Presenter
Graham Hall
When?
Wednesday, 5 June 2013
10:30 am–12:00 pm ET
Find the program start time in your local area. Who Should Attend?
Teachers, teacher educators, policy makers, and others involved in ELT/TESOL teaching and learning.
Registration
Cost: Free for members; US$45 for nonmembers
Register Online Register by Fax or Email (PDF) Registration Deadline: 31 May 2013 Registering After the Deadline Please review this important information: About Your Registration Accessing Your Virtual Seminar More About This Seminar
For much of the last century, the field of English language teaching (ELT) assumed that English is best taught and learned without the use of the students' own language(s). In recent years, however, this monolingual assumption has been questioned, and a re-evaluation of teaching has begun that relates the language being taught to the students' own language. Despite this recent change, however, there is very little data that actually documents the extent and purpose of own-language use in ELT.
This virtual seminar focuses on a study that used a global survey of almost 3,000 teachers in more than 100 countries to investigate how learners' own languages are used within ELT and how English language teachers around the world perceive own-language use.
The seminar addresses the potential disconnect between theory and practice and between theorists and teachers to recognize the conflicts that language teachers and learners feel about own-language use in ELT.
What Will I Learn?
Participants will
- Consider (or reconsider) the professional and methodological debates surrounding own-language use in ELT.
- Explore the possible ways in which use of the learners’ own language(s) may facilitate and support language learning in the classroom.
- Reflect upon the role of the learners’ own language in their own professional context/classroom.
Discussion Questions
- What is meant by own-language use? Why might this term be preferable to first language, L1, or native language?
- Why is an interest in, and re-evaluation of, own-language use emerging now?
- Why and how might teachers and learners use the learners’ own language in class? What are its possible pedagogic functions?
- How might own-language use support language learning?
- Is it possible to find an appropriate or optimal level of own-language use? Who should decide this?
- What attitudes do teachers (and learners) hold towards own-language use?
- To what extent are own-language use practices and beliefs influenced by contextual or background issues such as the type of institution, the English language level of the learners, and the teachers’ own experience?
- How is own-language use seen and discussed within the wider TESOL profession?
- Is there a potential gap between mainstream ELT theory, methodology, and literature and teachers’ practices in actuality?
About the Presenter
Graham Hall is senior lecturer in applied linguistics at
Northumbria University, where he teaches on the following programs: master of arts in applied linguistics for TESOL, master of arts in TESOL, and bachelor of arts in English language. He has been involved in English language teaching and TESOL for 20 years, as a teacher and teacher educator in a variety of contexts. His research interests range from classroom discourse to the cultural politics of TESOL. He is the editor of
ELT Journal and the author of
Exploring English Language Teaching: Language in Action, winner of the British Association for Applied Linguistics Book Prize 2012.