Our second plenary speaker, Dr Nicos Sifakis, is an academic whose research has put Greece on the global academic map. Dr Sifakis is an associate professor at the Hellenic Open University and director of its M.Ed. in TESOL programme. He has
published extensively in various international refereed journals and is co-editor
of ELF for EFL Contexts (Multilingual
Matters, 2019), Using English as a Lingua
Franca in Education in Europe (de Gruyter, 2018) and English Language Education Policies and Practices in the Mediterranean
Countries (Peter Lang, 2017).
1. Your plenary session will focus on
ELF-awareness as a framework for integrating research in EFL. What are the key
areas that the suggested framework places emphasis on?
As a term, "ELF-awareness" is a lot more than simply an awareness of
ELF (or English as a Lingua Franca). It certainly incorporates this awareness,
in the sense that we, as teachers, learners, policy makers and courseware designers, need to be aware of what happens when we use English to
communicate with people for whom English is not their "mother"
tongue, in what ways the discourse and the interactional strategies are unique
or different to those typically employed in interactions with the so-called
"native speakers" of English. ELF-awareness incorporates three
distinct, but also interlinked, areas: awareness of the language (which refers
to the aspects that I just mentioned), awareness of instruction (which refers
to teachers' becoming fully aware of their teaching context and also their own
perspectives and deeper convictions about how English should be taught, (whether
and to what extent they correct learner errors, and so on), and awareness of
learning (which refers to the understanding and acceptance of the fact that
out-of-class use of ELF should inform, to a lesser or greater extent, what goes
on inside the EFL classroom). In this sense, EFL teachers who are
"ELF-aware" understand the ramifications of the complex nexus of
English language communication in the 21st century for their class and are able
to hone their teaching skills and syllabus (to the extent that they are allowed
to do so) so that their learners become confident and successful users of
English.
2. In your follow-up session, you will be presenting ENRICH, a project
aiming at providing teachers with the competencies required to meet the needs
of multilingual classes. Which are the main competencies teachers should be
equipped with?
UNESCO has defined the so-called "transversal skills", i.e. the
skills considered not related to a specific job, task, academic discipline or
area of knowledge but can be used in a wide variety of situations and work settings. These are skills that help learners adapt to changes and to lead
meaningful and productive lives, and are exactly what we aim for in the case of
multilingual classes, namely:
- Critical and innovative thinking
- Inter-personal skills (e.g. presentation and communication skills,
organizational skills, teamwork, etc.)
- Intra-personal skills (e.g. self-discipline, enthusiasm, perseverance,
self-motivation, etc.)
- Global citizenship (e.g. tolerance, openness, respect for diversity,
intercultural understanding, etc.)
- Media and information literacy such as the ability to locate and access
information, as well as to analyse and evaluate media content.
Interestingly, these skills can be, and should be, part of every English
language teaching curriculum, and I'm going to be explaining why and how this
can be done in my workshop.
3. Based on your extensive experience as a University professor, which do
you feel should be the key priorities of an EFL/ESL teacher?
First, reflectivity, looking outward and trying to find out as much as possible
about our teaching context, our learners, the courseware, the target situation;
finding out what works and what needs to be changed or adapted. Then,
reflexivity, looking inward and critically thinking about our own perceptions
and convictions about our decisions and actions inside and outside the language
classroom. There are many more and more subtle priorities, but one I always
point at is the need to learn about not just the subject matter (English) and
pedagogy (teaching English), but also managing classrooms, leading people (our
learners) and helping them be their best selves as learners -- this is the
remit of educational psychology.
4. Our 26th Convention focuses on practical suggestions
to solving classroom issues . Which areas of ELT do you feel could benefit the
most of a more hands-on approach?
Definitely, handling groupwork. Also, focusing on the underlying, hidden agenda
that always lies behind every single activity we carry out. Understanding that
tasks and activities always have an openly known and stated agenda, e.g. to practise speaking or carry out a drill, but
also train our learners to do other things as well, e.g., work (or not work)
with their fellow learners, think (or not think) about the content of a
particular text during a multiple matching exercise. In this sense, we have to
answer the following question every time we ask our learners to carry out any
task: What is the real learning potential of this task? What will these
particular learners learn from carrying it out?
