Written by: Rebecca Sprengel

When so many aspects of life are being reduced, it is hard to find something really new. Well, the first inter-ELTA online conference was, if I’m not mistaken, a world premiere! 7 ELTAs, 8 speakers and over 60 participants spent a whole Saturday listening, talking and chatting about a huge variety of topics. These were: Marketing Yourself, Universal Design for Learning, Screencasting, BE material, Articulation, Fighting fossilisation, Teaching English through Food and Caring for your Voice. Slides were made available, we chatted in breakout rooms, and just when we felt the last drop of energy draining away, Frances Lucey, English teacher and soprano at the Bavarian State Opera got us all alert again. We stood up and did some loosening up exercises, followed by a number of vocal warm ups. Finally, as a reward, she sang “Away in a manger” so beautifully that we all had goose bumps.

The first inter-ELTA day was such a success that, not surprisingly, the next one is already in the pipeline. Read the reports of various talks written by your ELTAS committee members.

 

Business English Material – Where are we now?
Evan Frendo, ELTA BB, Besig Coordinator
Written by Rebecca Sprengel, ELTAS events / newsletter

As a business English trainer, writer and former BESIG Coordinator, I was especially interested to hear what Evan Frendo had to say about Business English Materials. In his very professional talk, he told us that “most big publishers produce business English materials, yet many trainers claim to rarely use them”. He looked at good practice in current BE teaching materials and concluded with a checklist of key criteria: needs based, authentic language, relevant business content, multimodality, flexibility and ease of use. He went on to tell us that our clients need “language of doing business” rather than “language of talking about business”. Some examples of language of doing business are: socialising and small talk, emails, meetings with suppliers, presentations and reading contracts. He surprised a lot of us when he said that the use of the first conditional is not commonly used in authentic business communication. Publishers are now producing in-company and tertiary material in one pack, less ESP books and targeting the adult market as a whole rather than just BE learners. Not surprisingly, technology is playing an increasingly important role with blended learning, online delivery and “Pepper”. A robot teaching assistant who can speak up to 15 languages and provide translation via Cloud services – and, Evan emphasised, is much more patient than a human. Will Pepper take over?

 

 

Screencasting – how to use video to give corrective feedback on written work
Claire Smith ELTAU, Ulm
Written by Karin Scheffold-Mokler, ELTAS events coordinator

With her very enthusiastic and motivating talk, Claire Smith introduced www.screencast-o-matic.com to the participants.
Claire showed us how to use the above website “video creation for everyone” which is easy to handle and makes the teacher’s corrections more personal and easier to understand for the students. They can watch the video again and again listening to the teacher speaking or explaining grammar etc. (blended learning).
Important information: You can use this website for free!

Claire Smith recommended starting the video feedback by first saying what was good in the student’s written text before starting with your corrections and explanations…
She demonstrated one of her video corrections of a student’s written work to us using screencast-o-matic.com and underlined that using this website was absolutely time-saving for the teacher.

 

 

Language production – slips of the tongue
Andrea Vogt-Nas, ELTAS
Written by Ingrid Abele, ELTAS Treasurer

The deputy chair and very dedicated ELTAS-member Andrea Vogt-Nas talked about language production often causing slips of the tongue. She has a background in psycholinguistics and many years of experience in working on speech production of students of all ages.
The workshop started off by finding out how many languages the participants speak and which phonological issues were most difficult.
Andy put together a simplified version of one of many models and explained it as follows:
When you have an idea which you would like to put into words, you try to find and fit the right words into the ongoing speech. In addition, you think about the right syntax, grammar and functional assignment. Then finally you are able to communicate what is on your mind. This all happens extremely fast and we don’t even realize what complex associations are going on.
Afterwards some participants were asked to read tongue twisters out loud and the others had to make notes on all the blunders they noticed and think about the reason for the pronunciation problems.
Some reasons for making mistakes could be that we anticipate the wrong sound, exchange letters or mix up words just to name three error categories out of seven.
Being aware of how language is produced in language teaching helps us to see where and why malfunction takes place. With help of the different classroom activities offered, we can assist our students in becoming aware of their own speech errors.
This talk was very inspiring for me to see how I can help my students speak more naturally. They often have a good range of vocabulary but somehow the language flow doesn’t seem to be quite right. With these new insights I hope to be able to help my students make noticeable progress in improving their speaking skills.