IATEFL Chronicles, Day 2

Day 2 is over. After a wonderful Pecha Kucha event hosted by Jeremy Harmer, I almost forgot my tiredness, sleeplessness ( my biologic rhythm, unfortunately, hasn’t realised yet that I’m in Brighton and I keep waking up exactly at the same time I have to get up at home)Last year I watched the PK live at home while doing the ironing. That night I really wanted to be there and promised myself to do my best to be able to attend the next IATEFL and it just happened and I was there with my friends and enjoyed watching the amazing Pecha Kucha presenters. For me, PKs are very difficult as you have to present something and at the same time you have to be humorous, witty, engaging and fast. I congratulate on all of them for the beautiful work they did today.

Well, today I and Karin had also enjoyed ourselves walking around Brighton with 23 other delegates. Our guide was great and I can say she was a wonderful storyteller as well. Walking through the lanes, she told us stories and really made the moments of the tour memorable for us.

OK, I had some fun today but of course I attended many sessions, toured the book exhibition,poster presentations, lost my little notebook where I had jotted down my blog post notes. Anyway, here comes a brief summary of my day 2

One of the sessions I attended and enjoyed very much was of Carole Robinson’s workshop called, ‘Visualising language-Activities to make language stic’. She pointed out that when we use visualisations in class, motivation increases. As she said if we give a chance for our students to visualise, they will remember better. She repeated that everybody has a different way to remember things and during the activities we had done we really saw how different our learning strategies were.

Here I’m listing some activities and notes from the workshop.

• Play instrumental music and ask students to choose a picture from a handout you gave or ask them to draw their own picture of the place.
• Use Guided fantasy. Take them somewhere and make them visualise that place and then ask them to describe.
• Tell them to draw the picture of the key vocabulary they learnt during the lesson.
• Ask them to bring a favourite photo and describe it.

What can we teach and practise using visualisations

• Language of reasoning
• Senses
• Comparison
• Tenses
• Adjectives
• Modals

The other session I want to write about was of Janet Bianchini’s wonderful presentation of web 2.0 tools. The talk was called ‘Teaching Idioms effectively with web 2.0 tools’. Janet Bianchini was one of the first people I started following and she immediately followed and helped me in the twitterverse. Reading her blog, I knew how creative and hardworking she was and I just wanted to be present at her session. It was a fabulous introduction to web 2.0 tools. She presented everything in a very clear and meaningful context that everybody who was not familiar with web 2.0 tools had an idea and a desire to use them.

The talk was how to teach idioms. She showed great sites where we can find definitions, drawings, examples of idioms. She wrote a story using many idioms and those idioms appeared on a web 2.0-tool-parade. You will find the slides here on Brighton Online  and from her blog.