One of my trainee teacher complained about the school management on an internet forum. Someone from the same online group forwarded this message to the director of the school. As a result the teacher was fired.

Do we need any instructions as to what we can say and do on the internet as teachers?
Does your school provide some dos and don’ts regarding your online behaviour? How is this in your country?

The other day we had a pupil who refused to listen to a female teacher. The school immediately contacted the parents to explain that the school really couldn’t tolerate that sort of behaviour. Fortunately, the parents were very understanding and supported the school’s point of view. Have you come across similar situations in your teaching contexts? Please share your viewpoints with us.

I think I was just the right person for this conference. On the one hand I am deeply interested in people and their personal development, on the other, I am fascinated by electronic wonders of the modern world but at the same time a bit scared of them because I never really took enough time to get to the bottom of the whole thing. This is why I thought ELT in the Digital Age was really what I needed. I had great expectations from this conference: meeting new people, sharing my two un-digital, uplugged workshops, with them and, above all, learning something new and overcoming my fear of digital technology.

At the opening plenary Gavin Dudeney talked about New Literacies, Teachers & Learners. He told the audience that terms digital native and digital immigrant are now being replaced by a new division, digital resident versus digital visitor. He also introduced DSL, digital as a second language. If you belong to a slightly less young generation, you could, for example, admit, “I wasn’t born speaking digital”. Among a whole bunch of exciting digital things that can be very useful in class, Gavin showed a remix of Penny Lane, a literal version on YouTube. A literal version of a song means that you watch the real video spot, the music is the same as in the original, just instead of the original lyrics the singer/s describe what’s in the picture. Later I googled literal Penny Lane again as watched literal versions of other hits on YouTube. I’ve decided to use some in class soon. Like it or not, times are changing and, to quote Gavin, “Shift happens”.

In the second plenary Duncan Foord explored the difference between a teacher and a coach. I was particularly intrigued by some of the data he produced: students need 200 hours of English if they want to master one Common European Framework step. In a week this means that if they sleep for 8 hours per night, spend 3 hours in an English class and revise at home for one hour, they still have 109 hours to spend on other activities. Asking students to revise for just one hour per week means expecting them to work on their English for less than one per cent of their time. No matter what technology teachers and students use, it’s the uptake that matters, said Duncan after he had given the audience a number of ideas how to motivate students to do English in their free time.

After the plenaries and my first workshop it was time for some practice in DSL and Sandra Jasionavičiene provided just that. In her workshop Using Technologies in the Class of Creative Writing she encouraged participants to use wikis in a creative writing class. She explained that wiki wiki means ‘quick’ in Hawaiian. It was a lively workshop and I think quite a few of us who struggled DSL worked extremely hard. When I got back home I was determined to create at least one wiki myself, which I did, when TD SIG committee was choosing suitable talks and workshops for TD SIG Programme Day at the next IATEFL Conference in Glasgow in March 2012. I think that if I should read all this a few years from now, when, I hope, I have mastered all this to at least some extent, I will probably just smile at how ignorant I was in Vilnius, but now, a few weeks after the conference, using the newly-acquired knowledge is like a tonic to me.

While waiting for the Arts and Creativity slot to begin in the afternoon, I asked my neighbour about Lithuanian surnames which have different suffixes for men and women. I was told that a man’s surname would end in –us, for example, a married woman would form her surname with suffix –iene while a single woman would use suffix -iute. My Lithuanian colleague also gave me a brief introduction into extra letters Lithuanian has in its 32-letter alphabet which I am most grateful for.

Izolda Geniene, the former LAKMA president, gave a talk on teaching language, poetry and culture using elements of the visual art. She used Pieter Brueghel’s painting Fall of Icarus to illustrate some points in her presentation and mentioned synaesthesia as an important ingredient in this approach. Her talk was a windfall for me – for the last few months I’d been looking for ways to explore that particular painting with my students. I was interested in it because it appears in the coursebook I use, but I didn’t know what exactly I could do with it. Dr. Geniene provided interesting material that I can take in class as soon as we get to the unit with this painting. Does this also happen to you – I mean, that you go to a particular talk at a conference not really understanding why you chose it but you just know you must be there and then during that talk something clicks and you see why you’re there?

