Keynote and plenary speakers

CONFERENCE KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

Adrian Underhill
A black belt at learning from experience?

Galya Mateva & Svetlana Dimitrova-Gyuzeleva
Multilingualism in the Classroom

Keith Kelly
Cross-curricular projects for the language classroom

Tim Bowen
The mad, bad, crazy world of English

PRE-CONFERENCE EVENT PLENARY SPEAKERS

John Clegg
English teachers in CLIL programmes: acquiring new skills

Phil Ball
Do you want your students to learn language? Then stop teaching it

Adrian Underhill

(sponsored by Pilgrims, UK)

I work as a consultant with schools wishing to develop their organizational intelligence, and as a trainer conducting programmes on facilitation and leadership skills. Current positions include educational consultant to Study Group UK, principal tutor on the Oxford University summer seminar for EL teachers, and trainer on Pilgrims teacher programmes. Prior to 1999 I was Director of the International Teacher Training Institute at IH Hastings.  I am series editor of the Macmillan Books for Teachers, author of Sound Foundations: Learning and Teaching Pronunciation, and recently brought out SOUNDS: The Pronunciation App. Current interests include applications of action inquiry and reflective practices in professional learning, and the role of improvisation in teaching.

Plenary:
A black belt at learning from experience?
Our potential is great, perhaps greater than we can imagine, yet to move towards it what we need is not more action, or even different action, but learning from our action. Francisco Varela claims we have a ‘blind spot’ for learning from experience, and this is where inquiry and reflective practice come in, proposing ways not only of learning from experience but of construing our experience so that we can learn from it. I will look at some practical approaches to professional inquiry for teachers, at ways of living our teaching as inquiry, or living our classroom as an adventure park for learning…

Keith Kelly

Keith Kelly is an experienced teacher and teacher trainer and a team member of Science Across the World. Founder and coordinator of the Forum for Across the Curriculum Teaching (FACT), Keith was coordinator of the English Across the Curriculum project for the British Council in Bulgaria. Keith is author of the Macmillan Science and Geography Vocabulary Practice Series and is consultant to Macmillan’s onestopclil website. He has also written resources and textbooks for the Zurich Educational Publishing House and OUP. Keith was made a Fellow of IUPAC (The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry) for contributions to the programme and has been working on educational projects mainly focusing on the teaching of content through the medium of English. (keithpkelly@yahoo.co.uk)

Plenary:
Cross-curricular projects for the language classroom
Language teachers are constantly asked to bring the outside world into class. One way to do this is to engage learners in project work which gets them to investigate their world and the world around them. This plenary aims to:
- discuss the value of project-based language learning;
- present ideal topics for language learning;
- give practical project examples;
- offer colleagues ‘a place to get started’ on projects.

Tim Bowen

(sponsored by Pilgrims, UK)

Tim Bowen has taught English and trained teachers in more than 20 countries, including Russia, China, Brazil, Germany, Hungary, Switzerland and Poland. He graduated in Slavonic languages at the University of Leeds, did a postgraduate Certificate in Education (TESL) at the University College of North Wales, Bangor, and has an MPhil in the field of TEFL from the University of Southampton. He is co-author of The Pronunciation Book (Longman) and Inside Teaching (Macmillan) and author of Build Your Business Grammar (Heinle), as well as co-author of the student portfolios for the Straightforward series (Macmillan) and author of the teachers’ editions for the Attitude, Expressions, Open Mind, Master Mind and New Inspiration series (Macmillan). He has been a regular contributor to the Macmillan Onestopenglish site since its inception in 2001. His interests include contrastive linguistics, etymology and, of course, pronunciation. He is currently a free-lance teacher trainer, author and translator.

Plenary:
The mad, bad, crazy world of English
We will take a tour through some of the stranger aspects of English. We will look at words past and present, examples of new expressions that may or may not be here to stay, and examine some of the more absurd examples of native-speaker usage.

John Clegg

(sponsored by Macmillan and the British Council Bulgaria)

John Clegg is a freelance education consultant based in London UK. He specialises in education through the medium of English as a second language in primary and secondary schools. He works mainly with teachers, schools and education authorities in content and language integrated learning in Europe, in English-medium and bilingual education in Africa, the Middle East and Asia and in multicultural education in the UK. He works in a research capacity on language and literacy in Africa at the University of Bristol; he has also recently taught on CLIL programmes at NILE Norwich and the University of Nottingham and on English as an Additional Language at the London Institute of Education. He has recently worked as lead consultant to the Qatar academic language programme for English-medium teachers of maths and science. He has also written content-based ELT materials for the Canton of Zurich in Switzerland.

Plenary:
English teachers in CLIL programmes: acquiring new skills
English teachers working with subject colleagues in CLIL programmes need to learn new things. Firstly they need to teach aspects of the language of subject learning. Secondly they need to learn something about the subject. Thirdly they need to practise collaboration with subject teachers – on planning, materials, assessment, co-teaching and whole-school policy. This presentation will outline some of the ways in which English teachers in CLIL programmes need to modify conventional practice.

Phil Ball

(sponsored by Macmillan and the British Council Bulgaria)

Phill Ball is a CLIL-based materials writer and teacher-trainer based in the Basque Country. He taught Phonetics and Linguistics at the University of Deusto for several years before moving into materials writing and teacher-training for the Basque Government and then for the Federation of Basque Schools, and has been closely involved with their successful multilingual project ‘Eleanitz’.  He has also worked in England, Peru, Oman and Qatar. He works on the language and pedagogy courses for the University of the Basque Country, and has written a series of CLIL textbooks for the Basque schools’ social science syllabus (studied in English), which are also being used now in the wider Spanish curriculum. He has also developed and written a series of textbooks for the English syllabus, specifically designed to support the conceptual and procedural demands of the social science materials.

Plenary:
Do you want your students to learn language? Then stop teaching it
One of the problems with language teaching is that it often tries too hard to teach language.  That may seem paradoxical, but it remains true that language teachers have struggled for decades to establish a valid basis for the content of their lessons.  It has never been easy to find a satisfactory way to marry linguistic and conceptual/topical content.
CLIL, given the appropriate conditions, can enrich a language syllabus by introducing real reasons for using English.  This talk will try to show how CLIL makes this alleged contribution.