Category Archives: IATEFL

IATEFL 2017

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IATEFL 2017 in the great city of Glasgow is finishing up after a busy, enjoyable and thought-provoking week for many in the ELT profession.

This year I really started to make use of my membership when unable to attend because of work and family commitments. I checked how the MaWSIG or Materials Writers Special Interest Group was getting on at their PCE on Monday and saw they’d had a great time. You can read about it here in Rachel Daw’s excellent post: Storify about the 2017 MaWSIG PCE.

I also watched the British Council interview with the world-renowned, erudite and extremely affable David Crystal. See it at: David Crystal interview at IATEFL 2017.

I haven’t had time to fully check out the presentations by contacts and mentors in my career so if  you are interested you can check out these links:

Rachael Roberts’ blog; Marie Delaney’s site  The Learning Harbour and Jo Gakonga’s site and links to videos on YouTube: Jo Gakonga elt teacher training.

Today, I have the task of rewriting some Secondary progress and end-of-year tests so the internet and Facebook are mainly switched off apart from research purposes. Come 4.00 pm GMT, I’ll be finishing off and either relaxing with a cuppa in the garden or heading into town for a well-deserved coffee.

 

 

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Learning Objectives for Young Learners

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During 2015 I helped with the development of the Young Learners learning objectives for Pearson’s Global Scale of English and co-presented the project with Mike Mayor at IATEFL in Manchester.

Since then, the learning objectives have been finalised and published. Teachers of 6-14 year olds can now use them to see what level of proficiency their learners have reached. You can download them at: https://www.english.com/blog/download-gse-young-learners or read them in this PDF: gse_lo_younglearners

They are also available as part of Pearson’s Teacher’s Toolkit at: https://www.english.com/gse/teacher-toolkit/user/lo

If you look at page 8 of the PDF, you can see how the learning objectives have been used to inform the lesson objectives and activities in Pearson’s Poptropica Primary course at Level 2. You can map the materials you use with your Primary learners to the learning objectives, so do have a go at seeing how these objectives can inform your teaching and let me know how you get on.

Teachers are invited to get involved with the project and Pearson welcomes feedback from teachers and ELT practitioners with experience of teaching children. You can send feedback at https://www.English.com/gse/contact

 

 

 

 

Post-IATEFL

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Well, our talk went down well at IATEFL and I am now back at my desk getting ready for the next stage of the Learning objectives for YLs project. This will be to reorder the descriptors to create a logical set and to incorporate the feedback from reviewers and either rewrite descriptors or send them for further analysis. I also need to assign a cognitive level to the descriptors, which will be quite a challenge. I’m looking forward to getting my teeth into the job, so to speak, and will keep you updated.

Getting ready for IATEFL

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I am finalising the presentation that I will be co-presenting with Mike Mayor from Pearson at this year’s UK IATEFL conference. It is about whether the Common European Framework can be adapted for use with Young Learners. I have heard back from Szilvia Papp (Cambridge English), Shelagh Rixon (freelance), Marianne Nikolov (Hungary) and Angela Hasselgreen (Norway) about recent research into this field and will be talking about this. More news soon.

YL can-do descriptors for rating

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I have just finished the second day of selecting can-do descriptors from a list of new and adapted ones to be sent out for rating. It involves carefully selecting descriptors that fill gaps in the current syllabus.

I will be co-presenting a workshop on this at this year’s IATEFL conference so come and find out more. We’re on in the morning on the Monday.

YL descriptors – progress update

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After a week visiting family, I have settled back into the daily routine. I have now finished content mapping all seven levels of a Primary course, and have now moved into the next phase of the project which is to pull out all of the new and adapted YL descriptors I and my fellow content mappers have created. Interesting if slightly gruelling work.

It’s now just over a month to IATEFL where I will be presenting on the YL can-do descriptors project so come and see me doing my thing in Manchester on the morning of Monday 13th April.

As February approaches…

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I am now splitting my time between content mapping a Primary course for Pearson and writing revised Primary test material, again for Pearson. On Monday I’m meeting my contacts at this publisher to plan my IATEFL workshop on how we have gone about producing can do descriptors for Pearson’s YL syllabus. Interesting times and I am enjoying it.