From April 9-13, CCBE’s Catherine Prewett-Schrempf and Anna Weninger mingled with English Language Teaching (ELT) experts from around the world at the 52nd IATEFL Annual Conference and Exhibition in Brighton (GB) and delivered a talk to over 60 international delegates. In addition, they participated in diverse sessions ranging from culturally sensitive language, tips on helping students enhance their vocabulary, innovative assessment and the latest trends in digital language learning and teaching. Catherine also participated in the Business English pre-conference day while Anna joined the Learning Technologies Special Interest Group pre-conference day, both days focussed on networking with delegates with similar interests and contexts.
During the main conference, Catherine and Anna gave a 30-minute talk entitled “E-ductive grammar: Discover, discuss, demonstrate – digitally” which proved to be a very popular session with a large international audience consisting of more than 60 tertiary educators from, among others, Germany, Russia, Greece, Switzerland, the NL, Belgium, as well as UK universities and language teaching institutions in attendance. Their talk focussed on Distance Learning units offered in the first semester of our BA Management & Entrepreneurship program and demonstrated how digital media can be used to successfully engage students in student-centered grammar learning. After the talk, many members of the audience queued up to ask for copies of the presentation slides and even days after the conference, incredibly positive feedback continued to arrive via email, such as:
- “I attended your session at IATEFL in Brighton, it was amazing. I love the blended method you guys have, especially the video made for the students.”
- “I attended your workshop at the IATEFL conference a few weeks ago and I thought it was wonderful. I was pleasantly surprised how much you can include in Moodle [….], so thank you for that.”
With publishers in the ELT community also expressing interest, FHWien has truly made its mark on the ELT e-learning scene.