Reminder: Public Lecture by Prof Juliane House at Aston University

On Wednesday May 22, 2013, CLERA’s Distinguished Visitor Professor Juliane House (Hamburg University, Germany) will give a public lecture titled “English as a global lingua franca: A threat to multilingualism and translation?” at Aston University.

Professor Juliane House is Professor emerita of Applied Linguistics at Hamburg University and and a senior member of the Sonderforschungsbereich “Mehrsprachigkeit” (Research Centre on Multilingualism), where she directs projects on translation and multilingual business communication. She also directs a project on multilingualism and multiculturalism in German universities.
Her research interests include translation theory, contrastive pragmatics, discourse analysis, English as a lingua franca and intercultural communication.

For more information about the event, visit the CLERA website.

 

Call for Papers: III International Conference on Bilingual Teaching in Educational Institutions, Madrid

The Rey Juan Carlos University of Madrid and the Department of Education, Youth and Sports of the Madrid Regional Government will host the III International Conference on Bilingual Teaching in Educational Institutions to be held at the Rey Juan Carlos University (Vicálvaro Campus) in Madrid on the 18^th and 19^th of October, 2013.

Bilingual education is growing in different educational systems across Europe. In the multilingual society in which we live, preparing our young people for their future studies and professional life is a decisive issue. Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) has become a necessary instrument for confronting this challenge.

The III International Conference on Bilingual Teaching in Educational Institutions titled: “Bilingual Education: Consolidation and Perspectives for the XXI Century” aims to go deeper into and move forward in the analysis of bilingual education. The conference is of special interest for primary, secondary and university teachers, researchers and policymakers committed to bilingual education.

The key themes of this Conference are the following:

• CLIL and good practice
• CLIL assessment in different subjects
• Bilingual education: teacher training and updating
• Activities and resources to support CLIL methodology
• Technological tools for bilingual education in the XXI Century
• The importance of literacy in the bilingual classroom
• Bilingual teaching in secondary education
• Future challenges in bilingual programs
• Academic language in different subjects
• Bilingual teaching in higher education

The registration period is currently open and available on the website www.cieb.es. Abstracts (not exceeding 400 words) should be sent before July 8^th,2013.

 

Conference: How does language work?, June 27-28, Aston University

On June 27-28, 2013, CLERA and InterLanD will be hosting a two-day conference titled ‘How does language work?’.

The variation between the language of the home and community and the language of school is at the heart of a great deal of the underachievement of identifiable groups of learners in Britain. These learners may speak English either as a first or second language. They draw on the language of home and community to make meanings within school. School subjects draw on different kinds of language. These variations in language do not match.

The conference aims to:

• Make the workings of the language system explicit in order to appreciate the role language plays, in constructing knowledge across all learning areas.
• Build understandings about the patterned ways meanings are made within and across genres so that educators are able to develop students’ language resources to understand and produce those genres.
• Enable participants to understand and use the differences between spoken and written language, both as a teaching and a learning tool.

This conference is a groundbreaking two-day vent and features a rare UK keynote from Professor James Martin of the University of Sydney, an architect of “genre based pedagogy” in the early 1980s.

It is aimed at both teachers and educators, across phases, who are concerned with the role language plays in learning.

For more information, please go to the conference website.

22 May: Public lecture by Prof Juliane House at Aston University

CPD event: PowerPoint & Video Editing Skills for MFL Teachers

CLERA Researcher of the Month: Sue Garton

CLERA has a broad range of researchers and research candidates working in many different areas of language education. Each month, we feature one of our researchers to learn more about them, their work and their interests.

Our Researcher of the Month for May is Dr Sue Garton, Co-Director of CLERA. As Senior Lecturer in TESOL and Director of Postgraduate Programmes in English, Sue has taken a leading role in establishing the Centre and developing Aston’s highly successful English PG programmes, especially with regard to Distance Learners. In March 2013, she was appointed Chair of the Standing Committee for Research of the US-based International TESOL Association at their annual international convention in Dallas, US.

Click here to read her profile.

New: Journal of Perspectives in Applied Academic Practice

Primary French Project Partnership launched by ALL, IF and NfL

  

A high-profile partnership that aims to support primary schools throughout England has been formally launched in London on 14 March 2013. The Primary French Project Partnership brings together three organisations:

• Institut français du Royaume Uni (IFRU)
• ALL – The Association for Language Learning
• Network for Languages

They have come together for the purpose of supporting primary schools wishing to teach French as part of the new statutory curriculum from September 2014. The support will include the development of teaching resources to exemplify the Key Stage 2 Programme of Study for Languages (French), outreach to as many primary schools as possible, the development of training courses for teachers, and professional development opportunities.

To find out more about the project and who to contact, please read the following press release: Press ReleasePrimaryFrenchPartnership

Current issue: Reading in a Foreign Language (RFL)

The April 2013 issue (Volume 25, Number 1) of the electronic journal Reading in
a Foreign Language (RFL) is now online and can be read at http://nflrc.hawaii.edu/rfl

This issue begins as a special issue, “Reading in Less Commonly Taught Languages”, edited by Neil J. Anderson of Brigham Young University. In the first article, Shen and Jiang provide valuable insights into reading fluency of Chinese characters, focusing their research on word segmentation accuracy and comprehension. The second
article in this special issue focuses on the value of phonics instruction in learning to read in Italian by Cihon, Morford, Stephens, Morrison, Shrontz, and Kelly, in which the authors provide information from three studies they conducted to illustrate the value of developing decoding skills in learning to read Italian.

In addition, there are two articles in our regular research section. Junko Yamashita examines word recognition and passage level reading. Ryoko de Burgh-Hirabe and Anne Feryok discuss a model for extensive reading motivation in the Japanese as a foreign language setting. We also have a review by Nancy Meredith of Mastering Academic Reading.

RFL is a scholarly, refereed journal published on the World Wide Web by the University of Hawai`i, with Richard R. Day and Thom Hudson as the co-editors and Anne Burns, Director of CLERA at Aston University, as the reviews editor.

The journal is sponsored by the National Foreign Language Resource Center (NFLRC), the University of Hawai‘i College of Languages, Linguistics and Literature, and the University of Hawai‘i Department of Second Language Studies. The journal is a fully-refereed journal with an editorial board of scholars in the field of foreign and second language reading. There is no subscription fee to readers of the journal. It is published
twice a year, in April and October. Detailed information about Reading in a Foreign Language can be found at http://nflrc.hawaii.edu/rfl

Is English a form of linguistic imperialism?

On the occasion of the 47th Annual IATEFL (International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language) Conference in Liverpool, 8-12 April, 2013, Prof Anne Burns, Director of CLERA, moderated the British Council Signature Event “Linguistic imperialism: still alive and kicking?” (video recording available here).

To coincide with this event, Anne provides some background information about the discussion of English as linguistic imperialism on the British Council’s Voices blog.