Saturday, May 19, 2012
   
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2011 National Conference Plenary



Below are the abstracts and bios of our plenary, featured presenters, and presenters. 

Plenary

 

Jason Renshaw

Bio: Jason Renshaw is a former lecturer in the department of English Education at Kyungpook National University and author of Boost!, the well-known integrated skills coursebook series from Pearson Longman. He is currently based in Australia, following ten years in Korea in a variety of teaching and management roles covering private language institutes, business English and teacher education programs at university level. He was a pioneer of content-based learning programs and online course delivery focusing on speaking and writing skills in the Korean context. He currently works as the managing director of his own company, English Raven Educational Services, which specialises in online course design and delivery as well as resource development for teachers of English. He has become very active with social media for education purposes, maintaining one of the world’s most popular English language teaching blogs and acting as co-founder and moderator for #ELTChat, a Twitter-based teacher discussion and development initiative which brings together English language educators from all over the globe.

 

 

 

Plenary Presentation: Materials development for language learning - the next ten years

Given the central (and often overwhelming) role materials play in English language instruction, they can make for interesting evidence in terms of where we have been and where we are going within the broader sphere of English language teaching. In this presentation, Jason will review some of the developments in coursebook content and design over the past ten years, both globally and for the Korean context in particular. From there he will go on to present some of here-and-now developments in course material evolution and discuss what we may be seeing in the way of materials (and, as important, the ways in which they are delivered and used) as the next decade unfolds.

 

Workshop: Collaborative Coursework Design and Application

Despite a variety of coursework developments over the past decade or so, the reality is that most commercially produced coursebook material still very much represents a sort of one way street in terms of content and activity selections. The coursebook is the curriculum, the teacher is the delivery person, and the learners are like consumers. Is it possible to bring teachers and learners more into this overall picture through new kinds of course material design? In this workshop, Jason Renshaw will present a variety of new coursework models that work on the principle of content and activity application being more of a collaborative process. Participants will be invited to apply their own ideas and creativity to facilitate an approach that sees learners becoming active contributors to their own coursebooks. For the purposes of this workshop we will focus on material and activities for learners in the 10-15 age bracket, but there is no reason why the basic principles involved can’t be successfully applied to other age sectors as well.

 

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