Michael Carrier

BETT is the biggest educational technology show in the world. Now being held at ExCel in Docklands, it’s a long ride from central London but worth it for the breadth of exhibits and the great talks – all for free (and good views of the docks from the DLR railway).

My talk (which you can find on the Presentations page) was about re-defining access to language learning through the use of Handheld devices. There was a good turnout of over 100 people, with some interesting Q&A afterwards,  but it’s really hard to concentrate when you’re in an open theatre, inside the exhibition hall, surrounded by 10,000 people chatting!

Not far away in Limehouse is Gordon Ramsay’s newish venture, a gastropub called The Narrow (on Narrow St). Excellent riverside terrace with views back towards the city, great for peaceful lunches watching boats…..

The Conferences &  Presentations pages are now live and you can download my PowerPoints from there in PDF format.

Please feel free to send questions comments on the presentations!

MC presenting at IATEFL Hungary

IATEFL Hungary brought 300 delegates from 18 countries to Eger, a charming medieval city about 100km from Budapest, close to Slovakia, Romania & Ukraine for their excellent annual conference this past weekend.

The conference brought in international gurus like Scott Thornbury, Lindsay Clandfield, Ken Wilson, and was co-sponsored by the British Council, led locally by dynamic Country Director Simon Ingram-Hill.

The many highlights included Ken Wilson’s thoughtful but hilarious ‘Ten Quotes to make you think’ presentation, Steve Oakes’ session on ‘Embracing Ambiguity’, and David Hill on using British Folk Songs in class.

IATEFL Hungary have set up their own online conference site, with sessions, interviews, roving reporters and commentary for those who couldn’t make it to the actual conference.  You can see interviews with many of the presenters, including your truly interviewed here.

Many thanks to organisers Zsuzsa Lindner and her dedicated committee for a stimulating and enjoyable conference.

Join us next year in Budapest for the 23rd conference.

Every year September 26 comes around too quickly, and in the UK we neglect to join in the celebration of the European Day of Languages. A few events are arranged here and there but there is no press coverage or public awareness of the celebration of humankind’s ability to speak multiple languages and communicate between multiple cultures.

In Europe they do things differently, and I was lucky enough to share in celebrations in Poland yesterday with a conference in Warsaw focusing on New Technologies in Language teaching. Unlike an ELT or languages conference in the UK, this was of great interest to the press and the public – several TV channels were there interviewing speakers and participants, and the conference made it on to breakfast TV.

Can you imagine an IATEFL speaker being interviewed for BBC Breakfast Time? What does that tell us about our lack of interest in languages, I wonder?

The conference attracted speakers and participants from across Europe and was illuminating because the core theme of many of the presentations shifted from the use of technology in itself to the use of Social Media. Speaker after speaker described using Facebook, Twitter, LiveMocha, Busuu and other sites, and emphasised how the use of social media in and alongside the classroom was giving their students more confidence in expressing themselves, boosting their motivation, promoting task-based learning and groupwork.

It was instructive to see how the emphasis had shifted from the use of technology (web, PCs, mobiles) to the use of the communication medium facilitated by the technology, and how this can benefit learning.

Many of the investigations into social media usage had been part of EU projects, organised around EU-funded multinational consortia of schools and colleges from around the EU, with teachers and academics using the project to dig deeper into uses of social media.

The richness of this input gave a great ‘takeaway’ for this conference, but also served as a useful reminder that too few institutions in the UK are involved in the EU project circles that help teachers to carry out this vital developmental research. We in the UK really need to get more involved in the EU’s focus on language use and language research.

New launches in the Market Report series to support UK ELT schools

The British Council and English UK held a launch event for three English Language Market Reports: China, Italy and Turkey on Wednesday 19 September at The Royal Society.

At the event, authors of each report shared their findings and responded in a Q&A session about each of these key ELT markets.

The reports are part of a new series of comprehensive market studies to be produced by the British Council and English UK. They aim to provide support for UK ELT institutions in recruiting students from overseas markets. They focus on key markets that are vital for the work of accredited ELT institutions.

There is a need for ELT-specific market information and it is hoped that these reports will help British Council accredited institutions to gain insights into how the education market works in the target countries. The reports will assist institutions in building closer connections with and promote their products to potential students and their influencers, overseas partners, study abroad agents and other stakeholders.

At the launch event there was an opportunity to hear the authors summarise and discuss their findings and conclusions.
Participants also received hard copies of the reports, which will be available in the ‘English in the UK’ section of our English Agenda website.

After months of tireless work by association founder Leo Marin and her dedicated team, the first full IATEFL Peru  conference ran smoothly over a warm winter’s weekend in Lima, with plenary speakers Paul Seligson, Andrew Sheehan, Penny Ur and myself.

We were hosted by the Colegio “La Reparacion” in central Lima for the first day, moving to a private college on the outskirts for the second day – a chance to experience different parts of the city.

The conference was a great success with a large turnout of teachers from all over the country. Some had travelled 12 hours or more by bus, overnight, just to attend. Their dedication to their profession, their appetite for new knowledge, new ideas and desire to share experience, was impressive to see.

Everyone is very grateful to Leo and the IATEFL committee for making this happen and look forward to IATEFL Peru 2013 which will be in Lima on July 13-14.

