Conference report: Kristina Kruhak

Kristina was one of three winners of the BESIG conference scholarship 2005. Below are her reports on the sessions she attended as well as interviews with some of the delegates.

Saturday, November 12, 2005

9-10 h Ivan Barnes: Students as Better Presenters

At the very beginning the talk was a bit of a disappointment since it did not examine the topic which had been announced and which I had been really looking forward to. Instead of focusing on students’ presentations, the talk discussed developing speaking skills for students of business English. Still, it was an interesting overview of guidelines for teachers in working on their students’ speaking skills. Ivan Barnes used the new Profile series to illustrate how to get one’s students talk in a natural manner. Although we were already familiar with the vast majority of guidelines given in the talk (setting students particular tasks, recycling, role play, visual prompts and many more) it was good to know that we could find them all in a series of books with ready made examples and exercises to use.

After the talk, I talked to Ivan Barnes about his career in educational consultancy and the fact that his role might be perceived as the one of a sales representative and nothing more. He stressed he was not really a commercial person and was not there to sell the book. His extensive experience in teaching gave him an insight into teachers’ needs. He understood how they felt and how he could help them and, in his opinion, this is the message he manages to get across to his audience.

10:30 – 11:15 h James Chamberlain: Just Plain Rude!

Intercultural competence tends to be the buzz word that never goes out of fashion. Despite all the talks, workshops and presentations on the topic, it is, I feel, still a bit of a mystery to us all. It is, therefore, a great pleasure to be able to discuss this notion with colleagues coming from different cultural backgrounds and those who have the experience of working in cultures so much different than their own. It was also wonderful to see that such a topic can still trigger heated debates even among those who share the common understanding of communicative competence and are aware of the importance of intercultural communicative competence. Being a Croat, a member of a rather dynamic, straightforward and extroverted nation, who lived in France and England for a while, I could easily understand all those who were, in this discussion, much more inclined to defend their and other people’s students as simply being interculturally challenged and not aware of giving offence. In the end, we all simply had to agree that we disagreed and admit that our own understanding of intercultural competence is to a great extent coloured by our own background and experiences. Although useful and interesting, the Behavioural Assessment Scale for Intercultural Competence is simply no panacea that could work perfectly well for all.

12:00 – 13:00 Mark Powell: Up Close and Personal

There is one simple fact that should have been mentioned in the summary on Mark Powell and his workshop published in the BESIG booklet we got before the conference: “He’s a man of many talents, stand-up comedy being one of the most prominent ones.” It was a full hour of fun and laughter. I suppose that those who had met Mark Powell before did not need this type of information, but for people like me, who have only met with his books, this would have been a useful thing to know. Mind you, it would be impossible to find a room big enough to admit all those who’d want to come and attend. We were given a lot of ideas and some very useful handouts during this rather hectic, but definitely interesting and upbeat workshop. I do wish we had more time to try them out on the spot since the greatest part of the audience were teacher dealing with one to one classes, and these can be scary if one is not 100% prepared. I especially liked the handouts with professional scenarios that, I believe, most business English students can relate to. The examples from Mark Powell’s experience were at the same time useful and funny and in so many ways similar to what we all had to face at one point. I am not entirely sure that he lived what he preaches when it comes to presenting in this workshop, but he is definitely one presenter to whom I would never advise using humour with moderation.

Lunchtime was a great opportunity to meet other colleagues and exchange and share experiences. I really enjoyed talking to Lesley Elhouni and Paddy Mahony from the Cambridge Academy of English, a private language school based in Cambridge.

Lesley is based in the part of the school called the Professional Centre, a small unit attached to a General English teaching school, where they teach professionals who come for one, two or three week courses. Lesley mostly teaches business skills such as presentations and meetings, so her choice of workshops was based on that.

Talking to Lesley was a lot of fun, and she seemed like a person who had a lot to say, so I wondered whether she was thinking about applying as a speaker in one of the future conferences.

“I don’t think so,” she replied, “I am not sure I have enough knowledge on a particular subject to give a presentation about it yet. Maybe in the future, but not at the moment, and certainly not in Business English. I have only been teaching Business English for about a year.”

Lesley really enjoyed all the sessions. This was her third conference and she was quite impressed by the BESIG Monaco conference because it seemed much better organized than the ones she had previously attended. Also, all the sessions she attended were really interesting and useful, which had not always been her experience in the past.

Paddy Mahony is the director of the Professional Centre at the Cambridge Academy of English. There are four permanent teachers at the Professional Center. I had to admit I was a bit surprised since I expected a greater number of permanent teachers, but Paddy explained that the overall number of their clients had dropped over the last few years. Most of them come only for the basic business skills and are not always interested in doing more than that, although the school is definitely capable of meeting other demands as well. Besides, as a rule, native speakers are not interested in learning foreign languages, so the school only teaches English. Paddy was also quite impressed with the Monaco conference. He had not been to such a conference for a very long time. “I never regarded myself as a conference person,” said Paddy, “But the presentations I have attended so far have been full of energy, full of information, stimulating. I am very comfortable.”

When asked what he meant by ‘not being a conference person’, Paddy referred jokingly to David Lodge’s example of a perennial conference person who had no work in the Institute, but spent all his time meeting people to talk about the work they haven’t done. According to Paddy, conferences are very often used as marketing tools rather than development tools, and he is really not into that. “I am into learning,” Paddy said. And it seemed this was just the right conference for it.