Natalie Gorohova from the neighbouring Latvia focused on design thinking in classroom and showed how business English can be an unexpected source of inspiration for an English teacher. She showed that design thinking can be human centred, experimental, optimistic and collaborative. Using a set of cards the group then tried a little bit of design thinking in practice. What I am particularly grateful to Natalie for is that she mentioned Sir Ken Robinson, and gave a link to his website. This was the third time I came across his name, and I’d seen his animated presentation Changing Education Paradigms twice, but as if often happens in the post-conference rush, many exciting new ideas and pieces of information sink into oblivion, and this is what happened to Sir Ken in my head not only once but twice. Now, third time lucky, I’ve not only checked his website but I also bookmarked it and ordered his book Out of our minds: Learning to be creative. This time what he has to say won’t escape me.

After the busy first day of the conference some participants and organisers could relax at the reception, tasting Lithuanian food and wine, chatting and listening to Lithuanian national music. However, this was a very energetic kind of relaxation, as one of the musicians in the trio that came to play and sing Lithuanian songs all of sudden started dancing. How I ended up dancing with him I don’t quite remember, one minute I was sitting and talking, the next I was in the middle of a group dance, something similar to a ceilidh. It was just great.
The second day of the conference started with Annette Capel’s presentation on The English Profile, a programme that, as the author claimed, is shaping the future of language learning, teaching and assessment while Chris Moore from LanguageLab spoke about Using the power of virtual worlds for Business English learning.
Having finished my second workshop, I joined Duncan Foord in Elmyra Jurkšaitiene and Jūratė Orloviene’s workshop on CLIL. The presenters took the audience through a typical CLIL geography lesson. We learned about world’s big cities and problems that people living there face, and I think that Duncan learned his first word in Lithuanian: kanalizacija (sanitary sewer). Contrary to Duncan, I’d already known this word because it’s the same as in my mother tongue, even the spelling and pronunciation, as so are words such as in policija (police), kapela (chapel) and many others. In fact, Lithuania was one of very few countries where when arriving at my hotel, my name was pronounced correctly and with ease and I didn’t have to invent a different, more English-friendly spelling (‘moytsa’) so that people could say my first name. A small thing maybe, but it made me feel very much at home there straight away.
The conference ended with Kristina Smith’s plenary talk The danger of carts before horses: putting pedagogy before technology in which she briefly went through the new digital tools that were often mentioned during the conference, and concluded with a thought that maybe it is time to re-evaluate our pedagogical principles bearing in mind what the learners of today need.
When the time came to close the conference, Egle Petroniene, the LAKMA president and heart and soul of this event, did it with a lot of warmth and charm. Lithuanian teachers will meet again in two years’ time, and they may even organise a joint event with another IATEFL SIG then.
After the conference participants who were not from Lithuania had a chance to take a bus tour of Vilnius. It was very thorough and provided me with all sorts of information. Now I know that basketball is second religion in Lithuania and that in Vilnius there is even a monument erected to basketball. It makes sense then that European Basketball Championship, which ended just four days before the start of the conference, was held in the Lithuanian capital. It was during this informative tour around Vilnius that I also learned about the mock Republic of Užupis, the artists’ community by the Vilnia in the east of the city, which has its own constitution with 41 articles written in eight languages on metal boards fixed to a wall there. Here are some of the most interesting articles:
Everyone has the right to live by the river Vilnelė, while the River Vilnelė has the right to flow past people.
Everyone has the right to love.
Everyone has the right to idle.
Everyone has the right to be misunderstood.
Everyone has the right to understand nothing.

New technologies and social media reshape the way today’s learners access information and gain knowledge. Teachers respond differently to this situation: some have managed to jump on the IT bandwagon, embracing modern technologies and using them to meet their learners’ needs, some remain ELT dinosaurs and view IT with suspicion and fear, while most of us are somewhere between the two extremes, eager to put all this digital magic under a microscope. This is why teachers, researchers, teacher educators and decision makers are meeting in Vilnius to exchange, discuss and develop our ideas on the challenges of the digital world.

Plenaries will include

• Gavin Dudeney: New literacies, teachers & learners
• Duncan Foord: From “English teacher” to “Learning coach”
• Ieva Zdanytė: Engage your students in creative ways
• Annette Capel: Insights from English Vocabulary Profiles – A powerful electronic resource
• Chris Moore: Using the power of virtual worlds for Business English learning
• Kristina Smith: The danger of carts before horses: putting pedagogy before technology

Registration
Please go to https://www.iatefl.org/events/step1.php?event_id=37 ; delegates from Lithuania can register at http://www.lakma.vpu.lt/en/registration_form

Registration ends on 14 September.

Conference fee

• LAKMA / IATEFL TD members 35 LT / 10 EUR £ 9.00
• Non-members 70 LT / 20 EUR £18.00
• Students attend the event free of charge.

