14/07/2015, by CLAS

Innovative Language Teaching and Learning at University: Enhancing Participation and Collaboration

The School of Cultures, Languages and Area Studies was the proud host of the 5th annual conference in the “Innovative Language Teaching at University” series. Under the heading “Enhancing participation and collaboration” this year’s conference, organised by Cecilia Goria, Oranna Speicher and Sascha Stollhans, took place on 19 June and was attended by over 120 linguists, language teachers and language acquisition researchers.

After opening the conference, the organisers handed over to Head of School Judith Still, who welcomed the delegates and emphasised the importance of research-informed and innovative language teaching, which lies at the heart of our practice in CLAS. Zoltán Dörnyei (School of English) gave the first keynote presentation on “Motivation and the vision of knowing a second language”, which undeniably marked a highlight of the conference and inspired lots of interesting discussions.

Judith Still opening the conference

The sessions which followed included speakers from all over the world, and topics ranged from technology-enhanced language teaching and learning and content and language integrated learning to intercultural competence, the role of the year abroad and innovations in assessment and feedback. There was also a workshop on “Technology in language teaching”, offered by David Binns from Sanako, one of the main sponsors of the conference.

The conference was rounded off by Jan Hardman (University of York), who looked into different forms of teacher-student interaction in her keynote presentation “Engaging and motivating students (and yourself) with a dialogic pedagogy”.

Thank you to all conference participants for a fantastic and very productive day! You can download the conference programme and some of the presentations on the conference website, and catch up with the tweets from the conference (#InnoConf15) in this storify.

A volume with selected papers from the conference, edited by Cecilia Goria, Oranna Speicher and Sascha Stollhans, will be published with research-publishing.net in 2016.

The conference organisers with delegate Fakhreddine Brahmi from the University of Gafsa, Tunisia

Sascha Stollhans, Department of German Studies

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