Report by Sara Hannam

I always find it difficult to choose which talk to go to at any conference as I find myself wanting to go to all of them! IATEFL is no exception. Imagine having to choose from up to 20 different topics running simultaneously - all promising a stimulating presentation of new ideas or approaches. What a fantastic way to spend 5 days in the UK - I would thoroughly recommend all TESOL members to consider joining IATEFL and coming to the next conference in 2005 to be held in Cardiff (Wales).

Liverpool's famous Adelphi Hotel provided the backdrop for this year's conference. I attended most of the major plenary talks and was overwhelmed by the feeling that this really is an exciting time to be part of the global ELT family. Old norms and values and outdated ways of thinking are giving way to a new view of teaching English which awards equal ownership to all users of the language. Several talks on this subject caused animated and engaged discussions among the audience. Jennifer Jenkins in her talk on ELF (English as a Lingua Franca) pointed out that 'while lingua franca functions are welcomed by non-native and native speakers alike, its lingua franca forms are regularly relegated to the status of errors'. Jennifer went on to urge practitioners to consider this contradiction in their own pedagogy. She posited that teachers need to beware the tendency towards becoming custodians of 'correct' English. Some of her suggestions regarding how ELF can move forwards are a) avoiding the direct teaching of idiomatic language that is context specific and cannot be understood by a wide audience of ELF speakers b) having an awareness of the core of ELF pronunciation goals which are significantly less than you would imagine - mutual comprehensibility should be the only goal c) encouraging the development of accommodation skills (i.e. ELF speakers finding ways to fill in the gaps in each other's language knowledge to make communication meaningful) and d) raising awareness of different varieties of global English.

Other plenaries included Bill VanPatten who talked about his view that L1 and L2 acquisition are fundamentally the same in terms of underlying processes, Rama Mathew considered the issue of sustaining on-going professional development and practical enquiry through the idea of involving teachers as researchers in curriculum renewal projects and finally Adrian Holliday looked at the issue of 'natives' and 'non-natives' and argued that this divide is a political construct. Adrian put forward the idea that the 'us' and 'them' divide has existed for many years in the world of ELT and shapes perceptions in terms of relationships between teachers/students and between teachers themselves. He gave a number of examples from his own professional development as he moved through the process of becoming more aware that the global ELT community should be an inclusive 'we' - Adrian argued that this is only possible if we all tackle the cultural prejudice that exists, recognizing and naming it for what it is.

Apart from the plenaries, there was a lively debate organized by the Editor of the English Language Teaching Journal, Keith Morrow, the motion of which was: 'A corpus doesn't help teachers and learners much in the classroom. What they want is materials based on imagination, creativity, and experience'. For the motion was Michael Swan (author of Practical English Usage) and against the motion was Mike McCarthy (author of the English Vocabulary in Use series). Both speakers put forward convincing arguments, Michael Swan claiming that the corpus is not usable by teachers in its raw form, as examples of 'real' language can also be invented by the teacher themselves which allows them to tailor make samples directly for their students' needs - he argued this would inevitably make them more interesting. Mike McCarthy responded by arguing that the corpus is extremely useful for non-native teachers of English as it provides quick and contextualized samples that would be otherwise difficult to obtain - he drew on his own experience of having first been a teacher of Spanish as a foreign language. He also disputed the fact that using corpus based data needs to be boring or un-creative as it depends what is done with it by the teacher. Mike's point was supported by several speakers in the audience who (as non-native teachers of English) said they found corpus an indispensable source of living language. The audience were asked to decide (by shouting their approval!) who should "win", but the overwhelming majority indicated that they were both right, and that corpus can be used alongside the invaluable experience and creativity of the teacher. Ah well, most debates are "straw" arguments after all!

I also attended the Associates Day on behalf of TESOL Macedonia-Thrace, Northern Greece, the aim of which was to give our organization a more international profile and find out what is happening for associate members like us. I made some very useful contacts and found out some more information on issues of funding, making the most of our website and organizing events. By night, I had the pleasure of seeing local Liverpool poet Levi Tafari who tantalized the audience with his fantastic dub-poetry, a mixture of local Liverpool dialect and his native Jamaican variety of English. Calling himself an Urban Griot, he fully engaged the audience in an interactive poetry session on subjects ranging from love to the environment to education. I also had the pleasure of meeting another member of TESOL Macedonia-Thrace, Northern Greece from Serres at the conference and several colleagues from TESOL Greece.

I arrived back in Thessaloniki tired but fuelled by a renewed enthusiasm for English Language Teaching. I met teachers from Iceland, Spain, Hungary, Senegal, India, Pakistan, Germany and France, all of whom share in a love for their profession. I am definitely going back next year - why not join me so we can make the contingent from the Macedonia Thrace area even bigger and stronger!

I cannot begin to say how pleased I am to have attended such a great conference! The first impression of a crowded floor, echoing with hundreds of conversations between ELT professionals from all over the world is a moment to hold.

No matter how cold the weather, a cup of coffee between sessions was enough to keep you going again as you wondered through the publishers’ exhibition collecting tones of brochures and samples.

I spent only three days in Cardiff and I’ve only managed to attend a handful of sessions, but it is quality that matters, not quantity, and all the sessions that I attended were interesting in their own way. This is a review of them.

