Dear Diary

This week, I thought I’d take a leaf out of Katherine Bilsborough’s always interesting Newsletter, and write in the format of a few entries in a diary. After five days of “Got up, went out, came home, went to bed”, I was getting desperate, and then something happened. ?????

Saturday 6th April

Went to a “cal?otada” at my son’s house. March is the proper month for this very traditional Catalan event, but anyway, it was a very enjoyable day. Cal?ots are long spring onions which are grilled on a barbeque and accompanied with a romesco sauce, after which the barbecue’s used to cook all sorts of meat. Lots of wine too, obviously. ?About 30 people came, and just about all of them, apart from my wife and me, were bilingual Catalan and Spanish speakers. Lots of them also spoke English very well. What was interesting for nerdy old me was the choices of language they made when talking to different friends. In a group of seven or eight people that formed for a while, David spoke to Marta in Spanish and to Jordi in Catalan, Marta spoke to Jordi in Spanish and to Montse in Catalan, and so on, and they were all switching from one language to the other in the same conversation, quite unaware that they were doing so. I asked them what motivated their choices, and after mulling it over, they reckoned it was determined by what language they used first with one another. Some had met and made friends at a school where Spanish was the main language, so they spoke Spanish to each other, while others met at mainly Catalan speaking schools so they spoke Catalan. Or they met at a football club, or a local bar where one of the two languages was mostly used. Once the habit had been established, it maintained itself, even though all but a few felt equally happy speaking either language (the exceptions held strong Catalan Independence views and only reluctantly spoke Spanish).

This phenomenon is, I think, peculiar to truly bilingual environments (Montreal, Barcelona, Bilbao, Tashkent, ….) and I’ve never seen or heard anyone among the hordes currently baying on about Translanguaging mention it. It’s not classic code-switching, where you talk to someone in an agreed language and occasionally use words or phrases from another language, and it’s not motivated by any ideological creed that denies the “validity” or “reality” of separate languages and enjoins everybody to “celebrate the full range of their linguistic resources”, whatever that means. It's just what people do if they're left to their own devices. ?????????

Wednesday 10th April

Marta González-Lloret, author of the 2015 book “A Practical Guide to Integrating Technology into Task-Based Language Teaching”, gave a videoconference session for participants in the TBLT course that the SLB cooperative is currently running. During the session, Marta got into a short riff about the transactional character of so much of what passes for education these days. Here’s a slightly edited transcript:

“We ‘ve seen big changes in higher education in the last 30 years and in how students perceive learning too. So now it seems to be a lot more “transactional”: I ask you for a paper, you give me a paper and I give you a grade, right? That’s it! They focus more on the product than on the process. But, really, I think “I don’t care much what paper you give me; what I care about is the process of you writing the paper because that’s what helps your writing – learning to write”. So I make a very, very strong point to my students when I teach language. I tell them that it’s not the product, it’s the process. I don’t care about your vacation in the Bahamas. What I want is for you to write about something that will teach you how to write and how to think and how to compose and, you know, develop these skills, that you need not just for Spanish but for your job, and your life, you need these skills. And those skills are not transactional. I can’t give you those skills no matter how much you pay me, right? It’s something that you need and it’s a process. You need to go through the process and I keep repeating it and repeating it and some of the students actually do realise that it’s important and they pay attention to it. That makes them not interested in Chat GPT to do their compositions because they understand that that is just going to kill the process, which is what we’re trying to nurture”. ?Amen to that.

Well, that’s it really, so let’s look forward to next week.

Tuesday 16th April

WELCOME TO BRIGHTON!

IMATESOL CONVENTION BAG INCLUDES?PLAN OF BRIGHTON CENTRE CLEARLY MARKING ALL EXITS?

