TESOL 2009 DENVER

Snow and lots of it. They had forecast "light snowfall", but the newspapers say that this is a blizzard. It's pretty much my first experience with snow, so of course I had to run out and touch it and take photos. However, I did manage to get in a few talks. Here is a summary of my notes:

Toni Hull Authentic Materials
Toni has been teaching in Russia and in Vietnam. She talks about using authentic materials- websites, videos, etc, produced by “non-native” speakers of English as learning materials for her students.
The drawback is that these materials are not always grammatically correct, or perhaps they are correct, but they use non-standard structures or expressions that may be used in one part of the word but not another.
She mentions that she uses a lot CNN revealed, a program that interviews celebrities who are not always English speakers.

Curt Reese 14 lessons from Facebook
Uses Facebook applications and you tube videos as starting point for writing or speaking activites. Showed us a very cute video from Sister Salad about youtube haters. Good handout

Non-native content teachers
Lise Lotte Hjulman
Joyce Kling
Ulrich Bliesener
This is related to teachers teaching their content through English, similar to what we are doing at the Uninversity. They talk about advantages and disadvantages and their situation is very similar to ours, with similar concerns: the level of English of the students, how much learning is going on, do they have to simplify the curriculum, etc.


FREEMAN & RICHARDS Is ESOL as we know it dead?

The kind of education required will change and it will need to expand across the life span
So much going on that the classroom is no longer the main learning place. Some changes:
· English as a common language
· Social participation
· F2f vs. virtual learning
· Native speaker/interlocutor is no longer the model
· ESL/EFL is no longer the dichotomy, Graves talks about context embedded and context removed
Some concerns:
· When should English learning start
· What is proficient
Freeman: early start is not correlated to proficiency (Spain vs. Germany)
Richards: do dubbed movies have anything to do with this? The availability of English in the real world?
THE LEARNERS ARE LEADING AND THE DELIVERY NEEDS TO CATCH UP
Industrialization of teacher education. Quality matters and it matters tremendously. For teacher training, there must be indicators of quality, levels of education and levels of training.
What are materials in the wired world? Can you have global standards?