ELTWeekly

Spontaneity in Language Teaching Conference, Birmingham, September 27

Post author:Tarun Patel
Post published:July 20, 2014
Post category:ELT Conferences ELT Newsletter ELTWeekly ELTWeekly Volume 6 Volume 6 Issue 17
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[ELTWeekly Volume 6, Issue 18 | July 21, 2014 | ISSN 0975-3036]

On 27th September, 2014 Horizon Language Training will be putting on a one day conference for language teachers at Brasshouse Language Centre, Birmingham. The conference will feature talks and workshops on the theme of Spontaneity in language teaching from some great speakers – Adrian Underhill, Alan Maley, Luke Meddings, Nick Bilbrough and Vivian Gladwell. There will also be an ‘Open Space’ slot in the afternoon where participants will be able to enter into discussions of their own choosing, or lead their own workshops related to the theme.

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Third UAD TEFL International Conference 2014, Indonesia, September 17-18

Post author:Tarun Patel
Post published:July 20, 2014
Post category:ELT Conferences ELT Newsletter ELTWeekly ELTWeekly Volume 6 Volume 6 Issue 17
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[ELTWeekly Volume 6, Issue 18 | July 21, 2014 | ISSN 0975-3036]

The third UTIC 2014 aims to bring together innovative work and new ideas in ELT from a number of different experts in the area while providing a medium for English language teachers and practitioners in general to exchange and share ideas and experience in ELT. A special emphasis will be placed on learning material development; what are the underlying concepts and rationale for material design, what language skills it purports to teach, how it serves to promote language acquisition, and what appropriation required to address students’ cultural backdrops and classroom constraints in various teaching contexts. (more…)

Article: How the FIFA World Cup™ can inform English Language teaching

Post author:Tarun Patel
Post published:July 19, 2014
Post category:ELT Newsletter ELTWeekly ELTWeekly Volume 6 Volume 6 Issue 17
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[ELTWeekly Volume 6, Issue 18 | July 21, 2014 | ISSN 0975-3036]

The Cambridge English blog has published an article on FIFA World Cup’s influence on ELT.

The 2014 FIFA World Cup™ has had everything – great goals, classic matches, drama, controversy and even a linguistic study from the team here at Cambridge University Press.

We used the World Cup to showcase the power of the Cambridge English Corpus, a multi-billion-word database of written and spoken English language taken from a huge range of media sources. Throughout the tournament, our language research team analysed this database to discover the media’s sentiment towards the competition and participating countries.

The less said about the words associated with England (‘exciting’, ‘disappointing’, ‘inexperienced’) the better, but with the curtain coming down on proceedings over the weekend, it comes as no surprise the ‘powerful’, ‘focussed’ and ‘committed’ Germans ended up victorious in their pursuit of a fourth World Cup title, defeating the Argentinians who played with ‘confidence’ and ‘flair’ but were often seen as ‘unconvincing’ on their way to the final.

Speaking about the study, Dr Claire Dembry from our language research team said, ‘The breadth of sources we’ve analysed over the course of the tournament means we’re able to give a unique insight into the mood surrounding each team. Examining the Cambridge English Corpus and seeing how the media portray the various competing nations has given us an interesting insight into how national identity and stereotypes have been played out in the media.

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