Early Thursday morning there was a session not to be missed as Suresh Canagarajah gave a talk on ‘Globalization of English and changing pedagogical priorities’. He referred to globalization as a model that features relatively more fluid relations between languages and dialects through the mobility of workers and the expansion and integration of languages. These changes encourage everyone to negotiate different varieties of English that distort the original by giving it a local twist. The appropriation of English by speakers to cater for their particular communication needs affects teaching and questions the norms of pedagogy. Which sort of English should we teach, and how are we to avoid the curse of Babel? On the other end of Mac Communication pedagogies of one size fits all, Canagarajah proposed that English professionals are compelled to engage with the changes and learn from language practices that seek to challenge the dominant by constructing pedagogical practices that value linguistic pluralism. His answer made evident the need to focus on strategies that would help our students negotiate communication, rather than focus on the instruction of one and only homogeneous language.

Arguably Canagarajah celebrates the opportunities for difference and later on that afternoon Sara Hannam challenged uniformity as she discussed the issue of ‘Accent Prejudice in ELT’.

Considering the importance of the socio-historical context as a factor that shapes up her participants’ views regarding accent, Sara insightfully compared two groups of ELT practitioners, one living in the UK and the other in Greece, by focusing mainly on two accents, the international English-Greek one and the regional Liverpool one. In order to deconstruct prejudice towards the Liverpool accent by the British participants, the speaker presented a complete past and present background of the area and attempted a link with the media to show how ‘scousers’(people from Liverpool) are portrayed as stereotypically bad and dangerous and how this stigmatizes their accent, being an integral part of their identity. In their own respect, the Greek participants conform to their own version of the dominant as they fall for the supposed superiority of the native speaker accent for classroom instruction compared with the English-Greek one. As both groups failed to question the imposed stereotypical conception of accent, she wondered whether assimilation to the environment to change accent, or resistance to maintain the right to speak differently should be the goal of ELT pedagogy. To facilitate our choice, Sara reminded us of the dangers of assimilation, as they demand the abandonment of difference in order to pay the price for uniformity. Teachers have the ethical responsibility to strip accent off prejudice, not off difference.

After rearranging the room, Kirsten Holt begun her workshop on ‘Meaningful pronunciation for the classroom’. This hour-long session was devoted to teachers who find it hard to teach pronunciation. Kirsten claimed that working on pronunciation can bring another dimension to language learning and that it doesn’t have to be boring and theoretical. And it wasn’t, as there was a selection of everything, from tongue twisters to practicing the articulation of separate sounds, from phonological versions of ‘the hangman’, to songs and games. But what I thought was the most useful of all and also a chance to meet the people around you was the group evaluation of existing material and the effort to propose additional or adaptive material to the original. Arguing that each group of learners is different, and that the perfect coursebook does not exist, Kirsten challenged us to think outside the box in order to make pronunciation more accessible to our learners.

The next day, I was present to a talk by Neil Cowie on ‘Investigating students emotions in the ELF classroom’. Encouraged by the idea that language teachers need to sensitize to students’ emotions in order to support their learning, the speaker conducted a study to examine his students’ feelings about learning English. Through the five-minute reflective activity at the end of every lesson he established how important it is to the students to experience their classroom as a community and how significant it is to them when their teacher manages to provide the opportunities for such a community to be created.

Following that day Andreja Hazabent made us all play a wonderful boardgame called ‘Culture Shock’ that she had designed herself with some friends to teach her students how learning a language and learning about the culture behind it go hand in hand. Besides the linguistic aim of the game, it also offers students the opportunity to test their knowledge and learn more about the history, geography, arts, sports and everyday lives of English-speaking countries. The aim of the workshop was of course to have fun, but also to think of ways how such a game could be implemented in our classrooms.

Finally, the ELT Journal Debate on the ‘Common European Framework(We don’t need bureaucrats to tell us how to teach!)’ featuring Kari Smith (Oranim College of Education) and Frank Heyworth (Secretary General of EQUALS) and chaired by Philip Prowse attracted a lot of people that afternoon. Smith argued for breaking the framework on the grounds that it is a top-down managerial construct that serves the economies of performance rather than fostering the complexities of the ecologies of practice. She also claimed that it is a cumbersome, old-fashioned and confusing piece of work that caters for standards of competence instead of standards of opportunities. On the other hand, Heyworth regards CEF to be a book indicative of where teaching is now, a non-prescriptive attempt to list available options and to free learners from the tyranny of schools as they create their own learning biographies. He also argued that it is valuable as it offers teachers a common language and it consists an open invitation for reflecting on teaching and assessing practices. After the presentation of the two contrasting viewpoints people from the audience participated with enthusiasm posing questions to the speakers. The voting process was nothing like I have experienced before as the winner was regarded the side that made the most noise by stabbing their feet, shouting, whistling and clapping. But the result was ambiguous, as the room seemed torn in half skeptical of the presentations of the two brilliant speakers.

And that full noisy room was the last thing in mind that I carry from the conference.

Signing out I want to thank all the speakers whose sessions I’ve enjoyed, and also express my gratitude to the people of IATEFL for granting me this year’s First-Time Speaker Scholarship which gave me the chance to travel to Cardiff, otherwise a financially impossible goal.

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