Innovate ELT is one of the freshest conferences in English language teaching, held every May in Barcelona. This year Becky Hill, a Senior Editor at Cambridge University Press, went along to find out more.
This was my first time attending Innovate ELT, and going in I wasn’t sure what to expect. On the heels of IATEFL, perhaps I was picturing vast lecture theatres and large audiences. Instead, what I found was a relaxed, intimate conference where delegates were encouraged to mingle and chat.
Plenary sessions were given outside under palm trees in the glorious Spanish sunshine, and the half-hour talks kept things dynamic and pacey. As part of this year’s theme of ‘Power to the Learner’, we heard not just from experts and teachers, but also from language learners themselves as they reflected on their own ELT experiences.
Ideas abounded, but a few questions really stuck with me from the talks I attended…
1) What are the pillars of polyglottery?
One of my conference highlights was hearing from professional polyglot Lýdia Machová, who has taught herself eight languages to B2 level or above over sixteen years. She put forward four ‘pillars’ of successful language learning, inspired by polyglots:
• finding the fun in how you learn
• exposing yourself to a huge quantity of new language
• practising at the high frequency needed to become fluent
• developing a system of habits so that language learning becomes a routine part of life
Lýdia herself practises the Gold List method, which involves distilling a vocab list down over a number of weeks until you remember every item. Her session emphasised that polyglots value vocabulary acquisition far more than learning grammar rules, and that they learn languages in lexical chunks, rather than as isolated words.
2) What is an empowered learner?
In their talk on Empowering the Digital Language Learner, Sylvia Johnson and Bindi Clements of Learnlight gave their thoughts on what makes a language learner truly empowered:
• The learner is self-directed and needs-driven
• They are discerning about the content of the materials they use
• They have a strong motivation to study, and know how to use learning materials effectively
• They feel confident, and are in a low-risk environment where they are able to make mistakes
• They take responsibility for their own learning, and are accountable for it
They advise that language learning should be flexible, delightful and relevant. We can encourage this by giving students greater autonomy over where and when they study, how they study, and what they study. They also emphasised the importance of giving learners the opportunity to analyse and reflect on what they have learned, as a tool towards greater empowerment.
3) What can we do about the ‘hidden curriculum’?
Ilá Coimbra’s talk drew heavily on Jill Hadfield’s ideas of the covert syllabus – the unspoken values, behaviours, beliefs and perspectives that are subtly expressed in course books. Ilá posited that course books can be very limited in how they portray social norms, and offered her ideas on what teachers can do to raise their students’ awareness of this hidden curriculum, and encourage them to challenge any potentially harmful preconceptions they encounter.
Acknowledging that not all course books are equally guilty, and that publishers are tied by the needs and sensitivities of their markets, Ilá directed the delegates to be mindful of what they see in the materials they use, especially around:
• gender and class stereotypes
• heteronormativity
• social standards – ideas of beauty, success, happiness and aspirations
She argued that a lack of representation can reinforce existing hegemonic stereotypes, and that the teacher can help address this by adapting activities to bring ‘the excluded’ up, and by leading their students to question the ‘normality’ expressed in the materials they are using.
4) What makes an activity into a ‘game’?
Thinking about the challenge of engaging millennials, Elena Peresada, who organises the Trendy English conference in Russia, focused her session on how we can bring the appeal of playing games into the ELT classroom in a meaningful and enjoyable way. She argued that many staples of the ELT teacher toolkit (e.g. Find Someone Who) are not really games at all. For her, the essential elements of a game are:
• You can win or lose
• You can devise your own strategy
• You can make meaningful decisions
• There must be a goal to aim for
She also pointed out that not all games need to be PvP (=player versus player) in which the students would compete against each other to win. They can equally be PvE (=player versus environment) in which the students can collaborate to play against the game itself.
As a starting point for teachers of millennials who want to add more game elements into their lessons, she suggested a PBL system, which stands for Points, Badges and Leader board. While this is not technically a game itself, it can be a useful stepping stone on the road to introducing more competition into the classroom.
You can find out more information about the Innovate ELT conference here.