OPENING KEYNOTE: Liz Truss: “Private Education?in a Post-Truth Era: Profiting from Pragmatism”

Yes! She's Here! We couldn't be more excited that the former UK Prime Minister will give the opening address.?As she so famously said "The single most important two things we can do are education, education, education"! ELT is at a crossroads, which is why we need a third way, a pragmatic way.?The advantages of creative accounting, score adjustment in high stake tests, pyramid selling,?zero-hour contracts,?smarmy sales pitches, telling lies, and?crossing your fingers behind your back when making?promises?will all be discussed with Liz’ hallmark mixture of wit and wisdom.

?DE BEERS SPONSORED PLENARY: Prof. Hack Pilchard: Taking Coursebooks to The Next Level

?Widely-respected?Professor Pilchard, who has done so much to line his own pockets, will explain how new independent studies sponsored by a consortium of leading ELT publishers?demonstrates?how?tethered sheep, fed only on carefully selected and sequenced?lexical chunks from leading ELT coursebooks, achieved "well above average", "statistically significant" scores?on specially-adapted versions of the Pearson GSE bank of tests, thus providing?convincing evidence for the utility and efficacy of coursebooks. He will then discuss?his?own daring new coursebook series “Business English For Millionaires” printed in gold leaf on Giza 45 Egyptian sheets, each copy signed by an Elon Musk bot. ?

?MORNING?PLENARY Prof.?Farcen-Parodi: Patterns in the toast;?Shadows on the wall:?Messages in the Broccoli ??

Professor?Farcen-Parodi has been changing her mind about how people learn languages?for the past 50 years. On different occasions she has declared: It's the input! It's the output! It's input and ouput! No! It’s Affordances!”

Here she brings her?exciting voyage of discovery full circle?by returning to?Heraclitus: It's flux! Prof. Farcen-Parodi will disorganise (sic)?her plenary by tearing up her notes, throwing them into a bin,?and?then picking out?random?samples to act as cues. In this way,?the?different components of one?complex system (the?prepared talk) will?interact and give rise to another pattern (the talk itself) at another level of complexity.

To facilitate disengagement from?the positivist paradigm that so perniciously pervades current thinking,?Prof. Farcen-Parodi asks members of the audience?to wear blindfolds?and fit ear plugs (only $10 when?pre-ordered from our helpful Convention staff).

?CLOSING KEYNOTE Larry Farmer: The ELT is Full of Truly Wonderful People And I Honestly Really Mean That

Larry Farmer, one of the most widely-respected ELT ambassadors in the world today gives his own passionate defence of his beloved profession and explains just why he loves everything?(really, absolutely everything)?so very, very much.

The talk will be content-free, and?Farmer’s renowned practice of leaving the stage so as to?walk among his fans will be enhanced by attaching him to a special harness, designed by his colleague Spat Raspberry, an expert in flying high and dodging?flack. Thanks to the harness, Farmer will spend equal amounts of time on each of the three floors of the auditorium.

The session will end with Farmer, accompanied by the Brighton Fire Brigade’s Brass Band ?performing his 2020 masterpiece “Brexit: Enlightenment is Dead”,??which includes the immortal line “I Phoned My Brother on the Telephone, Just to See?What He Would Say”. ?????

So ROLLUP, ROLL UP! BRIGHTON AWAITS

As you?wait for a bus to the Brighton Centre in the torrential?rain, watch the poos come rolling in to Brighton’s Brown Beach! It never rains but it pours here?- specially in April!? That's why you'll need

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PRE-CONVENTION EVENTS

GrammarSIG: Can you Teach Without?Morphine? (Is this right? Ed.)

DURING THE CONFERENCE

JOBS FAIR: No, not fair jobs, silly, but the chance to search our extensive data base of appalling jobs with absolutely no guarantee that they exist for the special Convention fee of?500 pounds sterling.

BAD TRIPS TENT: Feeling queasy? Can't take any more? ?Last year, this tent was a huge success - in fact,?the biggest venue of the convention! Seek help here. For just 100 pounds sterling, an unqualified nurse will pretend to listen.

SEE YOU SOON!?