A report on the 18th IATEFL conference in Poznań

Four teachers¹ from NKJO in Leżajsk attended the IATEFL conference between 11th and 13th September 2009. The most useful and interesting lessons learnt are set out here.

IATEFL is an international organisation promoting TEFL related research and teacher training around the world. The annual conference of the Poland branch features speakers from Poland, the UK and other countries. Teachers attending these conferences can learn about the most up-to-date ideas on methodology, linguistics, phonetics and other areas related to teaching at all levels. This year’s conference was focussed on the use of new technology and the impact of globalisation.

Membership of IATEFL also gives teachers other benefits such as regional group meetings and specialist groups.
Getting off to the best possible start² was demonstrated with this advert which shows how you should not start too quickly but build up to a climax. There are strong psychological reasons why ‘you never have a second chance to make a first impression’. A good first impression will create a ‘halo’ which leads to a positive interpretation of everything else you do. A bad first impression will create ‘horns’ leading to negative opinions.
We are naturally attracted to a narrative: a story with a beginning, middle and an end. However we remember more at the start and the end: the so-called ‘primacy - recency effect’. Teachers should therefore break up lessons with actual breaks or enlivening physical exercises in order to have more beginnings and endings.
Bore’em or Board’em?³ , one of the most interesting talks, posed the question of what a teacher can do in a situation where they have a total lack of modern technological equipment, which is rare nowadays. The inspiration for the talk was a time when one of the speakers could not get the keys to take out the projector and was angrily asked by the janitor, ‘Well, what kind of teacher are you if you can’t teach a single lesson without technology?’ Although technology in the FLT classroom is important and useful, we should not forget that it is the teacher that can make a lesson interesting, not interactive whiteboards of projectors. Armed only with chalk and board along with some interesting ideas, supported by a little sense of humour, a teacher can conduct some truly worthwhile classes.
Creative use of the board⁴ is something that few teachers have paid enough attention to. We should think about and plan our board work. There are some mistakes to avoid, such as ‘hiding’ at the board or spending too much time writing on it and using capitals, because they signify SHOUTING! We should avoid writing single words on the board as they only encourage translation; instead we should use a corpus layout and phrases that convey grammatical information, such as a leg, an arm, short hair, to get up at 8. Rather than writing lists in a column we can ‘splatter’ phrases randomly around the board as students will have more work to do to discuss each item (more dynamic than working your way down a list).
Localising the course book⁵ is necessary because course books don’t connect with students’ lives; they are about places and people far away from the everyday reality of our students. The key to making that connection is vocabulary. Rather than giving a dictionary definition of a new word or phrase, the teacher can think of how it can be used to describe something that is part of the student’s experience, such as the weather, their work as a student or their life outside the school. This sends a message that English is not just for talking about how wonderful England and its people are but rather that it is relevant to the students’ lives.
However, with a million words in the language, we must ask the question: what vocabulary do students need?⁶ In fact, educated (but not higher educated) native speakers know only up to 20 thousand words; 8 or 9 thousand is enough to understand most texts and just 3 thousand words is enough to understand 86 percent of everyday native conversation. Dictionaries offer help in choosing which words are worth learning at each level. The Oxford Advanced Learners’ Dictionary shows a ‘key’ symbol next to words that are in those essential 3 thousand words. The Cambridge Advanced Learners’ Dictionary has three grades: essential, intermediate and advanced. The Macmillan English Dictionary has a system of stars indicating the importance of each word. The Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English gives the frequency of use in speaking and in writing. This is important as many words are mainly used in one or the other, such as ‘start’ (speaking) and ‘commence’ (writing). Polish students tend to write using too many informal spoken words, whereas Asian students tend to speak using too many formal written words. Teaching the more formal words, then, is important in Poland; so students can be given a text with a lot of (new) formal words which they have to find the informal equivalent for. Then they should write something using the new formal vocabulary. In specialised areas, students don’t actually need much help in learning ‘business’ or ‘computing’ vocabulary, for example, because these tend to be mostly nouns that are easily understood, grammatically uncomplicated and often met by students who are motivated to remember them. Students interested in these areas do need to learn general academic words that are used to put more complex sentences together. The Academic Word List contains 570 such words, like debate, achieve, objectives, issues, focus, assess, aspect of, equip with etc.
There are two kinds of reading: intensive reading, which is widely practiced in schools and language courses, and Extensive Reading⁷ , which is not. Intensive reading uses short texts that are written for the purpose of presentation of grammar structures or vocabulary items, whereas extensive reading is simply reading books for pleasure. A teacher in a Polish primary school has claimed to observe great improvement in student’s grammar and vocabulary after reading books in English. Also, very importantly, they actually enjoyed reading and their motivation for learning English increased greatly. With many ‘graded readers’ available, teachers of all levels can encourage their students to read for pleasure, and at least one hour every month should be devoted to reading in class (during which the teacher will also read their own book).
Using humour to train language and intercultural skills⁸ offers a lot of opportunity for students to have fun while practicing vocabulary (especially double meanings) and grammar. The internet is a great source of droodles, graffiti, acronyms, doctor jokes etc. In particular grammar rules for writers offers fun ways to make grammar points. A lot of humour, of course, is directed at other nationalities and the speakers from England knew that their Polish audience would enjoy jokes about one particular neighbour, such as: ‘Life is too short to learn German’ and ‘German humour needs to be taken seriously’ (from Oscar Wilde).
Games and shared activities to introduce children to the written form of English⁹ can help teachers to understand exactly how children learn to read and write. Reading is actually guessing: As lnog as the fsirt and lsat lrettes of ecah wrod are crrocet, poelpe do not hvae any porlbem radenig tehm if tehy arladey konw how tehy sunod. There is, however, a danger that the spelling might have an effect on pronunciation, so it is important to hear and say the word at the same time as learning the written form. Writing is actually inventing, as children learn to think for themselves and take risks. Mistakes, then, can actually be a positive sign of progress as they have ‘internalised’ spelling rules but simply misapplied them in this word. Teachers need to notice that, for example, a child who writes ‘jirafe’ has learnt that ‘j’ is the correct spelling of /dz/ in most of the words that begin with this sound, but they have not learnt the exception yet. Therefore spelling is not black and white, but we have to look carefully to see signs of progress.
What makes spoken English unbearable¹⁰ is that spelling is the enemy of good pronunciation. In Italian, for example, the letter ‘a’ is pronounced /a/, ‘o’ is /o/ and ‘i’ is /i/. So we know how to pronounce ‘la tavola pitagorica’. However, in English the letter ‘a’ is pronounced /I/ in village, /e/ in many, /æ/in map, /a:/ in sharp, /a/ in what, /a:/ in war and /ə/ in along. This leads to two different types of mispronunciation. The first to correct is the pronunciation of the spelling of particular words, such as ‘Thames’, ‘work’ and ‘comfortable’ as these mistakes are very noticeable. The next priority is to correct the phonological interference where students are using a close equivalent from Polish in place of the correct sound, as in cat /ket/, that /vat/ and thin /fin/. The latter group are the characteristic mispronunciations that make up the Polish accent.
English: alive and kicking¹¹ reminded us that English is constantly evolving, not only under the influence of native speakers but of foreign learners too. No one owns English and there is no standard accent, but all accents (see a fine example) are valid. There is now a popular idea of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) out of the control of ‘natives’. The language is changing to meet new needs in examples such as shortened words and acronyms in electronic texts and new words like al desko, furkid, me time, shopgrifting, digital native and chugger¹² .
When giving Feedback¹³ it is essential to remember the difference between the motivational (‘keep up the good work’) type and the constructive (‘you need to make changes’) type. We too often forget to encourage students with positive comments whereas in fact we should be giving such motivational feedback at a ratio of five-to-one more than the critical constructive type.

