Thoughts from IATEFL Liverpool

With 20 plus talks in some slots, it's difficult to know what to go to. Methods of choosing include the random I'll-try-the-2nd-door-on-the-left method, the follow-a-friend technique and the popular in-search-of-TEFL-star approach.
I tried to be a little more coherent (although guilty of all three of the above on occasions) and went on the trails of ICT, Dogme and Task-based learning - a mix of personal interest and what seems relevant to our centre.
What follows are some thoughts and favourites as well as some links. Note that many of the talks can be watched at Liverpool Online, . 

1. Ipads & Web-based Tools

Apart from my own interest in web-based resources, I'm aware we've just bought a class set of Ipads for the teaching centre so I thought this was an important area to focus on.
i) One of the best talks I went to was by a colleague, Jon Parnham, from the Hong Kong teaching centre called Implementing Ipads In The Classroom. His talk was very relevant to us and I'll pass on more to the management and ICT teams here. During my stint on the BC stand, I got to learn a bit more about the 7 British Council apps - these will all appear on our new Ipads.
ii) Another session I really enjoyed was Nik Peachey's session called 'Evaluating Web-based Tools'.  Have a look at this simple site called TodaysMeet, which he had running throughout his talk, inviting participants to comment and ask questions. I used it with my Senior Advanced A class on Friday. In my task the students searched for interesting articles on their mobile phones and posted the links on TodaysMeet - homework is to choose an article and talk about it in the next class.

2. Getting rid of coursebooks?
A number of talks I went to were anti-Dogme, with coursebook writers justifying the way they make a living. I went to one talked entitled Dogme: A Coursebook Writer's response - a summary of which might be 'Dogme has some very valid points and useful ideas but you still need my coursebook'. Another session on this theme is The Decline & Fall of The Coursebook.
In the exhilaration of the conference, I started thinking it would be great to abandon our coursebooks. A more sober reflection is that, whilst that might not be possible or really desirable, we should be questioning the role of the coursebook as the de facto syllabus in our centre. Its place as chief source of material is one thing but shouldn't we be using our own syllubus-based learning outcomes as a starting-point for lesson planning?

3. My favourite talk
The most impressive talk for me was by Jane Willis, who is semi-retired, but one of the early advocates of the task-based approach. Task-based coursebooks never really took off (Cutting Edge was a watered down version) and as a result many of us are not very familiar with this approach. A pity because it's an approach that could revolutionise much of our teaching. I recommend having a look at the slides from her talk From Grammar Point To Task-Based Lesson. 

4. Poetry and Linguistic Imperialism
The conference treat was the closing plenary with Roger McGough, one of the 'Liverpool Poets' reading some of his work. Also worth watching was the excellent discussion organised by the British Council on Linguistic Imperialism. The 4-person panel was great but it was the contribution from the floor which really made it, including a question about why the British Council doesn't seem to promote the Welsh language!

If you ever get the chance to go to one of these big conferences, I strongly recommend it. I got to go this year on the strength that accommodation was provided free by family 'over the water'. I'll need a talk next year.

Dogme class ideas ;-)

For those of you who take Dogme very seriously, here's an antidote http://dogmeinaction.tumblr.com/page/2

An Introduction to Dogme

Last week, I led an insett at the British Council, Bilbao on Dogme.  We discussed dogme principles (see Scott Thornbury’s article ‘A Dogma for EFL' for more information) by contrasting them with a coursebook orientated approach and deciding which we agreed with more (thanks to Lee MacKenzie for this strategy).

We looked at some ideas from ‘Teaching Unplugged’ by Meddings & Thornbury (Delta Publishing, 2009) and a few I picked up from different sites on the net, of which I particularly recommend:

 - the Dogme Cookbook    

 - Dale Coulter’s Language Moments

 - Mike Harrison’s site

 Luke Meddings delivering a live lesson is also very useful to get a better idea of what a dogme lesson consists of.

At the end of the session we carried out a little survey. While only one of the teachers present felt they would like to adopt a completely dogme approach, everyone felt they would like to incorporate some of the approach into their teaching. But, as a colleague pointed out, they probably wouldn’t have come to the session if they hadn’t.

More dogme doings

If you're interested to know more about how dogme can actually work in a class situation, here's a video of Luke Meddings (co-author with Scott Thornbury of Teaching Unplugged) teaching a live session. Also included are his own reflections of how he thought the session went.

Oli Beddall offers a Dogme cookbook which is a series of useful suggestions for activities you can do in class followed up by ideas for focussing on the language that students produce. And if you're not convinced that the dogme approach is for you, check out the comments at the end of the post and you'll find that you're in good company.

In this post, Chia Suan Chong gives us an anatomy of a class in which the impetus was provided by photos her students had taken and how she (and her class) dealt with the language that emerged. And if you like her style, here's another post from her  - Only in a Dogme class… 

And to keep the balance, finally here's a post from Stephen Greene who feels that there's been an overload recently of dogme doings.

Are you ready to Dogme?

Dogme certainly seems to be one of the current buzz words in English language teaching – we've even had a dogme session here at our centre (thanks Peter!) So what is it? As I understand, it's all about making as much out of students' input into your class as you can. But don't take my word for it. There are a lot of experts out there ready to give their definitions and specific takes about its implications for what we do in our classes.

Check out:
Scott Thornbury's blog An A-Z of ELT  – and particularly the comments on his posts – for an unwinding debate about what dogme is all about. Scott wrote the classic on the subject - Teaching Unplugged (do we have a copy at our centre? We should!)

He co-wrote the book with Luke Meddings, who is currently the guest writer on the TeachingEnglish website. Lukes's already written there an article, 2 activities: Family snapshot and My wikipedia plus a blog post. And if these inspire you, why not take the opportunity to ask Luke a question while he's around on the  site? All you need to do is to add one to his blog post.

Another dogme blogger to look out for is David Coulter. David's blog – which is endearingly called Language Moments – is based around him providing lesson skeletons – not lesson plans – because if you've got a plan you've probably not got the right dogme mind set to go with the flow of how students are responding to your class. (So forget most of what you learnt on your CELTA/DELTA course!) I personally like his skeletons a lot – they're full of practical ideas for activities to do in class and are obviously the product of a teacher who reflects a lot about what works (and doesn't) in his class.

There are many more dogme ELT bloggers than the 3 I've mentioned here. Perhaps you can add them yourselves in a comment or write another blog post? Or if you've found this useful, let me know and I'll add a follow up.