Northern Greece, bizarre book titles, a humorous look at the classroom and even a song and dance routine.
David A Hill, Malgorzata Kosior, Maria Sachpazian, Gavin Dudeney, Nikos Sifakis and Tom Godfrey provided the entertainment ably compeered by Phil Holland. The fun was followed by a buffet kindly sponsored by Burlington Books. TESOL Macedonia-Thrace, Northern Greece would also like to thank the Hellenic American Union, Express Publishing, the British Council and Input on Education for all their help and support in making it a weekend to remember.
