INVITED SPEAKERS

Dr Maggie McAlinden

​Maggie is the current TESOL program leader at the School of Education, Edith Cowan University in Perth, WA where she teaches on postgraduate courses and conducts research into empathy and emotion in intercultural language education. She is an experienced language teacher and teacher educator. She has previously worked at Curtin University where was also the Director of Studies at the English Language Centre and Coordinator of English Language Development in the Faculty of Health Sciences. She started teaching English in 1995 and has taught across all ages and levels, including working for the British Council in Cairo where she was the Young Learner Coordinator.  She was born and educated in the UK and moved to Australia in the early 2000s because it was far too cold and rainy in the UK! Her teaching and research is informed by ideas from critical poststructural feminism particularly how power, discourse, and difference influences what can be known and how we come to know in Western academia.

Affective pedagogies in language education: Is there anything more authentic or meaningful?

As language teachers we want to embrace and enact authentic and meaningful practices in our classrooms. But how can we do this when the affective is invisible to ourselves, our learners and the field? In this session, we will explore what emotion can teach us and how affective pedagogical practices are at the heart of meaningful and authentic learning experiences in language education.
 

Mr ​Davide Guarini Gilmartin 

​Davide Guarini Gilmartin is British Council Vietnam’s Education for English Systems (EES) Academic Manager. He is a teacher educator with more than 21 years experience teaching English and training teachers and trainers. He has been living and working in Hanoi, Vietnam since 1999 and joined British Council in 2003. He holds a BA (Honours) in Town & Country Planning, a Trinity Cert TESOL and a Cambridge DELTA. He has extensive experience of teaching and training in East Asia, having designed and delivered numerous courses and workshops for British Council projects (e.g. Access English, Active Citizens, Academic Teaching Excellence (ATE), CiPELT, CiSELT, Connecting Classrooms, English for Teaching, ERIC, Primary Innovations, Teaching for Success, Thailand Regional English Training Centre (RETC), VTTN) in China, Indonesia, Myanmar, Peru, Thailand, and Vietnam.  He also has experience as an IELTS examiner and a Cambridge ESOL Oral Examiner Team Leader. Prior to entering the education sector, he spent eight years working in the UK local government sector as an urban and policy planner.

Responding to a crisis: Lessons for the future

Over the past four months, the world of education (and English language teaching) has been turned upside down as teachers, learners, institutions and policymakers have had to respond to the Covid-19 crisis in real time. In this presentation, Davide Guarini Gilmartin (British Council Vietnam’s English for Education Systems (EES) Academic Manager) will outline some of the ways in which the British Council has responded to the crisis, share some of the initial research that British Council has undertaken into how teachers and teacher educators have reacted to the crisis and draw some conclusions about the longer term impact this could have on the teaching, learning and assessment of English, both in Vietnam and beyond. There will also be an opportunity to share your own ideas about some of the challenges and address the impact of the Covid-19 crisis and what lessons you feel we can learn for the future of ELT.

Mr Will Laschet 

​Will Laschet is a DELTA qualified teacher and trainer from the UK. He is the Teacher Trainer for Asia at National Geographic Learning and is based in Singapore. He has been teaching English since 2001 and has experience in private language schools, British and Korean Universities and the British Council Singapore. He has conducted teacher training sessions in Malaysia, Cambodia, Vietnam, Indonesia and Thailand. His interests include facilitating student engagement, increasing motivation, encouraging self-study and using technology as a learning tool. 

You don’t have to change your Life to teach online

Teaching online. Everybody’s doing it, and there are 1001 apps, games and websites that you can use to dazzle your students. However, what if we simply want to teach our students from the coursebook without having to remember a plethora of internet login details? National Geographic Learning’s best-selling adult series Life has integrated digital components that make teaching easy and effective and learning engaging and interactive - whether it is online or face-to-face. In this session we will look at how we can use digital elements such as the CPT, LMS, e-book and online workbook to complement and enhance learning with a printed textbook. Join Will Laschet in bringing your textbook to Life with simple steps and ideas.

Dr Dat Bao

​Dat Bao, Ph.D. is a senior lecturer at Monash University, Australia. He has previously worked with Leeds Beckett University (UK), Cornell University (USA), the National University of Singapore, and the Assumption University of Thailand. His expertise includes curriculum design, intercultural communication, materials development, literacy development, creative pedagogy and visual pedagogy in language education. He is the author of Understanding Silence and Reticence: Nonverbal participation in Second Language Acquisition (Bloomsbury, 2014), Poetry for Education. Classroom Ideas that Inspire Creativity (Xlibris, 2017), Creativity and Innovations in ELT Material Development: Looking beyond the Current Design (Multilingual Matters, 2018).

How Tasks Influence Talk and Silence

Although it is sometimes believed that the more challenging a classroom task is, the more silent students might become, this could be a simplistic, over-generalising observation. Recent discourse on silence points out that students are inherently diverse in their preferred modes of learning. Some tend to quietly process thoughts; others are prone to thinking out loud. Some enjoy sharing ideas with peers; others are situationally changeable in their learning behaviour. Such inclinations, however, are not exercised independently but in many cases emerge as a response to the design of every task. The discussion shares several preliminary discoveries developed from an empirical research project on a community of East-Asian students in Australia.