International Conference Invited Speakers

intcon — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 17:14:17 +0900

Scroll down to see each presenter's abstract and biographical sketch.

Plenary Speakers

Dr. David Nunan

Sponsored by Anaheim University

Mentoring and Peer Coaching as Professional Development Tools

Dr. Rod Ellis

Sponsored by Anaheim University

Corrective Feedback and Teacher Development

Dr. Kathleen Bailey

Sponsored by Anaheim University

Pursuing Professional Excellence through Reflective Teaching

Dr. Tim Murphey
Sponsored by KOTESOL
Pursuing Professional HAISCM: Hope, Agency, Imagined Selves and Communities Motivation
Banquet Speaker
Prof. Marc Helgesen
Sponsored by Pearson Longman Korea
Let’s get physical: Warm-ups that include language and movement

Featured Talks
(Alphabetically)
Dr. Stephen Andrews
Co-sponsored by Cambridge University Press Korea & KOTESOL
<coming soon>
Dr. Jill Burton

Sponsored by Austrailia Education International (AEI)
Writing the Profession: An Examination of How TESOL Practice Gets Documented
Dr. John Fanselow
Sponsored by KOTESOL
Huh? Oh. Aha!—Differences between learning language through rote memorization and predicting

Dr. John Flowerdew
Sponsored by KOTESOL
<coming soon>
Dr. Jerry Gebhard

Sponsored by KOTESOL
Pursuing Professional Excellence through Exploration of Teaching

Prof. Marc Helgesen
Sponsored by Pearson Longman Korea
Pursuing Professional Excellence: Language Teaching that Makes Sense

Dr. Jeannette Littlemore

Sponsored by Kyungwon University (Univ. of Birmingham TESOL Program)
More than just words: Pursuing professional excellence through the use of gesture
Prof. Scott Miles
Sponsored by: KOTESOL
What sticks? Language teaching for long-term learning

Dr. Scott Thornbury
Sponsored by SIT Graduate Institute (USA)
Seven things beginning with M

Presentation Titles & Abstracts
PLENARY TALKS
(Chronologically)
David Nunan
Mentoring and Peer Coaching as Professional Development Tools

Rod Ellis
Corrective Feedback and Teacher Development
This talk will explore how an ‘idea’ of interest to both researchers and practitioners can serve as a basis for the professional development of second language teachers. It will seek to illustrate how research can inform teachers’ development. The talk will first examine a number of controversies relating to how corrective feedback (CF) has been viewed in second language acquisition research (SLA) and in language pedagogy. These controversies address ; (1) whether CF contributes to L2 acquisition, (2) which errors should be corrected, (3) who should do the correcting (the teacher or the learner him/herself), (4) which type of CF is the most effective, and (5) what is the best timing for CF (i.e. immediate or delayed). In discussing these controversies, both the pedagogic and SLA literature will be drawn on. The talk will then offer a some general guidelines for conducting CF in language classrooms based on a sociocultural view of L2 acquisition and suggest how these guidelines might be used for teacher development.
Kathleen Bailey
Pursuing Professional Excellence Through Reflective Teaching
As language teachers, we have many ways to pursue professional excellence. We can take courses, attend conferences, or read books and articles to increase our knowledge and skills. We can benefit from our supervisor’s feedback. We can also engage in reflective teaching practices to address issues which we ourselves identify.In this plenary presentation, we first will consider the concept of reflective teaching and then examine a variety of reflective teaching practices which were topics in an international survey of over a thousand language teachers. The respondents indicated their experience with and the appeal of a range of reflective teaching practices. Their views will inform our discussion about pursuing professional excellence.
Tim Murphey
Pursuing Professional HAISCM: Hope, Agency, Imagined Selves and Communities Motivation
HOPE is composed of PATHWAYS THINKING (ways) + AGENCY THINKING (confidence to act). As teachers we might ask, “To what degree do our methods provide productive pathways and confidence?” AGENCY is “the socioculturally mediated capacity to act” (Ahearn, 2001). Taking more control over one’s life and work through languaging (Swain 2005), grammaring (Larsen-Freeman, 2003), and participating (Sfard 1998) are what language learners and teachers do.. Student Voice: Action Logs, LL Histories, Petitions, Surveys, Volunteer Work, etc. are examples of students becoming prosumers. Teachers’ action research and curriculum improvements are ongoing acts of agency. Imagined, ideal, or possible selves are our fantasies and goals about what we might become in the future. These can be very motivational. Or visualizing an undesirable self that we could become might spur us into action. Very importantly these ideas for possible selves usually come from the people around us, our peers, in our communities. Communities can be past, present, and imagined communities. Our past experiences with communities, and their ability to inspire us or not, are very important. Then we have our present communities and classes that we feel a more or less belongingness to. And finally we have imagined communities that we imagine exist and that we belong to but we never know all the members and it is more of an abstraction. All of these communities can contribute to our learning and professional development.
DINNER TALK
Marc Helgesen
Let’s get physical: Warm-ups that include language and movement
Why use warm-up activities that use both physical movement and language? There are many reasons. Physical movement gets everyone involved. It makes use of multiple sensory modalities – and that means everyone is getting input in the sense the use most easily. They also build a cooperative, positive classroom culture. The activities can trigger the imagination, provide a break in the classroom routine…and they are fun. Learners do more when they are engaged with the activity. This activity-based session will introduce a series of warm-up activities that involve language and movement as well as a rationale for using them. These are activities the presenter uses with university students but are useful from high elementary school on up. And here’s the irony: even though they use more energy than many classroom tasks, they also generate energy, whether in your classes or at the end of a long day of conferencing. Enjoy. It’ll move you.