Lima itself is a delightful city – 2000 years of history along the beach. If you have chance to visit, make sure you go to the Huaca Puccllan, a 2000 year old pyramid and religious site, which long pre-dates the Incas. The original Lima people built this in around 200 AD and lived here peacefully worshipping the moon, sea and the shark until overpowered by the Wari – who specialised in human sacrifice. Photos of the site can be found here.

The only sacrifices now are of the sea bass and steaks in the attached restaurant, here,  one of the gastronomic highlights of Lima, which is set in the ruins and where even in winter you can eat fine food in the historical site. I recommend the Tacama red wine – Peruvian wine has come a long way in recent years and now rivals Argentinian in some of the vineyards.

At the weekend I went to Liverpool to speak at the EnglishUK North conference, held at a stunningly designed language school called  LILA* – which I assume stands for the Liverpool International Language Academy.

The conference was excellent, with a wide range of speakers from the local to the  global like Jeremy Harmer, and a great audience of about 120 teachers from across the North.

Being originally from the North, I found it very heartening that ELT is developing so much outside the centres in the South and South-east, and finally students overseas (and especially their agents) are realising the benefits of moving further afield than the traditional and very overcrowded centres like Cambridge and Oxford.

Being originally from Manchester, though, it pains me slightly to admit how much our rival port of Liverpool has developed in recent years. The city centre and the docks have been completely transformed to create a tourist and cultural focus equal to many in Europe, and the swarms of European tourists in the streets underlined that this city has been radically improved.

The combination of successful investment with the traditionally friendly culture of the  city makes it a real pleasure to visit. More ELT conferences in Liverpool, please!

And hopefully we at the British Council can help by investing more energy in promoting the North, Wales and other less traditional destinations for learning English.

The city welcomed us to the historic Teatro Rosetti for 2 days of stimulating conference sessions and the celebration of the anniversary, followed by a reception and gala dinner at the glamorous Excelsior Palace on the seafront.

Despite the biting Bora wind, famous along this coastline in the autumn,  the hazy sun made it warm enough to visit the sights in the conference intervals – lunch along the Grand Canal, shopping in the chocolate exhibition, and hiking up to the medieval castle of San Giusto for panoramic views of the city and coastline. Too cold to stay long, but you can immediately see why this spot high above the city was the perfect defensive position for hundreds of years.

The location was deliberate – the founding Chair and co-founder of EAQUALS, Peter Brown, has run his school here, the British School of Trieste, for 40 years.

It was the vision of Peter and his co-founders Frank Heyworth, Javier Lacunza, Richard Rossner,  Virginia Cowley and Tony Duff that language schools could (and should) aspire to the highest standards of professionalism, in academic, business and customer service areas.

Building on Peter’s success in founding AiSLI with colleagues in Italy in 1979, setting new standards of inspection for Italian language schools, EAQUALS was set up in 1991 and developed a very rigorous inspection process which ensures to this day that learners, parents, and sponsors can be assured of high quality, reliability, and transparency in dealing with EAQUALS schools.

The conference ended with an inspiring speech by EAQUALS Chair Ludka Kotarska, reminding us of why we all work for quality in language education –  which will sustain members until the next conference meeting in Barcelona in April. Our final dinner was just outside the centre in the Antica Trattoria Suban, first opened in 1865 as a coaching stop for the Habsburg’s imperial trade route, which used Trieste as the port for Vienna.

Highlights of the conference (including the stunning musical performance of a local choir singing in 8 different languages) can be found here

This week we are privileged to host the annual EFNIL conference at Spring Gardens, the British Council  headquarters off Trafalgar Square.

EFNIL is the European Federation of National Institutes of Language – the institutions which promote and protect the use of national languages in the European Union. These organisations, such as the Institut für Deutsche Sprache, Dansk Sprognævn, Foras na Gaeilge and Délégation générale à la langue française et aux langues de France,  work hard to support teachers and learners in their countries, creating new research, publishing and disseminating new theory and practice, providing educational resources etc.

EFNIL ‘s mission is to provide “a forum for these institutions to exchange information about their work and to gather and publish information about language use and language policy within the European Union. In addition, the Federation encourages the study of the official European languages and a coordinated approach towards mother-tongue and foreign-language learning, as a means of promoting linguistic and cultural diversity within the European Union.”

In promoting linguistic diversity, EFNIL members are often concerned about the effects of the growth of English usage in their countries or in EU-wide institutions – in Brussels, in business, in Higher Education courses, and are naturally focused on ensuring that the use and development of their national languages are not negatively impacted by the use of a global lingua franca.

We share their concerns about the over-dominance of one language – even though we of course support the learning and teaching of English –  because we share our colleagues’ belief in a multilingual and multicultural Europe, where national and local languages thrive and all citizens have the opportunity to become plurilingual.

To support that aim, I chaired a panel discussion on ‘Multilingualism in the UK’ looking at how we can encourage more learning of modern languages in the UK. We heard some ground for optimism as language enrolments are starting to creep back up again after the drop in MFL study that followed the decision to make languages at secondary school optional.

More information and previous conference proceedings from www.efnil.org