Michael Hoey : Old approaches, new perspectives: the implications of a corpus linguistic theory for learning the English language. 

An absolutely fantastic plenary, I’ve never heard Michael speak before (that’s the great thing about #IATEFL, us mortals get to call the gods by their first names!) but he was great. An interesting subject, very well-presented, with plenty of anecdotes and humour, and a strong theme.

So good in fact, I suggest you take out some time and watch, or at least listen to, him here while you read the rest of this.

Developing Competences : a framework for teacher professional development with Andrew Nye

Obviously anything on CPD was going to catch my eye and Andrew described and explained the new Cambridge English Teacher framework.

I’ve been a Cambridge English teacher for a few years, and the interview I did for them this morning got me a year’s free membership, so I’ll be renewing again thank you very much! Seriously I have done several  online courses with them, and will be doing their CLIL one as soon as I have time. Details can be found  on their website.

My interview made me a few minutes late for the ELT conversation between Jeremy Harmer and Scott Thornbury.

Although it is probably against conference etiquette I sneaked in (to an enormous auditorium and made a row of people stand up so I could get to a seat!) as there was no way I was ging to miss this one – although I was torn between this and the great Penny Ur who was programmed at the same time to run a workshop on Teaching English for Academic purposes: insights from experience.

The boys, Jeremy and Scott, talked about, amongst other things, the communicative approach, dogme, etc. They had a great repartee and some of the things they said particularly struck home, for example Scott’s comment about accepting correction in the language classroom that he would have resented from his friends outside. I’m sure my husband will recognize that scenario in my journey into the French language!

I also appreciated Scott’s comment about learning a language by using it, not learning a language TO use it.

Anyway, I’ll let you make your own mind up, by watching them here.