It was my first time at Language World today, which was being held in the Examination Rooms, opposite Queen’s College, in Oxford. The yearly event is organised by the Association for Language Learning (ALL) and is a great opportunity to see the latest resources (or the same old resources, in some cases) for Modern Foreign Languages being showcased, attend conference sessions on a wide variety of topics and, best of all, meet people on the same boat as you.

First of all, the people: it was great to see Lisa Stevens and Joe Dale again, whom I first met a few months ago at TeachMeet ’08, and to meet Chris Fuller and Marie-France Perkins in person, whose blogs I have been following. It was also a pleasure for me to greet Helen Myers, Linda parker and Steven Fawkes from ALL, after having had electronic exchanges of various kinds with them.

For me, the best bit about this type of event is meeting the people with whom you have a lot in common and with whom you can exchange ideas and a laugh. It is fantastic to see what other people are doing in the classroom and to get to speak with the people who are effecting change; either by sharing good practice or by influencing policy making.

The first session I attended was Joe Dale‘s, entitled Practical Podcasting: From ideas to iTunes because, although I have been using Audacity and GarageBand to create sound recordings for my interactive exercises in AsiSeHace.net for some time now, I am exploring the possibility of podcasting any future recordings in my recently created El Blog de AsiSeHace.net. Joe explored how to use Audacity to record speech and to edit the recording by adding music and effects, for example. The key part for me was to learn the best way to then turn the recording into a podcast using podOmatic and iTunes.

The second session I attended was Steven Fawkes’s Learners being creative with their language. Steven explored different ways to spark off creativity in the language classroom, given that creativity has been reinstated as an integral part of the new National Curriculum. Steven is clearly an excellent language teacher and the attendees enjoyed learning to count in Russian kinesthetically, using sign language as an aid, as well as looking into eliciting creative language using visual cues and word games.

The last session I was able to attend was Show and Tell organised by ALL, London branch, in which Lisa Stevens (pictured), Marie-France Perkins, Helen Myers, Stéphane Derône, and Nick Mair shared good practice, resources and advice. Unfortunately, I was unable to attend Ewan McIntosh‘s session entitled Thinking outside the xBox: Creative writing through computer games, as it was held on the Friday.

As I intimated at the beginning of this post, although Language World remains, without doubt, the most relevant event for language teachers in the UK, I felt that many of the resources on show were the ones which were probably there last year and the year before that. It was also slightly disappointing that, maybe with the laudable exceptions of Joe Dale and Ewan Mcintosh, not many sessions dealt with new technologies and how to enhance teaching through the use of ICT, particularly given that MFL is often hailed as a leader and innovator in this field. Perhaps that is something the organisers can look into.

In all, I enjoyed Language World, as a first-timer, and I thoroughly recommend a visit next year. I, for one, will be there!

This post is tagged Language World, modern languages, Podcasting, views and opinions