CLESOL

Clesol Day 2

Sonya Van Schaijik Critical Inquiry, PTC 08 , , , ,

Saturday
Keynote Speaker: Deborah Short, TESOL International
Using Sheltered Instruction to Develop Essential Academic Language Skills

http://www.victoria.ac.nz/lals/resources/academicwordlist/
Averil Coxhead 

Give the children something interesting to talk about.
Give verabal scaffolds for elaboration
SOLO Taxonomy at relational by highlighting key vobabulary.

Using word wall to make signal words explicit.

I was fortunate to sit in on Rosa Kalauni session where she spoke about
Secondary  Success
At her school they choose Pasifika Teachers and put the median band children together.
These same children attended the same classes with a Pasifika chosen teacher or a literacy class with a Pasifika chosen teacher. Rosa spoke with passion for the Tama Toa Project. Her session was well thought through and put together and I came away motivated to implement even more focussed projects at out school for our learners.

Today was the day I shared my #TeachNZ project
http://teachmeetnz.wikispaces.com/TeachMeetNZ_2014_3
If you go to this link you will find my slides and also all the 3 minute presenters slides.

Over the next few days, I will take the video and cut it down in three minute slots that the presenters can add to their digital footprints. I am excited to see the reflections begin to come in because I know that here is where the real learning takes place.

The exciting part of running a TeachMeetNZ session is watching the confidence and interactions develop between the educators who take part. The challenge with running a virtual session face to face with a live audience is ensuring a a balance between presenters sharing their stories and having time for the face to face audience.

After a break we moved into ‘In conversation with – Janet Holmes’, Victoria University of Wellington
Janet gave a great presentation and I really liked the way she incorporated photos and video to break up the just listening to Death By Powerpoints that seems to be the focus of a lot of presentations I have seen at the CLESOL conference.

I left the day early to have  rest. Then walked to the evening dinner.

Clesol2014

Sonya Van Schaijik Critical Inquiry, PTC 07 , , ,

Clesol Day 1

http://www.clesol.org.nz/index.html is in Wellington and runs for three days.

This year Clesol is hosted at Victoria University. This is my first visit to Rutherford house.
Using #Clesol on twitter I could only locate 6x other educators attending the conference.

The conference launched with a welcome function sponsored by IELTS. I was excited to see a few familiar faces so as Paul Nation walked by I grabbed him for a group photo.

The first plenary began the following day and as I sat in that first session and looked around, I  saw maybe 6 educators using a device. The challenge is most teachers have been given a TELA since 1996 so why were most educators here still using pen and paper.

William Grabe

Powerpoint available via email.
william.grabe@nau.ed
Foundation for L2 Reading development.
William highlighted essential aspects of reading comprehension. He spoke about instructional applications as well as a few specific practices that are not commonly considered in many reading instruction curricula. I was listening to him share about building a reading curriculum.

I attended   collaborative workshop ‘Connecting across the ditch and beyond.’ The session was well rehearsed, ran to time and was inclusive of all attendees. Both Lesley and Yvonne covered a range of social media and how they used them in their work. I was particularly interested in the collaboration and to hear that yesterday was the first time these educators had met f2f.
Lesley highlighted for the group a few of her global connections from her personal learning network. 
The following session was from John Read who covered 

‘Coming to grips with quality in language assessment’. John spoke about an ongoing concern in language teaching is how to assess learner abilities through good-quality assessments that are suitable for their intended purpose. He stressed the importance of moderation and expertise amongst teachers in their own subject area. Again the slides are incredibly text heavy and for a learner like me, I like my pictures.  I give a quiet chuckle when he spoke about computer familiarity. I was not sure if this included mobile devices but probably not.  

In the afternoon session I attended Heather Thomas session on Mindfulness practice and pedagogy that could enhance English Language Teaching (ELT) by increasing attention, emotional 

The session was not what I expected but is actually what I needed to hear. We often rush from one thing to the next but never take time to stop and smell the roses. 
She shared with us the following documentary. ‘Room to breath’.


Heather’s session was on Mindfulness meaning about being in the moment, being present, being in the now.

Probably the best part of the day was the discussion that happens between the sessions.