As George Pickering said in his talk, teachers attend conferences such as this not only for the lectures and workshops but also (and perhaps mostly) to meet new people, catch up with old friends and visit the book stalls (where participants could browse through or purchase the latest FLT books from different publishers).
Many social events were planned, including the very fashionable Nordic walking, for which many conference participants got up early in the morning, unfortunately not including the instructor.

The best social event was ‘Drums and Pipes’ - a performance of Scottish music accompanied by interesting and educational historical facts and anecdotes.
The conference, then, was a worthwhile, mind-broadening experience which provided us with some reminders of what we should be doing, together with some new ideas and inspiration that can be taken into our classrooms.

[1] D.Błoch, E.Pawik, B.Duda and I.Upchurch
[2] A talk by George Pickering
[3] By Czesław Kinski and Jacek Łagun
[4] By Paul Seligson
[5] By Hugh Dellar
[6] By Mike Mayor
[7] A talk by David A. Hill
[8] By Geoff Tranter
[9] By Jane Cadwallader
[10] By Sylwester Łodej
[11] By Grzegorz Spiewak
[12] Meaning respectively: ‘sitting at your desk’, ‘a pet to test what having a child will be like’, ‘time for yourself’, ‘buying, briefly using, and returning an item for a refund’, ‘a young person who has grown up with technology’ and ‘a charity collection mugger’.
[13] By Anna Gebka-Suska