FEATURED TALKS
(Alphabetically)

Stephen Andrews
Jill Burton
Writing the Profession: An Examination of How TESOL Practice Gets Documented
TESOL is, in the main, explained to the general community by TESOL consultants and academics outside the classroom, especially in written form. This paper examines why this happens and considers what understanding and respect for teaching is lost through, in particular, teachers’ silence in TESOL publications. It uses personal narratives of writing and editing for publication, draws on forms of writing that connect with reflective practice and uses community of practice theory (e.g., Wenger, 1998) to argue that unless teachers document and interpret teaching publicly, particularly in respected written forms, they will never be more than peripheral members of what should be their own communities of practice. The paper concludes by balancing the implications of this argument for teacher education and the management of educational institutions against a currently undervalued teaching specialism in mainstream society.
John Fanselow
Huh? Oh. Aha!—Differences between leaning language through rote memorization and predicting
When a person in a language class responds to a question with “Huh? Sorry, I can’t remember.” the person is implying that rote-memorization is the main way to learn a language. Questions in textbooks and on tests that ask for restatement of information also send the message that we learn through rote-memorization.Though there is a place for some rote-memorization in all learning, to assimilate and internalize a language we want to learn we need to use predicting skills. Though we cannot learn without increasing the amount of language that we move into our memory, the least efficient way to move anything into our memory is through rote memorization. The most efficient way to move something into our memory is through predicting and projecting meanings—connecting what we do not know with what we know.During the session, we will do a range of activities to contrast learning through predicting and rote-memorization.

John Flowerdew

Jerry Gebhard
Pursuing Professional Excellence through Exploration of Teaching
This talk defines principles underlying An Exploratory Approach to Teaching, including (1) being nonjudgmental, (2) being descriptive, (3) collaborating with others, (4) being willing to try out new ways of seeing teaching (e.g. trying the opposite to see what happens), and (5) taking on a beginner’s mind. This talk then provides ways to explore teaching (e.g. self-observation, action research, peer-observation) and gives examples of explorations Asian teachers have done through these principles to pursue understanding and change in their teaching.
Marc Helgesen
Pursuing Professional Excellence: Language Teaching that Makes Sense
Professional excellence means more than knowing about ELT. It includes knowing how we teach, including our own teaching and learning styles, and knowing who we are – in relation to our students. That includes sensory awareness. Barring a disability, we all have five senses. Every bit of information we take in comes through sight, hearing, touch/ movement, smell or taste. Why then are classes often limited to visual (Look at page 35) and auditory input (Listen!)? Everyone has one strongest “preferred” sense. Most of us also have a weak one. We often teach in the sense we process most easily. What about learners weak in that sense? This activity-based session will explore sensory modalities (learning styles or learning channels), ways to identify our own and learners’ preferred sense, teach across the senses and techniques to modify tasks to provide a range of sensory input. It really does make sense!
Jeanette Littlemore
More than just words: Pursuing professional excellence through the use of gesture
It is well known that professional development in language teaching involves not only the ability to reflect on action but also the ability to reflect in action. In this talk, I focus on an aspect of ‘action’ that is sometimes overlooked; the role of gesture, by both learners and teachers, in the language classroom. I argue that paying increased attention to the gestures that learners use, as well as to the gestures we ourselves use, can enhance our professional development as teachers.
Evidence has shown that the gestures used by learners serve both a cognitive function (i.e. they help them to formulate messages and to ‘think’ in English) and a communicative function (i.e. they help them to convey their ideas and to indicate when they need help). The use of gesture has been found to vary considerably across languages, partly because it is strongly related to the syntax of individual languages and thus reflects the way in which ideas are construed differently by different languages. In this talk I look at the use of gesture by language learners. I outline the different types and functions of gesture, and discuss research which indicates that Korean, Chinese and Turkish speakers tend to use gesture differently from speakers of English.
In order to illustrate my points, I use examples from my own data to show how language learners make use of gesture when they are producing language, and trying to understand language or explain it to others.Research into the use of gestures by teachers has shown that teachers who use large amounts of gesture are more likely to be viewed by their students as ‘good’ teachers than those who don’t. However, we need to be careful not to over-use gesture as it can sometimes provide too much help, thus reducing the necessity for the learner to ‘learn’ the language.
I close the talk by looking at how we as teachers can make good of gesture in the classroom and how we can conduct small pieces of experimental research with our students in order to improve the ways in which we use, and attend to gesture, in order to become better teachers.
Scott Miles
What sticks? Language teaching for long-term learning
What do your students learn in your classroom? More importantly, how much of what you teach is still retained by your students even just a few months after your class is finished? A second language takes thousands of hours of exposure and practice to reach a level of competency. Most classrooms, however, only provide students with 40-70 hours of English a semester. Not only is this time very limited, but many classrooms fail to provide the conditions for long-term learning to take place. The result is a cycle of learning and forgetting that is far too commonplace in EFL settings, with the average student having precious little to show after even a decade of formal English study. This presentation will review research in second language acquisition and cognitive psychology which gives guidance on what conditions are required for initial learning to take place in the classroom, and what instructors can do to assist students in maintaining and further developing acquired language knowledge and skills long after the class is finished.
Scott Thornbury
Seven things beginning with M
It’s a truism that no single method is going to meet the needs of all teachers and all learners, either locally or globally. Hence, we now operate in what is called the post-method era. Yet methods formerly provided teachers with a certain sense of security, a role which perhaps coursebooks now fulfil. This security is illusory, though, if it is not grounded in some basic principles of learning and education, principles that I will attempt to identify, and which (I will argue) constitute a blueprint for a coherent approach to language teaching.

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International Conference Invited Speakers