Transformations in ELT: Contexts, Agents and Opportunity- Key Speech
Professor Richard Smith began his talk with a brief historical overview of western language teaching methods and their export, highlighting the needs revealed by this history for teaching methodology to be appropriate in context. Moving on to agents, he stressed that the main agents of change in ELT are teachers, and he argued for the idea that the genuine transformations only tend to happen gradually, from within existing affordances. Finally, then, he laid emphasis on some practical and realistic opportunities for teacher development and teacher research which have the potential, at least, to bring about lasting change. For his presentation slides/materials, please click here Transformations in ELT: Contexts, Agents and Opportunity
Teaching Large Classes: Plenary
Referring to cases of good practice from recent research in developing country contexts, he has shared the findings on how some teachers and learners have addressed difficult circumstances including large class size, lack of resources and heterogeneous groupings. On this basis, he mapped out some directions for future teacher development and research work, drawing particular attention to the activities of the Teaching English in Large Classes network. For Dr. Smith’s plenary talk on teaching large classes, please click the link Teaching Large Classes
Teaching and Researching Large Classes: Workshop
Building on his plenary ‘Teaching Large Classes’, Dr. Smith encouraged the participants to share their own recent teaching successes. He also mediated further ideas from teachers elsewhere, and he showed how they can show themselves do research into the problems they face without too much added burden, indeed actually lightening their load.
It adds glory to the way teachers are applying local techniques to meet the target of teaching the global language to learn that ELT scholars are observing how the teaching is going on in different localities in different contexts and carrying out their researches and preparing papers for other teachers facing similar challenges in ELT. Obviously, the speech by Dr. Smith energizes teachers to test the imported methodologies and modify them as per the needs and circumstances. He seems to be emphasizing localization of ELT for greater success.