Newsletter 2021#22

Good morning

Last weekend, I attended the first ever online IATEFL International Conference. If you don't know about IATEFL, it's the International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language and it has a face to face conference every year that is totally awesome. The conference  was postponed last year and this year has had to go online for obvious reasons, but there was still a vast array of talks on a really wide range of ELT related topics. I have to say that it wasn't the same as a week of hobnobbing with an ELT 'tribe' in person, but hats off to the organisers for the amount of work involved.

This week, I'm giving the newsletter over to an IATEFL conference theme and if you feel inspired, you might want to think about going to the (hopefully face to face) event in May next year in Belfast.

Something old

I thought we'd kick off with a video summary of a talk I did at the conference when it was in Glasgow in 2017. It's called 'Brown and Levinson revisited; Politeness theory in post-observation feedback' and although it's mainly aimed at teacher trainers, I think it might be useful for teachers, too - we all have to deal with people and thinking about how you deliver 'feedback' (whatever that means in your context) is interesting (or at least I think so!)
 

Something new

This year, I was talking about feedback (again!), but this time thinking about how you can reflect on what you say by recording it and using transcription software to sloooow it down. As with the other talk, I think it'd be applicable to classroom talk, too! You can find the recording of the talk here.
 

Something borrowed

Finally,  I thought that it would be most remiss of me not to point you in the direction of some of the brilliant talks from past conferences that are still available to view. The British Council houses some at this site but when I looked this week, a lot of the videos are sadly unavailable (couldn't find out why). However, the ones for the 2017 conference still seem to be working, including a really inspirational talk by JJ Wilson and I also found an IATEFL Talks playlist from Cambridge University Press ELT on YouTube that has a star-studded line-up. Pop one of these on whilst you're having your coffee this morning and pep up your CPD!

See you all next week

Best

Jo