HELTA Members’ Day 2017: Voices from Within

What a fantastic day!

Our Members’ Day 2017 at Berufsschule City Nord was a whopping success. About 40 people showed up to see our keynote speaker Dr. Catherine Walter and nine of our members speak.

Materials from our speakers can be found in this GoogleDrive folder. It’s open access, so anyone can upload documents. Just make sure you upload PDFs and not PowerPoints; this way nobody can nick your intellectual property without some serious tinkerin’.

As the jam-packed programme left only very limited time to discuss some of the hot-button issues that came up during the course of the day, we want to invite everyone to use the comment section to share their thoughts. Here are just a few of the questions that we had:

In teaching phonology, should we focus more on receptive than productive skills?

What is the character of the English language? Do teachers focus too much on hard and fast linguistic definitions and neglect the ‘story’ of English? 

Is explicit grammar teaching (always) better than implicit grammar teaching?

What are the benefits of external assessment? Are tests good for students?

Is writing manuals good practice just for students of technical English, or all of them?

Contract English: an indispensible part of every teacher’s toolkit?

What do we do with notions of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ in the age of World Englishes? 

What are the most important life-lessons of EFL-teachers?

Where does ‘Business English’ come from? We’ve seen it borrow freely from military language, sports jargon, and even humanistic lingo. What’s next?

What are some of the best (and worst!) practices teachers have found to keep track of lessons and resources?

Is there anything you can’t teach in game-form?

and finally

Should the group Golden Girls have been given a full point for writing “Webster’s dictionary” in part three of the quiz?

Discuss! ?