From 3-5 March I was fortunate to attend the ECIS conference organised by the English as an Additional Language and Mother Tongue Committee (now called the Multilingual Learning in International Education Committee). It was my first conference of this sort, and I was very impressed by the energy and enthusiasm of the participants, in addition to the variety of the sessions and the caliber of the keynote speakers.
There are five key ideas that I drew from the fifteen different sessions I attended/participated in, which I think have direct application to the work we do at Le Rosey:
1. Developing understanding (and enjoyment!) in language learning requires having opportunities to engage in making meaning. Too often we are concerned with having students increase their accuracy by imitating models or working with blanket statements, but we are not concerned with encouraging them to explain the world, and themselves, using language to create new meaning. A learner must communicate his/her own experience in order to develop the authorship (and author-ity) that will fuel deeper understanding and confidence. There is a lost opportunity here, even more striking when we realise we are subverting a natural step for those who work through translanguaging:
“Speakers who learn, speak or write more than one language have additional symbolic resources through which they give meaning to things, persons and events.” (Kramsch 2009, 124)
Our efforts should be dedicated to generating experiences where students “create meaning” because their contributions will be unique, personal, and authentic. This allows them to “own” their language(s), including those they do not (yet) master.
Implications: This involves reflecting on the type of work we assign in class, and the type of projects we could embark in that invite students to create new knowledge rather than focus on grammatical and orthographical perfection.
2. Making connections/comparisons across languages is a win-win situation. How many of us grew up with “English only” signs on classroom walls, with teachers reminding us that when we cross their doorway, “we must speak (enter language of instruction here)”? How liberating to learn of numerous studies that promote translating, translanguaging, comparing, making connections, inviting students to work together on multilingual texts, and other methods that remind us that all languages are valuable. In addition to the affective component (helping us develop pride in our identity and celebrating diversity), this has a clear intellectual benefit, as students develop metacognitive competencies to understand linguistic structures, patterns, and semantic codes.
Implications: This involves rethinking how we organise our MT and English/French lessons. At this point we keep these very isolated (to the point where they have different departments that create their own goals and programmes) to the detriment of our students’ learning. We could consider working across languages, for example reading the same text in more than one course (before IBDP years) or inviting teachers and students to work together in producing bilingual/multilingual written projects. We could also share student work in any language on bulletin boards and at assembly.
3. Corrective feedback is not an effective tool for language development. For those of us who complain that our students do not read our corrections carefully, they do not refer to them, practice them or commit them to memory, here’s a piece of advice– stop wasting your time! A number of alternative practices will yield greater improvement: grade students on overall effectiveness, organization, persuasiveness, audience awareness, genre appropriateness, vocabulary development, revision, reflection and peer-feedback. Self-reflection (for example, comparing older to more mature pieces of work) is a very productive exercise because the learning comes from articulating (“meaning-making”, again!) those changes.
Implications: The languages departments should participate in a series of workshops specifically aimed at reflecting on our practices around corrective feedback and learning new methods to support students’ language acquisition. This could involve sessions on the value of Free Voluntary Reading, and how to structure a reading routine in our students.
4. Teaching “academic language” is a process that must be scaffolded. We are making the mistake of expecting students who have a very good working knowledge of colloquial English/French to jump to academic language without a well-designed progression for how to do so. I myself have given my MT students lists of “useful phrases”, “essay scripts” to practice, and academic articles to read as “exemplars”. However, all these tools assume that the students can make a leap from their everyday use of the language to the level expected of an IB scholar. There are ways of developing a coherent programme that will prepare students over a few years to work more effectively with formal codes of written academic language.
Implications: This involves inviting the different departments to reference how academic language is developed in their unit planners/written curriculum. It also involves sharing best practices to diversify our methods.
5. Working with real-life problems (with language as a tool for communication) is an effective way to engage students– language development becomes a bi-product of their engagement. The way we separate disciplines at school can force language and literature teachers to think their work must “reside” within their department. We must break away from those silos and allow students to work across disciplines– a great way to do that is through solving concrete problems. Language development is not the sole domain of language teachers, and if we could change the way we think of MT classes as “preparation for studies in literature” we would engage students more actively. As Stephen Krashen said: “Pleasure in life comes from trying to solve problems that we are interested in.”
Implications: This involves challenging the role we have given to language and literature teachers, which can be limited and limiting. By focusing only on literature studies, we are losing the opportunity to engage students in valuing language for its power to communicate ideas through different media.
For additional and more detailed notes on the different speakers/sessions, please visit
