LTE Conference day 2

I wasn't sure how much I'd get out of this - some, I figured, but who knew how much, given that I am not a Language Teacher Educator ... I teach language, not teachers. But the advantage of a conference like this one is the sheer number of paper sessions there are. LTE does something nice - they group papers by topics and give you a couple three-for-one sessions on Fridays.

I elected to start with Jo Tyler's paper on Attitudes of Inquiry for curriculum recommendations in six core areas - one of which, culture, is of especial interest to me. Then we had a plenary by Bernard Mohan of British Columbia - on Formative Assessment in the classroom. This one gave me some good ideas.

The longer session I chose in the morning featured Polio & Gass "Getting Students to Talk" on teaching pre-service teachers techniques for opening students up; McCormack & Ediger's "Lexicogrammatical Knowledge Base Requirements in ESL Teacher Education", which was fascinating and extremely applicable to FL teaching; and Naoko Taguchi's paper on "Chunk-Learning in Japanese as a Foreign Language", which was slightly less applicable to Russian intermediate-to-advanced students, being about absolute beginners, but interesting nonetheless. All three dealt with teacher-student interaction, always a useful topic.

This was followed by a 'hot-topic-table' luncheon; my table of ten discussed culture in language classrooms, and there were a lot of interesting stories and tips. For some reason, the Argentine guy who "is the culture" yet has people wishing him "Happy Cinco de Mayo" sticks with me.

The afternoon plenary was (so far) the least directly applicable to me and yet my favorite - a fabulous uplifting account of the renaissance of Hawaiian language medium education by Pila Wilson and Kaiki Kawai'ae'a. They told us about the development of P-20 immersion education in Hawaiian, and the Kahuawaiola Indigenous Teacher Education Program - a real success story.

The afternoon session I chose was on on-line classes: Joan Kang Shin's "Creating a Classroom Community in an Asynchronous Environment" about conducting on-line training across 16 time zones; Silvio Avendano's "Coping with Different Degrees of Technological Experience and Expertise among Students" was chock-full of pointers for dealing with setting up and running on-line courses, and included a lot of tips for writing manuals and orientation materials and dealing with students whose equipment may be old (a student last fall was running Windows 95 still - and had 4 hours of electricity a day); and John Nelson's "Ensuring Quality and Comparability of Face-to-Face and On-line Courses", which included a lot about how to evaluate your delivery and student satisfaction.

Worth the trip so far, absolutely.