Best of BESIG 2

On 7 June 2008 BESIG and TESOL France held a joint event entitled Best of BESIG 2 in Paris. Our plenary speaker was Andy Hewitson, Head of Teacher Training at Siemens, who proved an inspired choice - for a report on his plenary session please see below.

Speakers and the titles of their talks were as follows:

Eric Baber (Cambridge University Press) Move Along, Now: From Web 1.0 to 2.0 - and back again?
Duncan Baker (Lydbury English Centre Ltd.) Negotiating in English
Ian Bell (TESOL France) Teaching Trends: What and how should we be teaching?
Ann Claypole (LinguaServe) Teaching Business English in a Virtual World
Maurice Claypole (LinguaServe) Translation in the Business English Classroom
Anna Cowper (Macmillan) Have You Got What it Takes to Get Published?
Bob Dignen (York Associates) Intercultural Competence - leveraging the world's diversity
Stephen Ferron (IATEFL BESIG) Life After Business English
Anthony Green (Bari University, Italy) Business English Listening and Reading Skills - let's separate them
Vanessa Street (Université du Littoral) Transferable Skills: From private business language training to public university education
Adrian Tennant (IATEFL) Method or Madness?
Sab Will (TESOL France) Internet in the Classroom

Andy Hewitson: We used to...

Report by Stephen Ferron

No one is in a better position than Andy Hewitson, Head of Teacher Training at Siemens, to talk about the way language teaching has evolved in the past several decades. As a young language student he was drilled extensively on rote learning and pronunciation drills which meant that a generation after learning songs or poems in French and German, Andy could recite (or better still sing) the texts wonderfully (with nary a trace of a Scottish accent). He also reminded his audience of how EFL teaching materials have evolved over the years and talked about how the content focus has changed in business English to better serve the real-world needs of our learners. An unintentional highlight: because Andy was also describing how our profession has benefited from technological improvements, it was inevitable that he would be sabotaged by some old-fashioned equipment malfunctions. The lesson, of course, was that a good teacher will not be undone by the odd technical glitch. Andy was undeterred and the audience was delighted. And no laptop or PDA is likely to sing as well as Andy Hewitson -- in any language.

Photos and further reports of the event will be available soon. If you attended the event and would like to write a report about the event as a whole or a particular session please do - please send any contributions to webadmin@besig.org .