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Keynotes
Gary Barkhuizen
Plurilingualism, shedding skins and floating identities: Diversity in community language narratives
In my presentation I tell three stories which illustrate some of these challenges: (1) The first story is my own, a migrant in New Zealand who speaks English, with Afrikaans as a second language and some proficiency in Gayle; (2) The second story is about Gert, an Afrikaans speaker living on the North Shore in Auckland who is highly proficient in English; (3) The third tells of the imagined linguistic and identity experiences of pre-departure Afrikaans-speaking migrants from South Africa. These stories generate questions about language and identity in migrant contexts which have only recently begun to be addressed by community language practitioners. Some of these will be presented to the audience for consideration.
Rosemary Erlam
Understanding context and enhancing communication: Mediating the worlds of the practitioner and researcher
On one level, we need to recognise that there is already a large amount of research knowledge that is available. We need, however, to ‘mobilise’ this knowledge (Levin, 2010) and make it accessible to teachers, using language based on pedagogical concepts rather than technical constructs (Ellis, 1998). There is evidence to suggest that New Zealand teachers do want this knowledge and that given the opportunity to ‘positively’ engage with it that it may impact on their teaching (Erlam, 2008). On the other hand, we need research that engages with issues of concern in New Zealand contexts. While there are encouraging examples of teachers doing their own research (Jeurissen & Kitchen, 2007; Denny, 2005) there are also barriers. A possible way forward is for there to be greater dialogue and collaboration between the researcher and the teacher. This presentation will also propose that Ortega’s (2009) metaphor of ‘in-betweeness’ may be helpful in enabling those working in these different contexts to reconceptualise how they view and relate to each other.
Finally, Ortega (2005) claims that research is value-driven. What does this mean for research in New Zealand? How does the type of research that we are engaging in reflect the values that we hold? What sort of research do we need in and for the future?
Pauline Gibbons
Mediating Learning in the ‘Challenge Zone’
Drawing on recent research in Sydney in classrooms with large numbers of ESL learners, this paper describe the characteristics of ‘high challenge, high-support’ classrooms. It will first describe some of the key practices in which students were engaged as they participated in intellectually challenging work, and then discuss the ways in which teachers provided scaffolding for these learners both through planned and interactional scaffolding. Through these mediating teacher practices the paper suggests that even early English language learners are able to participate in a cognitively demanding curriculum.
David NunanProudly sponsored by:
In addition to his research and scholarly work, Dr. Nunan is the author of several major textbook series for the teaching and learning of English as a Foreign Language. These texts are based on his task-based language teaching approach, and are widely used in schools, school systems and universities around the world. His series Go For It is the largest selling textbook series in the world with total sales of over seven hundred million copies.
David Nunan has served two terms on the TESOL Board of Directors, first as Member-at-Large, and then as President. He was the first person to serve as President from outside of North America. In 2007, he was elected to the Board of Trustees of The International Research Foundation for Language Education.
Recent honours and awards include a 2002 citation by the United States Congress for services to English language education, and the 2003 TESOL Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2005, he was named one of the 50 most influential Australians internationally. In 2008, Anaheim University created the David Nunan Institute for Language Education to further language education and research around the world.
More than words: Culture and identity in language learning and use
In this presentation, David Nunan will challenge the notion that acquiring another language is simply a matter of mastering language system, that is the sounds, grammar and vocabulary of the target language. These are only part of the language learning story. Central to language learning and use is the personal and cultural transformation that comes with the acquisition process.
Merrill Swain
Dr. Merrill Swain is one of the plenary speakers and pre-conference workshop presenters and is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto. She has taught and conducted research at OISE/UT for 38 years. Her interests include bilingual education (particularly French immersion education) and communicative second language learning, teaching and testing. Her present research focuses on the role of collaborative dialogue and 'languaging' in second language learning within a sociocultural theory of mind framework. She was President of the American Association for Applied Linguistics in 1998-99, and a Vice President of the Executive Board of the International Association of Applied Linguistics (AILA) from 1999-2005. She is recipient of the 2003 Robert Roy Award which is given to “an outstanding Canadian second language educator who has been active in the second language professional community in teaching, research, writing and dedication to the improvement of second language teaching and learning in Canada”. She is also the recipient of the American Association for Applied Linguistics’ 2004 Distinguished Scholarship and Service Award. Dr. Swain has given talks and workshops in many parts of the world, most recently in Australia, Brazil, China, Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Ireland, Spain, Wales, the UK and the USA. Her most recent book is one co-edited with Bygate and Skehan Researching Pedagogic Tasks: Second Language Learning, Teaching and Testing (Longman’s). Another book of interest to this audience is Immersion Education: International Perspectives edited by Johnson and Swain (CUP). She is author of over 150 articles published in refereed journals, as well as many book chapters. Merrill is currently co-authoring a textbook which will introduce Sociocultural Theory through narratives of Second Language Learning and Teaching (Multilingual Matters).
