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.