Our incredibly popular annual Saturday morning conference returns for 2019 at the wonderful venue: Winterbourne International Academy in North Bristol

Registration from 9am, with stands and exhibitors (publishers, tour operators etc.)

Talk from Irene Leon (British Council): 9:30am

KEYNOTE - MARTINE PILLETTE

A knowledge-rich curriculum?

9:40am to 10:30am

The current teaching agenda is very focussed on the ‘knowledge-based curriculum’. Like so much in education, this concept lends itself to a number of interpretations… and potential misinterpretations. What is meant by a knowledge-based curriculum? From where does the concept originate? How does it relate to the National Curriculum? To GCSE? To the future Ofsted inspection framework? And – most importantly – how are we to apply it to MFL?

CHOICE OF TWO WORKSHOPS

11:00am to 12:00pm and 12:05pm to 1:05pm

You will be able to express workshop preferences when buying your ticket on this site, but your allocated workshops will be confirmed on arrival at the venue and on a first-come-first-served basis.

MARTINE PILLETTE

Let’s hear it for listening skills!

Many teachers are reporting disappointing results in GCSE Listening. By the time the corrections have been done, a conventional listening activity can easily take up 15mn… for not a lot of listening, yet pupils need to hear the language a lot. How can listening be practised more effectively without taking time away from the other skill areas? What activity styles can provide an effective springboard towards GCSE-style tasks?

PETER MORRIS

Working with authentic resources in MFL

A look at what is out there, what we can do with it and what we can do if we can’t find it.

• Why bother?
• Good authentic vs bad authentic.
• Do I have to spend my entire holiday in Spain photographing menus?
• Working with text, video, audio and images.
• To doctor or not to doctor?
• Can you fake it?
• Sharing it.

Examples in French and German.

CRISTA HAZELL

Role of Oracy in MFL: Maximising Progress, Confidence and Spontaneity in Speaking Skills

Crista will explore and unpick Oracy to better support and prepare all learners in MFL to improve and develop confidence, risk taking and spontaneity ultimately developing speaking skills. A range of tried and tested strategies to share with takeaways that can be implemented in your next lesson with minimum preparation from you the busy MFL teacher but maximum impact on student output and performance.

UXIA IGLESIAS FUERTES

Culture, festivals and traditions

Delegates can expect:

- practical suggestions for teaching about Hispanic customs and festivals which can be exploited at all levels

- an introduction to traditional Spanish idioms and rhymes which can be part of the classroom routine to motivate students and improve pronunciation at all stages.

- aphorisms and idioms for every occasion to enable your students to include idiomatic phrases in their every day language to reach those higher grades.

Examples will be mainly in Spanish with some in French.

DR GIANFRANCO CONTI

Strategies for maximising and optimising the use of curriculum time by working with human forgetting rates

Modern Foreign Language teaching is often a race against time: in the very little contact time available, teachers must secure the retention and automatization of a relatively wide range of vocabulary, structures and skills sets. To best tackle this challenge, MFL teachers must have at least a basic understanding of the key cognitive challenges that language teaching and learning pose to their students (Ellis, 2018).

In the first section of this workshop, the facilitator will provide a concise research-based account of how the human brain processes, retains and retrieves L2 vocabulary and grammar. This will entail (a) outlining how Working Memory processes incoming speech and activates existing knowledge to comprehend and respond; (b) discussing how memory works and forgetting occurs; (c) identifying the cognitive barriers to understanding and learning.

In the second section, based on the latest cognitive and second language acquisition research, he will proceed to suggest effective ways to maximize teaching and learning time by (a) embedding ILRs (Implicit Learning Routines); (b) teaching high-surrender-value functional chunks, as opposed to single words, through a range of evidence-based techniques that he will demonstrate and (c) ‘smart’ recycling through extensive spaced exposure to comprehensible input and pushed output. Tested instructional sequences will also be presented and discussed.

About the Presenters:

MARTINE PILLETTE

Martine is an independent MFL consultant and author and a senior examiner for an international organisation. As well as working on initiatives aimed at supporting MFL teaching at KS2-3, she frequently works with individual schools. She is particularly interested in issues of challenge, engagement and skill-based teaching and learning. She is well known for her realistic and engaging classroom ideas.

PETER MORRIS

Peter Morris is an experienced teacher of French and German, is a former Head of MFL at Gordano School, and is accredited as an AST, an SLE and is an SSAT Lead Practitioner. He is the author of several MFL textbooks and has contributed free resources extensively to the TES. He is one of the originators of the TALK Project and has run workshops on various aspects of MFL teaching for ALL, CILT, the SSAT, Bristol University, The Open University and the Council of Europe.

CRISTA HAZELL

Crista has been teaching in a range of secondary schools for 20 years and has been in Leadership for 19. She has worked across the UK and internationally in China and Ghana with students, teachers and school leaders developing teaching, learning, relationships and behaviour.

She is an MFL specialist, a pedagogy and pastoral champion known for seeking out new and innovative teaching and learning strategies which engage learners in their own learning journeys to help them become confident, inquisitive, happy and successful lifelong learners who can navigate their way through challenges in school, education and beyond. Saving time for teachers helping them to create engaging, relevant and memorable deep learning experiences whilst also sharing different perspectives on ‘assessment’.

Crista’s work has been published in There Is Another Way and The Working Class, Teachwire and The Guardian. She is also an active blogger, Independent Thinking Associate and National Council Member for The Association for Language Learning.

UXIA INGLESIAS FUERTES

Uxía grew up in Galicia, Spain with an innate interest in language, music and culture. After spending a year as a volunteer on the European Voluntary Service teaching pre-school children in Leeds, she was inspired to train as a teacher of English for Primary school children. Her year as an FLA soon turned into 2 years and eventually she completed the PGCE course and became a teacher of Spanish and French.

She is currently teaching at Chew Valley School, a non-selective secondary school, which is part of the Lighthouse Trust.

Dr. GIANFRANCO CONTI

An applied linguistics MA and PhD graduate, Gianfranco Conti has taught MFL for over 25 years both at primary, secondary and university levels. He has researched the impact of metacognitive strategies training and error correction on essay writing under the supervision of Oxford University Ernesto Macaro and documented in Professor Macaro (2001)’s book. His current research interests are lexicogrammar acquisition, listening instruction, metacognition, error correction and learner autonomy. Formerly head of languages at various schools in England and abroad where he has developed and implemented his instructional approach (Extensive Processing Instruction), he is currently a Visiting Fellow at the University of Reading.

Dr Conti is also a renowned conference speaker and CPD provider mostly active in the UK, South-East Asia and Australia. CEO of researched, Tom Bennett, wrote about one of his workshops: “…in my opinion one of the best presenters I have seen in the UK.’ The professional development group he founded, ‘Global Innovative Language Teachers’ is one of the fastest-growing communities of its genre. Dr Conti is also the founder of the interactive language learning website and blog www.language-gym.com which is one of the most influential in the world and he is the co-author of, ‘The Language Teacher Toolkit’ and currently co-writing with Steve Smith ‘Breaking the sound barrier: teaching listening bottom-up’.

BOOKING AND PAYMENT

Booking and payment must be made through this website. You will be able to express workshop preferences when buying your ticket on this site, but your allocated workshops will be confirmed on arrival at the venue.

PRICES

Non-Member - £30

ALL Group Member - £25

ALL Individual Member - £20

Trainee Teacher - £15

CONTACT DETAILS

Contact: allwestofengland@gmail.com with any queries about this event.

Please be aware that the ALL West of England committee is made up entirely of volunteers from the MFL world, and that we do not have an office or phone number.