ARTESOL

Susan Hillyard (B.Ed. (Hons.) Warwick University, UK.)

Resourcing your difficult classroom with imagination

The objectives of this workshop are to raise the participants’ awareness of how both teachers and students arrive at the classroom door each day with their imaginations active in their minds. However, as language teachers, we rarely tap into this valuable, free resource to motivate students or enhance their acquisition of English. The presenter will open up a discussion to try to define what we mean by the word “imagination” and what it is that makes us all believe our classrooms are difficult spaces to work in. We shall analyze the nature of these difficult circumstances and explore what all of these different, difficult environments have in common. One certain commonality is that many students themselves feel alienated from participating in classes which traditionally do not delve into the inner lives of the students.

Susan Hillyard has a B.Ed. (Hons.) Warwick University, UK. In her 52-year long career in 17 countries her roles include Teacher, HOD, Trainer, Conference/Webinar Presenter, Workshop Facilitator, Materials Writer and Researcher. She is Director of SHELTA, offering consultancy, PPD, EMI and courses on teaching English creatively to Teachers worldwide.

Ph.D. Ann Montemayor Borsinger (Rio Negro National University)

Contributions of Systemic Functional Linguistics to amplifying imagination in ELT

The tripartite view of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) on language as a system of choices offers possible ways of amplifying imagination in ELT. For SFL, texts are shaped by combining three different strands of meaning — experiential meanings that create conceptualizations of experience, interpersonal meanings that enable the communication of these conceptualizations in social exchanges, and textual meanings that organize the experiential and interpersonal dimensions into strings of coherent messages. This presentation examines possible language choices taking each of the three strands of meanings in turn. For instance, a focus on experiential meanings can show how changes in the representation of concepts in translations of textbooks seriously affect the transmission of knowledge from one language to another, and a focus on interpersonal meanings shows the way in which subject and verb choices are used in comic strips and change the Tenor of literary, academic and classroom discourse. For textual meanings we discuss how different options in the way information is arranged in academic texts affect their rhetorical force. The capacity of SFL to focus on especially relevant strands of meaning according to the genres encountered promotes a deeper understanding of the relations between the levels of grammar and discourse. This in turn draws our attention towards the challenges posed by the successful exploration of meanings in ELT contexts, where producing a second language that effectively complies with specific social and cultural functions is of great relevance.

Ann Montemayor-Borsinger holds a Master degree in Applied Linguistics (Bristol) and a PhD in Linguistics (Glasgow). She is Professor of Linguistics at Río Negro National University in San Carlos de Bariloche, and has been Invited Professor on different research/teaching programs in Argentina, Mexico (UNAM), Switzerland (University of Geneva) and Finland (University of Helsinki). Her research interests focus on functional grammar and discourse analysis. She has published widely on different types of discourses in English, Spanish and French, drawing on Systemic Functional Linguistics.

Ph.D. Charlene Polio (Michigan State University)

Writing for acquisition: how AI can help and hinder.

The goal of some writing instruction is to help students produce specific genres that they may need to write in real life.  In some contexts, where longer term goals are not obvious, such as primary and secondary education or general education, writing is often used to facilitate language learning in general.  I will first focus on how and why writing can be used to promote acquisition.  This will be followed by examples of when and how AI can be used at different stages to help students focus on language, produce more complex output on their own, and evaluate their own output.  I will end with some caveats about using AI in writing instruction.

Charlene Polio holds a PhD in Applied Linguistics (UCLA) and a MS (University of Pennsylvania). She is Professor in the Department of Linguistics, Languages, and Cultures at Michigan State University where she teaches the MA program in Teaching English to Speakers of other Languages (TESOL). She is a core Faculty member in the Second Language Studies Program. Her main research interest is second language writing, she is particularly interested in the various research methods and measures used in studying L2 writing as well as the interface between the fields of L2 writing and second language acquisition. She has published and done research in the areas of second language acquisition, foreign language classroom discourse, and behavior differences in novice vs. experienced teachers. She has been a visiting instructor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education/University of Toronto and Teachers College, Columbia University. She has taught ESL at Michigan State University, the University of California A, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences Graduate School in Beijing, and Philadelphia Community College.