More information at http://www.lakma.vpu.lt/
Accommodation in Vilnius: http://www.lakma.vpu.lt/en/news/hotels/

Catalina is a teacher trainer at Oxford TEFL  Barcelona

‘It’s so easy not to practise what you preach. It´s better to sit down and talk. We all have so much to say. Not a good idea to be talked at.’ – Luke Meddings

And so everyone talked at the Unplugged Conference last Saturday.

Before anything else, it was the students who had a say in Scott Thornbury and Luke Medding’s demonstration lesson.

First they shared info about their close friends and acquaintances. Next they went on to explain the reasons behind the demonstrations taking place in one of Barcelona ´s main squares. They organized their ideas in a text that they wrote and then shared with their colleagues. The lesson seamlessly integrated the four skills and used student-generated content to work on emergent language. There was work on vocabulary, question formation, connected speech and informal writing style in text messages. The explicit though gentle – given the set up – focus on form set the lesson apart from ´just chatting´.

What is more, the students also produced a short text explaining what they felt they had learned from the lesson and shared it with everyone in the room.

It was the first time learners were given the opportunity to give hot feedback on the teaching unplugged approach and this continued in the open discussion following the demonstration lesson.

The teachers also had plenty to say. Observers and students alike took turns to ask and answer questions about teaching unplugged. MAIN IDEAS:

• Learner lives and learner language are indivisible. Focusing exclusively on just one in the classroom means not doing our job.
• Teaching unplugged is an attitude rather than an experiment reserved to experienced teachers.  Less experienced teachers may find it more challenging to clarify a language point once it has emerged from conversation but the unplugged framework and task formats are not intrinsically more difficult compared to course book based teaching.
• The unplugged approach can be adapted for lower levels. The lesson can start with simple ´What´s your name?´ and ´Where are you from?´ type of questions and build on the information and language that emerge from the interviews.
• Teaching unplugged is not just conversation. It involves all four skills and a strong focus on form, which explains the importance attached to students producing written texts.
• Common European Framework level descriptors can be used to ask students to identify their level as learners tend to have a very good idea about what they can and can´t do in English.

After lunch, the participants generated and voted for questions for discussion. Groups were formed and the debates kicked off in an open space that allowed the teachers to float from one discussion group to another. A couple of hours and refreshments later, each group were ready to share findings. Here is what emerged:

Currently, there is a lack of research that validates teaching unplugged. Research is notoriously challenging to organize but we can start small-scale experiments to explore the effectiveness of the unplugged approach. Several participants have volunteered to carry out research and more initiative is welcome from teachers/ schools. The TDSIG website can be used for teachers to share ideas and findings.

Teaching unplugged and published materials are actually not incompatible. For those of us working in a context which specifically requires use of a course book, all we have to do is ‘unplug’ the book.

Tips:

• Keep lessons conversation rich by exploiting every opportunity for speaking and personalization.
• Be ready to discard the upcoming language point/task and focus on what the students are expressing interest in or struggling with.
• Use the relevant content in the book as a springboard for discussion and student-driven focus on form.
• What is not covered in a unit can always be given for homework.

Conversely, when teaching course book free, there is no reason why we cannot incorporate an activity, text or game we found in published materials if we feel that students respond well and it matches their interests, all within an unplugged framework.

Technology can easily be part and parcel of teaching unplugged. It was agreed that teaching unplugged doesn´t exclude technology, but the approach needs to be top-down. Instead of the teachers selecting videos and hoping for the best in terms of student interest in the class, we should allow students to bring in materials and build on their interest, let them generate content and work with and on the emerging language.

There is an essential out-of-class component which involves students researching topics of interest and then sharing their findings in class.

The group shared a project in which Spanish teenagers created a guided tour of Barcelona – all student-generated, personalised and directly relevant to learners’ interests.

1. Unplugging teacher training

There is no reason why teaching unplugged should be a luxury reserved exclusively to experienced teachers.

Pre-service training

When starting teaching practice, qualifying teachers can be encouraged to do a needs analysis and listen carefully to their students so that they can use this initial information to plan lessons that respond directly to learner objectives, strengths and weaknesses.  Language points straight out of the book and the ensuing over-reliance on published material can thus be replaced by a syllabus that responds to learner needs ´here and now´. Once the newly qualified teachers start their jobs on completing their training course, it is essential to provide a framework of support that covers carrying out needs analysis, lesson planning, syllabus design and evaluation.