I had the privilege of representing the TESOL CALL Interest Section at the meeting of the International Association for Teaching English as a Foreign Language (IATEFL) March 19–23, 2012. This was the second year of a series of annual exchanges between the CALL-IS and IATEFL’s Learning Technologies (LT) SIG. This exchange also involved Sophie Iannou-Georgio attending TESOL 2012 in Philadelphia representing the LT SIG. She will be reporting to the LT SIG about this exchange. These exchanges are being sponsored by the British Council under the leadership of Michael Carrier, who has long been a member of both the TESOL CALL-IS and IATEFL LT communities. Last year Phil Hubbard attended IATEFL on behalf of the TESOL CALL-IS and Gary Motteram attended TESOL on behalf of the IATEFL LT SIG. Many of the potential projects that he included in his report in the CALL-IS newsletter last year were elaborated upon during this visit. I was also fortunate to be able to interact with Sophie, Phil, and Gary during this visit.

The week began with a full day of preconference activities related to mobile learning. In fact, this topic dominated much of the SIG events throughout the conference. It was very interesting to participate in the IATEFL LT SIG activities. In particular, it was inspiring to see the way that a single day of the conference is organized around SIG days. For the LT SIG, this day was full of interesting presentations, some of which I will highlight in this article.

Graham Stanley, the LT SIG chair, welcomed people to the day’s events and coordinated the preconference workshop about mobile learning. This session was well attended and there was a lively exchange of ideas.

LT SIG chair, Graham Stanley, introducing Paul Driver

The first presentation of the day got people on their feet dancing and singing in a demonstration of some benefits of incorporating rhythm in the K–12 ESL/EFL classroom. Carole Nicoll (an independent consultant) presented a lively workshop on using earworms to promote improved pronunciation through engaging tasks that assist learners in retaining large chunks of information. More about Carole’s work can be found online at her website.

Carole Nicoll

One major highlight of the LT SIG day of the conference was the session “Pervasive Playfulness and Mobile Technologies for Embodied Language Learning,” by Paul Driver (University of Tras-os-Montes e Alto Douro, Portugal). In this session Paul presented some of his authentic location-based games in which students work together in teams to gather information and solve mysteries. For more about his games, you can visit his website.

Paul Driver

Another of the many sessions related to the use of mobile technology was presented by Maria do Carmo Ferreira Xavier (Cultura Inglesa S.A.). In her session, “Ideas to Implement Mobile Phones in the English Classroom,” she provided an overview of her 18-month experiment with mobile learning. She shared a number of practical suggestions for using mobile learning to increase student motivation. More about her thoughts on this topic can be found online.

Representatives of the British Council presented on technology projects in the countries they work in. Most of these highlighted recent successes and encouraged attendees to consider how the project might be adapted for their own teaching contexts. Some of these include Paul Woods (British Council Argentina), whose talk titled “New World New Media” explored using television, radio, mobile technology, the Internet, and social media to “reach every teacher and learner of English in Latin America.” Other notable presenters were Monika Zacrek (British Council Romania), who presented on the topic of using video projects as a means of reaching out to teens; Rui da Silva (Bellerbys College), who provided an overview of how to design courses in a manner that increases personalization and motivation; and Paul Braddock (British Council), who shared ideas on how to use interactive white boards. Vandana Jain (British Council India) presented a talk titled, “Digital Media and English in India.” This session showcased the British Council’s partnership with a leading TV provider in India to improve English conversation skills at a very low cost.

Representatives of the TESOL technology standards team, including Philip Hubbard (Stanford University), Sophie Iannou-Georgiou (Cyprus Ministry of Education and Culture), and Greg Kessler (Ohio University), provided an overview of the recently released TESOL technology standards. The presenters suggested ways that these standards may be used in varied contexts as well as to inform other standards-based projects. More about the standards project can be found online. The standards framework can also be freely downloaded here.

The recipient of the IATEFL LT SIG Travel Scholarship is invited to present at the conference annually. This year the recipient was Jitendra Kumar Singh from the N S Patel Arts College, in Anand, India. Jitendra presented on collaborative e-learning and m-learning management. This session featured the use of VCALP.com, which is a free and collaborative learning platform that has been developed for use in technology-poor areas of India. This session featured some very innovative and interesting ideas about the utilization of technology outside its traditional confines. Another award winner was Bruno Andrade (Cultura Inglesa, Rio de Janeiro). He received the IATEFL LT SIG Diana Eastment Scholarship. Bruno discussed how Skype could be used to enhance integration, participation, and speaking abilities.

Jitendra Kumar Singh

The closing session for LT SIG day was presented by Jamie Keddie (NILE). He explored the generational differences between teachers and learners. His focus was to get a better understanding of what he referred to as “generation YouTube.” This was followed by the LT SIG Open Forum, which provided an opportunity for individuals across the SIG to network and further discuss topics addressed during the day over light snacks and refreshments.

It was inspiring to see that two of the conference plenaries were focused on CALL. Diana Laurillard (London Knowledge Lab, Institute of Education) delivered a talk titled, “Supporting the Teacher as Innovative Learning Designer.” She emphasized that teachers need to “update and upgrade” their teaching through the incorporation of technology. Further, she acknowledged that teachers should not be left alone to pursue this; they require support from the profession, including teacher preparation programs. The archived recording of this session can be found online.

Steve Thorne (Portland State University and the University of Groningen) delivered a plenary titled, “Awareness, Appropriacy, and Living Language Use.” He outlined previous work that has investigated the language learning uses of social media, fan fiction communities, and online gaming. In this context, he argued for a usage-based model of second language development. He then presented a pedagogical framework designed to increase the relevance of instructed second language education through structured juxtaposition of digital vernaculars with more formal classroom genres of language use, an approach that he and his colleagues are calling bridging activities. The archived recording of this session can be found online. An interview at IATEFL with Steve Thorne can be found here.

The British Council hosted a number of social events, including a networking reception that was a welcome opportunity for attendees to socialize and experience the launch of the new website called LearnEnglish Teens, which is intended to teach English to teens across the globe. More about this project can be found online.

Gavin Dudeny provided a historical overview of the evolution of CALL in the session “Pat IT—From CALL to EdTech: A History.” He reflected on how he had seen the world of technology and the field of CALL change over the past two decades.

Gavin Dudeny

Last but not least, it was interesting to see the extent of innovative technology offerings in the exhibitors’ area. When compared with TESOL, it seems that many of the groups at IATEFL are small startups rather than large companies. I found a number of interesting booths in this area, but was particularly taken by the automated oral proficiency assessment tools being offered by Exam Speak.

The 47th IATEFL Conference will be held April 8–12, 2013, in Liverpool, England. You can find more info online.

Greg Kessler is associate professor of CALL in the Department of Linguistics at Ohio University. He is currently president of the Computer Assisted Language Instruction Consortium and editor of the Action Research Column for Language Learning & Technology. He was the TESOL CALL Interest Section chair from 2003 to 2004 and president of Ohio TESOL from 2007 to 2008. He was also a member of the authoring team for the TESOL technology standards.