LTE Conference day 3

All good things must come to an end, and so CARLA's 5th Annual LTE Conference does. Saturday was all about individual papers. These are the ones I went to:

• Elizabeth Harrison's "Instructional Choices of Mississippi Foreign Language Teachers", which showed that while the more foreign language the teacher knew the more communication- and culture-oriented instruction they did, the level of their actual educational courses didn't seem to have an effect.
• Andrew Cohen's "Learner Strategies, Teacher Techniques, Computers, and Pragmatics? Really!?", which was a fascinating look at using interactive technology on a website devoted to teaching Spanish pragmatics. Students work through modules on various pragmatic situations and then they go into a computer simulated immersion where they can try out their skills and intuitions using avatars in a virtual immersion in an on-line Mexican town. The website is called "Dancing with Words" and you can access it through the CARLA website. Totally cool concept.
• Kazue Oda's "Foreign Language Teachers' Beliefs about Teaching, Learning, and the Internet", a report on a case study that looked at beliefs about, well, those things, and how they and contextual factors influence Internet use in their classrooms, and how training teachers can change how they teach.
• Marianna Ryshina-Pankova's "Lost in Translation, Gained in Translation" which was the most immediately useful for me. She focussed on ways to use translation to develop L1 and L2 Social Semiotic Awareness, and discussed application of translation for language teaching. Fascinating.
• Linda Quinn Allen's "Metaphors as a Measure of Professional Growth" which charted the way student teachers' metaphors for their roles as teachers changed as they began actually teaching.
• Joanna Labov's "Preparing Novice Teachers to Teach ESL in Multilevel Classes" which looked at how to tier instruction to reach all the students in your class, regardless of their level - useful for any subject.
• Greg Ogilvie's "Mind the Gap" which looked at how teaching student teachers about TBLT (Task Based Language Teaching) raises their confidence in and approval of TBLT but doesn't seem to influence their actual teaching when they get into the classroom, and tried to figure out why.

The conference concluded with a final plenary by Timothy Reagan on "The Future of Foreign Language Instructors: Are we on the way to becoming dodos?" (No, he says. Whew!) This was a very insightful (and funny) talk about why FL teaching is important, given how few people actually achieve fluency as the result of their study. He argues that studying a foreign language is valuable in itself.

I'll probably post more about some of these talks and papers in the upcoming weeks... things that were said and my thoughts and reactions. You've been warned.

And here's a picture of me! (Just what you wanted to see, I know.)


All in all - a great conference! Well organized, well run, good papers and speakers, and a lot of useful information to digest and put to work.