The Inseparability of Cognition and Emotion in Second Language Learning Date/Time: Monday 4 October: 9:00 am Location: Performing Arts Centre Hall The research literature about the process of second language learning has focused to a great extent on cognition. Left aside are questions about how emotions fit into an understanding of second language learning. In this talk, my goal is to demonstrate that we have limited our understanding of second language learning by failing to take into account the role emotions play.
A perspective which brings together cognition and emotion is that of Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory (SCT) of mind. Vygotsky saw the two as being inextricably interconnected. However, many in the Western world who have taken up Vygotsky’s ideas have focused on the cognitive side of learning and development, myself included. In this talk I hope to redress this imbalance by discussing emotions as co-constructed, culturally-situated mediational tools, and by providing concrete examples that will show the role they play in the process of knowledge co-construction (learning) during interaction.
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Gary Barkhuizen is one of the plenary speakers and Associate Professor in the Department of Applied Language Studies and Linguistics at the University of Auckland. His research and teaching interests are in the areas of sociolinguistics, language teacher education and narrative inquiry, and he has published widely on these topics in a range of international journals, including TESOL Quarterly, Applied Linguistics, International Journal of the Sociology of Language, International Journal of Bilingualism, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, Linguistics and Education and ELT Journal. He has been editor of Southern African Journal of Applied Language Studies and New Zealand Studies in Applied Linguistics and is currently assistant editor of Language Teaching Research. He is guest editor of two special-topic journal issues: Language Teaching Research (with Simon Borg) on language teacher education (July 2010), and TESOL Quarterly on narrative research in TESOL, to appear in 2011. He is author of Analysing learner language (with Rod Ellis, OUP, 2005). Gary has taught ESOL at high school (in Mmabatho, South Africa, near where Mma Ramotswe lives) and at community college level (in New York, where Calvin Klein was a student), and has been involved in teacher education in South Africa, New Zealand and the US. He has also conducted short-term teacher/researcher professional development seminars in China, Cambodia, Hong Kong and Japan. Gary loves telling and listening to stories, that is, when he is not listening to Bob Dylan, reading Bill Bryson and John Irving, or watching the Warriors. 
Rosemary Erlam is a senior lecturer in the Department of Applied Language Studies and Linguistics at the University of Auckland. She initially trained and worked for a number of years as a speech-language therapist and then as a French language teacher. Rosemary’s PhD, completed in 2003, was an experimental study investigating instructional effectiveness in the French language classroom. Rosemary has a variety of research interests including second language acquisition, teacher education and language assessment. Involvement in a number of Ministry of Education funded projects has given her the opportunity to research effective language learning in the New Zealand context, an area of particular interest. This has also enabled her to meet and be involved nationally with teachers in professional development programmes. Rosemary has published widely, in both national and international journals. She has also been involved in a number of research collaborations, one of which has resulted in the recent publication of a book which she has co-authored and which is entitled 
Associate Professor Pauline Gibbons is one of the plenary speakers and has taught postgraduate and undergraduate TESOL courses at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia for many years. She has also worked in teacher education in Sweden, Hong Kong, Laos, Singapore, South Africa, Marshall Islands, UK, and USA, among other locations, and as an English language teacher in Iran and Germany. Her research interests are in content-based ESL pedagogy, and classroom discourse, and she has recently completed a research project focusing on ‘intellectual quality’ and ESL learners in the middle years. She has published extensively in the area of ESL education, including Bridging Discourses in the ESL Classroom: Students, Teachers and Researchers (Continuum, 2006), and three books published by Heinemann for teachers: Learning to Learn in a Second Language (1993); Scaffolding Language, Scaffolding Learning: Teaching ESL Students in the Mainstream Classroom (2002); and her most recent book English Learners, Academic Literacy and Thinking: Learning in the Challenge Zone (2009).
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