My Cardiff IATEFL

There were nearly 2,000 delegates at the conference, a lot of people milling around with nowhere to sit. So here from the comfort of your swivel chair you can enjoy some of the interesting bits.



Barry Tomalin talking on the importance of cultural awareness in language teaching.

There's also a very good video interview with him on the teachingEnglish site plus his article on the same theme.



David Crystal on whether texting will affect the English language and why he maintains a blog (amongst other things).



Penny Urr on how to make bog standard vocabulary and grammar exercises more interesting.



Richard Gallen on his experience studying Spanish and how he wished his teacher would have corrected him more.



The Pecha Kucha evening (Pecha Kucha has been described as the antidote to death from PowerPoint) - a relaxed occasion when teachers showed that they can sometimes be both amusing and imaginative.

IATEFL conference Cardiff

The 3-day IATEFL conference in Cardiff was a real treat although the quality of the sessions varied greatly. My tip to conference-goers: Think very carefully before you go to a session which includes the words 'research findings' in the blurp.

The photo is from Ann Foreman's session - you can just make her out at the front. It's in the assembly room in Cardiff city hall, about 90 people came and the session went down really well, it made me want to try out Vokies in one of my class - just wonder whether it would work well with adult students.

There will be an Insett in May when participant at the recent Cardiff, Serville and Milan conferences will share new ideas and activities. Until then, here are a few interesting websites which came up in different presentations

1. Wordle Copy and paste texts or simply give a web address and it produces a word cloud based on the frequency of each word? Good fun but would be interested to hear ideas about how to make use of it with students?

2. One of the most inspiring talks was by Marc Prensky, who talks a lot about the problem of YL students being 'digital natives' whilst their teachers are mostly 'digital migrants'. He had ideas for making use of their mobile phones instead of always insisting that they 'power down'. One idea was to do SMS text polls e.g. for student - teacher feedback: ask the question, they text their response and you watch the results appear on the screen.

3. Found Magazine - a great authentic source of things, notes and letters which have been found by someone somewhere - plenty of opportunity for speculation as well as exposing students to really colloquial and informal English.

4. Lindsay Clanfield gave a talk at the Bilbao conference on last September. In Cardiff he gave a session on using lists. Click here for 6 ideas.