MLC

Today's classrooms reflect the linguistic heterogeneity of a global age. Increasingly, foreign language students already speak one or two foreign languages, either with family members at home or because they have experienced other languages through travel and media. However, these students often demonstrate uneven proficiency in the productive and receptive skills of the languages they have been exposed to. Additionally, they are rarely able to articulate the learning strategies they have put in place to cope with foreign language content.
This provides educators with the opportunity not only to harness some of the methods the students have used to learn a foreign language in a collaborative classroom setting, but also to consolidate the students’ linguistic knowledge - which would otherwise remain undeveloped.
The objective of this workshop is to discuss and refine tools to harness students’ diverse linguistic competencies in order to: 1) make the students build on prior knowledge to infer new meaning and produce new language, 2) connect with languages in a concrete tangible way, 3) encourage multilingual proficiency, 4) increase cognitive flexibility and adaptability when meeting new people at school and in their future work place.

After attending your workshop, participants will have exchanged and refined strategies to assess and strengthen the diverse linguistic abilities that students bring to the classroom.

The target audience for this workshop is: Primary MFL teachers

This session will provide you with some ideas on how to put target language into songs and stories. There will be a focus on communicative language teaching in MFL in early years. How to promote MFL learning through role play and performance. Also, we will try to break down on how to achieve our learning outcome through small steps--different language games that will help getting students through different language acquisition.

After attending your workshop, participants will...Love teaching MFL to young children.

The target audience for this workshop is: Foreign Language Teachers

In our multilingual society, developing cross-cultural communicative competencies is increasingly important for mutual understanding. As foreign language teachers, we are constantly trying to focus on finding real life activities in order to create a communication-based and standards-driven curriculum for our students. In our language classes we find it important to address the necessary skills students must acquire for the 21st century using proficiently the creative technology tools now available. It is equally essential to offer greater opportunities for students’ engagement, for working in collaborative teams, for developing critical thinking skills and for managing precious time and resources.

Having all this in mind, we decided to focus on developing these approaches in our classes:

• Project-based learning, inspired on the communicative task-based approach for language learning theory with the use of technology.
• Flattening the classroom by connecting with schools around the world for regular pen-pal/ visual exchanges, global programs (twictée) and for sharing class projects.
• Developing a metalanguage in class by using Rachel Hawkes's theories on promoting oral exchanges in a foreign language class, Project zero's visible thinking routines (Harvard University) and the IB Learner Profile.

After attending your workshop, participants will...

• Empower attendees with ideas on how to make languages alive in class by providing real communicative contexts.
• Share resources, projects and ideas on how to support the development of speaking and writing skills in a foreign language class.

The target audience for this workshop is: Teachers in charge of new programmes or managers considering setting up such a programme

In this workshop, I shall present the audience with my experience as a classroom teacher whose interest in mother-tongue education led to me spearheading the creation of a pilot at Tanglin Trust School, followed by a full launch in 2014/15. I shall share how the British international school where I work has approached the various issues of setting up such a programme and shall compare this with alternate models of which I have knowledge, justifying why the choices taken were made. I shall also share lessons learnt in the domains of administration, staff recruitment, student enrolment, internal and external marketing, parental involvement and exam coordination. In addition to the discussion of such practical matters, I shall also present my vision of how a fully-developed mother-tongue programme within a British school might work and shall share with the audience how I specifically intend to move Tanglin Trust’s programme forward in the coming years.

After attending your workshop, participants will...

• Have a realistic idea of the steps that must be taken when setting up a mother-tongue programme as well as a practical idea of the required timescale needed to do so
• Be more aware of potential issues with students/ colleagues/ parents and thus be in a better position to anticipate and better negotiate such situations
• Be inspired to set up a mother-tongue programme that suits the context of their school

An increased awareness of and reference to BICS and CALP in the classroom are fundamental to both oral and written production in MFL and content lessons. Twenty first century students are increasingly familiar with the global use of BICS English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), spread through the use of communication technology, popular culture and multinational meetings but may not be aware of the need for CALP understanding and production in the academic environment. Firstly, we will make distinctions between accuracy and fluency tasks in the MFL classroom and the need for pupils and teachers to recognise the differences in the process and product of different task types in terms of focused correction and language appropriacy.  I will offer ways we can improve CALP production in writing in L2 MFL and subject lessons.     

Learning outcomes:
Teachers should go away with an increased awareness of:
1 the need to indicate the purpose of the task for pupils in terms of BICS and CALP production and correction.
2 to highlight language appropriacy in both MFL and subject lessons
3 strategies for focussed correction

The target audience for this workshop is: Upper Elementary and Middle School (Grades 5 - 9)

Literature circles are one of the hottest trends in language arts education, and not without reason. Not only do they encourage student engagement and interactions, they also provide teachers with the invaluable opportunity to step back and observe real student involvement, and comprehension of the class materials. Christina Shala is leading the way in bringing Literature Circles to ESL and modern foreign language programs around the world. Literature circles will introduce a fun, dynamic environment into any classroom, allowing students to practice all four of the aspects of their second language education; reading, writing, auditory and oral. Students are broken into small groups and assigned individual roles, providing them the opportunity to lead their own discussions and take ownership over their learning experience. Where typical second language classrooms tend to focus individually on one language skill or another, Literature Circles engage all of a student’s language skills together in a comfortable and natural way, and help students make direct connections to their second language through immersive use, as opposed to theoretical study.

