MA TESOL

Two talks of interest to ELT practitioners hosted by British Council on their Isle in Second Life …

We are pleased to announce that two talks by David Crystal will be retransmitted live to people on the British Council Isle in Second Life:

1) Speaking Shakespeare: Fact and Fiction
A light-hearted romp through Shakespeare

by Prof. David Crystal and Hilary Crystal

WHEN: Monday, July 12, 2010 at 5.00pm UK time (see http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/)
WHERE: British Council Isle
http://slurl.com/secondlife/British%20Council%20Isle/213/223/30

2)Myths and realities of English on the Internet
by Prof. David Crystal

The internet, the language linker par excellence, offers ELT fresh opportunities and challenges, but to respond to these requires an understanding of how language is evolving in electronic media. The talk examines some of the myths about what is happening to English in electronic communication, and discusses research realities.

WHEN: Tuesday, July 13, 2010 at 9am UK time  (see http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/)
WHERE: British Council Isle http://slurl.com/secondlife/British%20Council%20Isle/213/223/30

PARTICIPATION:
To participate in the event, join us at the British Council Isle in Second Life. Anybody (over 18) can access the Main Grid island by downloading the Second Life software from www.secondlife.com Creating an avatar is free and takes 15 minutes. Once you’ve registered and downloaded the software, teleport directly to the event by clicking on the following link in your browser:  http://tinyurl.com/3xnrjo2

HOSTS and ORGANISERS:
David Crystal will be speaking live at ETAI’s 6th International conference, Linking Through Language (see http://tinyurl.com/24z2vho > for more information)
Nicola Crowley, British Council Israel (Second Life avatar name: Nic Streusel)
Dr. Hanan Gazit,MetaverSense CEO (Second Life avatar name: Vrider Dancer)

For those not able to attend one of these events, here is a video of this year’s graduation ceremony. It’s rather long, but there are quite a lot of students in Education:

It appears to be European Year of Creativity. Set your creative juices flowing by doing this survey: http://www.etwinning.net/en/pub/news/news/what_does_creativity_mean_to_y.htm

This is a website particularly aimed at people who work at teaching languages in higher education in the UK. These days this inevitably involves discussions about the use of technology. They also run useful conferences and keep a store of materials online

http://www.llas.ac.uk/e-bulletin.aspx

Hi All, welcome to the beginning of our new academic year at Manchester, we’ve been a bit quiet during the summer, but will start to get things going from now on. We look forward to hearing news from others as well.

Gary

Please find for your information our School newsletter — Summer 08 Newsletter. As people who are our current and former students will see, we do our best to advertise their success stories for their peers and our other colleagues. You will also read that a new colleague is joining one of our sister courses and we hope to be working with him on various projects when he arrives.

This may not be a journal that is so familiar to people, because it is regional. However, for me it is particularly interesting because of that. Here is an article on multimedia and grammar learning.

http://www.asian-efl-journal.com/June_06_llc.php

If this article is not of specific interest to you, you can explore others, of course.

Rather late in the day, I’m afraid, but some of you might be interested in this: http://www.theconsultants-e.com/edunation/Slanguages2008.asp.

I presume that even if you can’t attend live there will be some archives of the material.

Here is a link to a European project site that may be of interest to people. This is not about English language learning, but might have some interesting materials or outcomes. You might also want to get involved.

 http://allproject.info/

This is an ELT journal targeted specifically at Asian countries, but with useful articles for us all.

http://www.asian-efl-journal.com/index.php