15:30 – 16:30 Dörte Gluchowski: The Needs Analysis that is a Party

In an hour Dörte Gluchowski presented a new approach to doing needs analysis that can get students talk, gain confidence, involve them all from the very beginning and create a relaxed atmosphere of cooperation. The components of the approach are themselves far from being a novelty, but organizing and uniting them in one approach is definitely praiseworthy. This was also a workshop where ‘there was no escape’ and one had to participate which was, I am sure, greatly appreciated by all the participants. We all had to play our role in a get to know interview session. I wish we had more time to discuss the possible reluctance of students to participate in such activities. They lend themselves well to working with students who already have some knowledge of the language, but I can very well imagine students at lower levels being a bit in awe of the approach. This was, I assure you, not the case with the teachers who took part in the workshop. We loved every minute of it.

Sunday, November 13, 2005

9:00 – 10:00 Eric Baber: The Use of ICT in Business English Teaching

Coming from a school that really prides itself on the use of technology in the classroom, I was extremely interested in this presentation. I expected to learn about new technologies I might introduce into my classes, as well as to get tips on new ways to work with the technologies I already use. During the presentation, Eric Baber introduced us to a number of useful Internet-based tools, such as Hot Potatoes, Blogger, and Wiktionary. Each of the tools was explained and discussed with great interest, and with audience members sharing their experiences using these technologies. I do have to admit I was left a bit disappointed at the end of the talk. Although a full hour seems like enough time, it almost always proves too short. This was probably the case with Eric Baber’s presentation. Having decided to present and talk about nine different tools, I feel he felt a bit rushed to go through them all, while not going over the allotted time slot. On the loosing side of quantity, as is often the case, was quality. While I was excited to hear about all these tools, most of which were new to me, I am not sure we had enough time to discuss their possible usage. I would have loved to hear some more examples of actual activities I could undertake with my students using these wonderful tools. Having Internet access from the very beginning would have definitely been an asset to this presentation.

10:30 – 11:15 Ilangovan Padmanaban: Present Self Before Making your Presentation

It was really a pleasure to attend a fellow scholar’s talk. I was a bit surprised to see that the audience was rather small in number, expecting such an interesting topic to attract a greater number of attendees. Still, the big advantage was that the talk really turned into an interactive presentation. Ilangovan started with a brief literature review and explanations on what presenters usually do and what kind of research they conduct in order to ensure having a successful business presentation. He then explained, on concrete examples, what common mistakes are usually made by presenters and eventually result in the failure of their presentations. According to Ilangovan, coursebook examples of good presentations tend to fail since they are a lot different from the actual real-life presentations. Following the good presentation models usually puts the presenter in the situation where he or she excludes himself/herself completely and is therefore forced to make cognitive adjustments before the end of the presentation. By presenting himself/herself first, with all his/her weaknesses and strengths, a presenter avoids such cognitive setbacks and triggers cognitive adjustments in audience.

12:00 – 13:00 Jeanne Spoeri, Pauline Brazier, Lydia Porter: Learning Strategies to Reduce Plagiarism

Here is a talk I really enjoyed. It was directly related to my field of interest, well presented with good, useful examples in a relaxed and interactive atmosphere. The talk was extremely well structured, encompassing reasons for plagiarizing in students, strategies and preventive measures to avoid it, as well as examples of projects students were involved in, which made it difficult for them to plagiarize and required them to account for every photo, slogan and element they used. It was especially interesting for me to see that the reasons for plagiarizing given by presenters’ students were to a great extent similar to the results of the research my colleague and I conducted at the Zagreb School of Economics and Management. It was also very gratifying to see that we were all using similar measures to fight it and that they really worked. We all agreed it was a long term process, but progress is definitely possible. I particularly liked the examples of projects students were involved in. It showed that extensive preparation is needed from both teachers and students in order to avoid plagiarism. Students should be guided every step of the way, should always be able to find help in their teachers and be given clear examples that will enable them to make a distinction between modelling and plagiarism.

Just before the talk, I had a couple of minutes to talk to Jeanne Spoeri, an ESL and Communications Professor at the International University of Monaco and the founder of the IUM ESL programme. Although not a member of the BESIG committee, Jeanne was a valuable asset to the conference organizers, making sure everybody got where they were supposed to be and as she put it “acting a bit of a Mum to all participants”. Since Jeanne has been teaching at the IUM for a number of years, I really felt the need to say how impressed we were all with such a warm welcome and well equipped lecture halls. According to Jeanne, all the credit should go to their president who was very keen on introducing the latest technology to enhance the working conditions at the University. Students were very willing to embrace this idea. The teachers were a bit apprehensive at first since they had no background in technology, but after having been given extensive training, they really appreciated this more than welcome change.

Jeanne teaches academic writing and works with students of different nationalities who come from very different cultural backgrounds, which means they do not have uniform writing styles. She has to explain to them what kind of writing is done in English, what kind of tone they are supposed to use, what the sentences structure is like and has to introduce them to the notion of cultural type writing as well. When asked whether students plagiarized a lot, Jeanne just smiled and invited me to her talk on the topic. I did accept the invitation and truly enjoyed every minute of it.