News

I (Jane) have just returned from The Language Show at Olympia, London, where I spoke about Task-based Language Teaching to a large audience of teachers of English, French, Spanish, Italian, German and several other languages. Starting with a set of TRUE or FALSE statements about TBLT, I gave a swift overview of different aspects of task design, demonstrating a teacher-led task sequence for beginners, (lots of audience participation here!), another sequence on the topic of Cats, with a text-based task leading on to reading and writing tasks, and finally showing how a focus on form can be achieved within a TBL framework. Go to CONFERENCES if you want to download my presentation and handout.

Earlier in October I led a two hour workshop on Task Design for NATESOL in Manchester. The teachers there designed some excellent sequences of tasks - pretty much guaranteed to motivate and engage their students - that they could use in their classes the following week. Visit the NATESOL web-site for more details.

A plea - would all contributors to our book CHALLENGE AND CHANGE IN LANGUAGE TEACHING - which is now Out of Print - please contact us urgently with contact details - as we are hoping to republish this collection electronically and we need your permission to reprint.

The Third Biennial International TBLT conference was held this September at Lancaster University - only 20 miles from our home. (Last time it was in Hawaii, in 2011 it will be in New Zealand.)  A stimulating mix of topics, ranging from research projects to materials design, the highlight for us was the presentation of Flemish language materials (TotemTaal) for L1 and L2 primary learners by a team from Leuven. Dave and I ran a workshop on Focus on Form - empowering or restricting?  Google 'TBLT 2009 Conference Presentations' and you can read all the papers for yourselves.

Also in September, Dave and I went to Lisbon to run a three day professional development course for British Council Teaching staff, looking in particular at ways of integrating tasks into the current language teaching programmes run at the Teaching Centres in Lisbon and Oporto. Working in small groups, sometimes with their own texts and sometimes with text books, teachers designed task sequences for the specific levels they were about to teach, and shared their ideas with other groups.  Altogether an extremely productive three days. 

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In March 2009 we spent two weeks in the Arabian Gulf. This was a wonderful opportunity to catch up with old friends and to make new friends. First stop was Dubai where Jane was plenary speaker and Dave a featured speaker at TESOL Arabia. The theme of the conference was English in Learning and Learning in English so many of the papers dealt with issues surrounding CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) and CBI - Content-based Instruction. We learned a lot both from attending conference sessions and from talking to other participants. Many of the papers are now up on their web-site - it's worth having a look.

From Dubai we flew to Qatar where we gave two workshops on TBL for Qatar University.

Finally we went to Oman. We gave a morning workshop at Sultan Qaboos University, where our programme was co-ordinated by Saleh Al-Busaidi. Then we went on to talk to teachers at the British Council, then a workshop for teachers of year 6 state school courses at the Ministry of Education and finally an evening session for the ELT Professionals in Muscat. We managed to combine this part of our programme with a few days' holiday in Oman, divided between Muscat and Nizwa. Only a few days, but we got a taste for the country and would love to go back.

Back in Britain we had four days to get organised for the IATEFL conference in Cardiff. We always hugely enjoy this IATEFL conference, both professionally and socially.

Summaries of our presentations in Dubai and Cardiff are posted on our CONFERENCES page.