TESOL France 2014 flew by again over the weekend (14-16 November). This year I presented a poster on using PirateBox in class. I felt there was quite a strong interest in this and pleased that some may take up the challenge of using it. I know of one teacher in Germany, paulw @josipa74, who has set up the open-wrt version on a portable router. Hoping to read about more take-ups in the future. The poster handouts went quickly and I had more which I had forgotten to replace!
I had an interesting question about the security of PirateBox for Android from one conference attendee, he was concerned with technically able students being able to look at other folders on his phone. It was a good question that I had not thought of it before. I guess any system is open to security holes, I should pose this question on the PirateBox forums. Oh and I won the poster prize competition (many thanks to Kevin Stein @kevchanwow for great feedback on poster and Ela Wassel @elawassell for letting me know via twitter as I could not make the closing sessions).
Stephen Krashen and Carole Read were plenary speakers. I caught Krashen’s non-plenary talk (see presentation 1 notes below) on the Friday where he amongst other things repeated his click-bait assertion that EAP teaching was a dead duck. What I found surprising is that he did not really angle his talk for a hall full of teachers who I assume wanted to know about pedagogy. There seemed to be a lot of headnodding and ELT amens and hallelujahs after certain assertions amongst the crowd. There were certain notable dissenters such as Hugh Dellar, for example.
By contrast Carole Read’s plenary on Saturday (see blog post below) was oriented to teaching concerns, in particular on teacher development, and was harmless enough though there was some language that skirted on and even at one point referenced NuLP, Neurolinguistic Programming.
On the Friday I went to a talk on spoken discourse analysis by Carole Ann Robinson where she described using out of context language and asking her high level students to put back the context they thought was appropriate. Inevitably a lot of context will be culturally loaded and as a colleague pointed out with French students such tasks would have to be set up very carefully and would necessarily be limited by the French context. Nevertheless there were some good activities to consider using limited language as prompts.
On Saturday before lunch I attended a talk on the TOEIC exam by Miles Craven, which was good though I wished the presenter had spent more time on the examples he used in the book he was selling. Some of them I had not really considered and would have liked to have seen more details on it.
The talk I attended after lunch on Saturday on team teaching by Paul Wheal was very interesting from what I managed to gather as I had missed the first thirty minutes (blame the lunch). It was on how he taught and corrected English in parallel with a content expert who was delivering the subject matter. There was a nice video interview with the subject-matter expert exploring the benefits and challenges of team teaching.
The final talk I attended on the Sunday was a panel discussion and presentation of a national survey of working conditions of English teachers/trainers in France. The numbers seemed to back up what the audience already perceived as the grim present and future prospects for the industry here. I may do a separate post on this.
As ever I am very grateful to all the hardworking volunteers who make this conference possible, thank you!
For more reading on TESOL France 2014 check out some of the posts below by Fab Englishteacher @fabenglishteach:
Review- Carol Read’s Plenary: Reflections on how to become a highly efficient teacher
Workshop Review -Esra Girgin Gümüstekin – Teach Empowered
Workshop Review : Sophie Handy – Top Tips For Teens
My TESOL FRANCE workshop –: L1 – How to avoid it and ways of using it in the language classroom.
Stephen Krashen has put up notes of his three talks:
Presentation 1: TESOL France – Compelling Comprehensible Input
EFL Notes 
One thought on “TESOL France 2014 – thoughts, poster, handout and links”