In this workshop participants will learn:

• The benefits of incorporating Literature Circles into ESL and modern foreign language classrooms.
• How to implement Literature Circles into a lesson plan.
• How to use Literature Circles as a student assessment tool.

This workshop aims to provide second language educators around the world, with the tools they need to efficiently implement a Literature Circle program into their pre-existing lesson plans. Our goal is to increase the impact Second Language programs have on students, and ensure they are leaving their programs with a firm, real-world understanding of the languages they are pursuing.

Target audience: Primary subject, LI and MFL teachers

Content and Language Integrated Learning
(CLIL) is a key feature of most primary schools within the EU and is designed to incorporate second language learning, L1 development and content understanding into a coherent whole. The move away from traditional models of L2 teaching and learning has resulted in increased motivation, higher cognitive involvement and inclusivity in classrooms and has improved collegial relations across schools. I will ask the audience to bring scissors, glue and crayons to participate in a series of tasks for ‘Water’ and the Solar system to show how a shift from reproductive to productive tasks can be made successfully with young learners.     

Learning outcomes
Teachers will:
1 understand the key principles of CLIL
2 make connections with their own curriculum areas
3 appraise current practice and language learning activities

The target audience for this workshop is: Teachers, IB coordinators and school administrators.

The workshop will outline successful practices at UWCSEA (Dover) to support Mother Tongue development as part of the IB DP.
These include:

• A syllabus outline including a two year-timetable
• A description of classroom methodologies
• A description of scaffolded inquiry-based learning in Language A
• A description of the role of Language A tutors and tutor support
• A discussion of financial costs
• A summary of academic results

The workshop will also show how SSSTA courses can provide excellent opportunities to demonstrate IB Approaches to Teaching And Learning (ATL’s) in Language A:

• Inquiry based Learning
• Conceptual Understanding
• Differentiation
• Formative and Summative Assessment

The participants will then be invited to discuss the Approaches to Learning available to SSSTA students:

• Communication skills
• Research skills
• Self-management skills
• Critical thinking skills
• Social skills

Finally the participants will consider the ethical and financial benefits for a school promoting a well-managed SSSTA Programme.

After attending your workshop, participants will...

• Understand the benefits to students of providing School Supported Self-taught Language A courses.
• Understand the wider potential educational, ethical and even financial benefits to a school community.

Attitudes toward additional language learning are changing. We are moving into a post-modern view of language learning that highlights the complex linguistic profiles of the students we teach. These children move flexibly between languages, often with a fluidity in identity, and are truly multilingual. Do monolingual contexts even exist in 2014? We will explore the importance that mother tongue plays in the lives of children, being inextricably linked to identity, and providing an essential framework in which additional languages can be built upon. We will explore the links between language and culture, and how language provides a window into how we view the world. Teachers will explore the complex language profiles of the learners found in their school be provided with practical strategies for supporting multilingualism in their classrooms.

After attending your workshop, participants will...

• have a better understanding of what current research says about best practice in terms of language acquisition and learning
• understand the importance of mother tongue
• take away some practical strategies they can use in their classrooms and schools to support multilingualism

The target audience for this workshop is: All language teachers

Workshop Overview: Visible thinking (VT) refers to any kind of observable representation that documents and supports the development of a student’s or group’s ongoing thoughts, questions, reflections. Some examples are maps, charts, lists, diagrams. All of these are important if they reveal to us the learner’s ideas as they think through an issue, a topic or a problem. The Visible Thinking (VT) framework is part of Harvard’s Project Zero research. The framework includes visible thinking routines, which are tools or strategies that help students connect to how they think and learn. A distinctive feature of thinking routines is that they encourage active processing. Can these routines be used or adapted to use in a language classroom, and if so, how? Many of the routines can be used in the language classroom, whether this is a mother-tongue classroom, an EAL or another modern language classroom. By carefully selecting the thinking routines, the language teacher can see the student’s prior knowledge, as well as the development and understanding of various elements of the language studied.
Examples from language classes will be provided.

After attending your workshop, participants will:

• become familiar with visible thinking framework and visible thinking routines
• have a better understanding of how the routines could be adapted to the language classroom by viewing examples and participating in hands-on activity

Although a hugely contested term and phenomenon, it is almost a truism now that ‘globalization’ has opened up possibilities of cultural exchange and created different forms of cultural conflict between different groups of people around the world. Thus, the pedagogical imperative in language education has been to account for diversities in the way we interact with one another through one or more languages. For example, intercultural communication and teaching aim to raise our awareness of how cultural differences shape communication, and how such differences could be taught in the classroom. Unfortunately, teaching cultural differences has often led to stereotyping cultures, with teachers shepherding their students towards unhelpful, and even dangerous, labels and categories of people as if these people think, behave and act in exactly the same way. In this workshop, I would like to share my own attempts at addressing this pedagogical dilemma: how to raise awareness of intercultural issues in communication but avoiding the usual trap of stereotyping people. My workshop draws inspiration from my classroom-based research in the area, especially from one of my recent publications in the Journal of Intercultural Education, entitled ‘Intercultural education in everyday practice’ (2014), currently among the top ten Most Read Articles of the journal.

Target audience: Early Childhood Teachers

Prerequisites: Creativity

Workshop outline: The workshop is conducted in English and Mandarin. We welcome other language teachers to join. This workshop attempts to present Mandarin as a multi faceted subject beyond the book where the children engage most of their senses to learn Mandarin concepts in action. 
Art & Craftwork are selected based on a certain theme and the learning experience is enhanced through the entire explanation and activity led by the teacher and facilitator.
This style of learning is particularly useful for language learning in early years it provides a relaxed mode of communication amongst the students, encourages problem-solving skills.  Most importantly, engaging in Art & Craft work in a different language engages the little brain into a full workout and improves cognitive function as children explore, translate, and learn new things at the same time.

By the end of the workshop, participants will be able to:
Apply this concept to other learning activities to make a language seem alive and applicable in real life to children.

This lecture will explore the characteristics of Jewish critical thinking and the making of original ideas. It will provide examples of Fichte's (a.k.a. Hegel's) thesis-antithesis-synthesis dialectic, which can explain the development of, for example, music or linguistic theories (e.g. analysing the emergence of Israeli, a.k.a. Revived Hebrew). The lecture will champion an 'on the one hand' – 'on the other hand' (Jewish) way of thinking, as opposed to a Black & White (B&W), Right & Wrong mindset. It will demonstrate how a dichotomous B&W approach results in cross-cultural miscommunication. Examples will be given of how foreigners misunderstand British English by failing to recognize Double Language, in which the actual and literal meanings of the statement diverge. The lecture will also characterize briefly what constitutes a good academic thesis and a good foreign language learner.

In this workshop we will consider what is meant by an inclusive curriculum and examine interactive strategies and activities that provide opportunities to enhance language development for all learners.
Target audience: Early Years and Primary.

The target audience for this workshop is: high school teachers, heads of department

What does effective teaching and learning look like in the language acquisition classroom? How can students be encouraged to manage their own learning? This workshop will draw insights from the International Baccalaureate’s five approaches to learning (learning that develops thinking skills, social skills, communication skills, self-management skills and research skills) and six approaches to teaching (teaching that is inquiry-based, conceptually focussed, contextualised, collaborative, differentiated and informed by assessment). Although these approaches to teaching and learning underpin the key values and principles of IB pedagogy, they are also equally relevant to all language classes regardless of system or setting. In this workshop, time will not allow for a detailed exploration of all these approaches, so potential teaching ideas will be modelled using a focus on self-management skills and inquiry-based learning. Participants will have the opportunity to work in small groups in the guided exploration of scenarios that model how these approaches can be applied to participants’ own high school language lessons.

After attending your workshop, participants will be able to identify opportunities to use a range of Approaches to Teaching and Learning in the own high school language lessons.

Although a hugely contested term and phenomenon, it is almost a truism now that ‘globalization’ has opened up possibilities of cultural exchange and created different forms of cultural conflict between different groups of people around the world. Thus, the pedagogical imperative in language education has been to account for diversities in the way we interact with one another through one or more languages. For example, intercultural communication and teaching aim to raise our awareness of how cultural differences shape communication, and how such differences could be taught in the classroom. Unfortunately, teaching cultural differences has often led to stereotyping cultures, with teachers shepherding their students towards unhelpful, and even dangerous, labels and categories of people as if these people think, behave and act in exactly the same way. In this workshop, I would like to share my own attempts at addressing this pedagogical dilemma: how to raise awareness of intercultural issues in communication but avoiding the usual trap of stereotyping people. My workshop draws inspiration from my classroom-based research in the area, especially from one of my recent publications in the Journal of Intercultural Education, entitled ‘Intercultural education in everyday practice’ (2014), currently among the top ten Most Read Articles of the journal.

This lecture will argue the advantages of a trans-disciplinary approach as a way of generating groundbreaking theories. The lecture will analyse the relationship between language and DNA, and between linguistics and genomics.

In this workshop we will consider what is meant by an inclusive curriculum and examine interactive strategies and activities that provide opportunities to enhance language development for all learners.

Target audience: Early Years and Primary.