Coping with Generation Z
Zeynep İskenderoğlu Önel and Meral Güçeri
The 17th International IATEFL Slovenia Annual Conference was held between 11-14 March 2010 in Terme Topolšica on the Alps.
The Conference focused on the characteristics of Generation Z and how we, as teachers, can cater to the needs and interests of this generation. Generation Z is a term used to define young people born between the mid-1990s and the late 2000s. The outstanding characteristic of this generation is their familiarity and comfort with the Net and the cyber world.
Some speakers labelled them as “digital aliens” whereas some appropriated this definition as “techno comfies.” At any rate, the aim of all the talks was to suggest ways to keep these highly technologically oriented young people motivated and on task.
There were quite a few sessions on the value of integrating feature films into language classrooms. Several sessions highlighted the importance oral presentation skills and getting Generation Z to talk.
Our session entitled “Effects of oral presentations on EFL student’s performance” discussed how properly guided and organized oral presentations may help students become active and autonomous learners with the involvement of research and critical analysis in groups. The presentation offered an approach to teaching oral presentation skills involving a guided feedback cycle that may help students overcome the potential anxiety they will have and build confidence.
Adam Simpson has had a chapter published in the new TESOL Arabia publication, ‘Developing Oral Skills in English: Theory, Research and Pedagogy’. In his chapter, entitled ‘What constitutes effective oral exam practice?’, he explored the ways in which learners practice the assessment format for speaking, what practice they are exposed to and their perceptions of how these activities did or did not benefit them in their exam performance.
With findings drawn from responses given by students attending the Sabancı University School of languages preparatory English program, the results were also presented at the IATEFL testing and assessment conference in Cyprus last October.
The volume also focuses on contemporary themes in the development of oral skills, and has been divided into sections related to oral communication anxiety, critical issues in oral skills, developing oral skills and the assessment of oral skills. Adam also prepared a summary of his research findings for the blog.
Forum on Curricular Issues 2010:Common Concerns – Multifarious Responses
Date: Friday 28th May 2010
Venue: Sabancı University School of Languages, Tuzla, Istanbul
Rationale: The Curriculum Team of Sabancı University School of Languages is proposing to set up a forum for representatives from a range of universities in Turkey and Northern Cyprus to come together to discuss curriculum issues in university foundation EAP programmes. The forum will take an informal and hands-on approach to the practical “nitty-gritty” of curriculum work aiming to complement the formal presentation of papers or workshops to be found at other professional gatherings such as conferences, seminars and workshops. We are initiating the FOCI project with a view to the possibility of the forum becoming a regular event and in the hope that curriculum teams from other institutions will wish to host the forum in future years.
Aims of the Forum
To provide an opportunity for representatives from a range of foundation EAP programmes in different state, foundation and private universities within the Turkish context to come together in order to:
• discuss issues of concern in the areas of needs analysis, syllabus writing, implementation, and programme evaluation;
• share experiences and ideas relevant to curricular issues from their diverse contexts;
• raise mutual awareness of the activities and approaches to curriculum issues in other programmes;
• build relationships and links between the curriculum teams in different institutions.
Expected Outcome
As the title this first meeting “Common Concerns – Multifarious Responses” suggests, we intend that participants will come away from the Forum with concrete examples of how other institutions have responded to these common concerns. This will involve whole-group discussion and smaller groups focusing on particular areas who will then feedback to the whole group. The topics of the focus group will be decided from suggestions made by participants on the registration form.
Participants
Any university providing EAP programmes to prepare students for their undergraduate studies in Turkey or Northern Cyprus is invited to send one representative: a member of a syllabus or curriculum team, or other teacher who is involved in curricular development.
- Places are limited to one representative from each institution
- If interest exceeds capacity, places will be allocated randomly from applications received by the closing date, while ensuring a range of different types of university and geographical spread in order to ensure the widest variety of perspectives.
- There is no fee and refreshments and lunch will be provided free of charge.
- The language of the forum will be English
- The deadline for registration is 31st March, 2010.
Please click here to register.
Information about transport between Istanbul and the campus:
Unfortunately SU is unable to provide accommodation. The following are hotels close to the campus: Lifeport & The Marmara Hotels
Click here for the provisional programme.
For further information or enquiries please contact Jonathan Smith at the following email address:
foci
sabanciuniv.edu
“Contemporary Issues in Focus”, the new coursebook for Freshman English 101 and 102, has just been published. The book has been compiled by the Freshman English instructors and printed by the UK branch of Pearson Education Limited.
“Contemporary Issues in Focus” consists of four chapters: “Media and Popular Culture”, “Gender”, “Race and Ethnicity” and “Innocence, Experience and Family Matters”, and contains a total of 52 texts. In each chapter, there are essays and articles by authors such as Simone de Beavoir, Naomi Wolf, Susan Bordo, Salman Rushdie, Martin Luther King Jr., Amin Maalouf, Patricia Holland and Neil Postman, and short stories by important literary figures like Doris Lessing, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Joyce Carol Oates, Frank O’Connor, Isabel Allende and Sevgi Soysal.
Ali Nihat Eken from the School of Languages attended the VIII Annual Worldwide Forum on Education and Culture in Rome, Italy, in the first week of December 2009. This year’s forum was based on the theme of “Crossing Borders and Building Bridges: A Global Program for the Future.” In the forum Eken presented his classroom research on studying representations of gender and sexual identity in film.
Arguing that although originally not intended for educational purposes, film can prove to be a legitimate subject matter that can be studied in its own right and a valuable teaching and learning tool in many educational settings, Eken drew upon his findings of his classroom research study he conducted in Freshman English 101 and 102, undergraduate content-based language courses in Sabanci University.
Ali Nihat Eken’s presentation aimed to answer the following questions: What does studying representations in films involve? What do representations of gender and sexual identity reveal about human relationships and belief systems? While answering such key questions in the light of relevant literature and his findings, he also discussed whether an awareness of views about gender and sexual identity would encourage learners to revisit and revise their own value systems and thus cross ideological borders, build bridges of tolerance and celebrate diversity.
IATEFL TEA SIG CONFERENCE IN CYPRUS - 23-24 October 2009, Famagusta
Meral Güçeri, School of Languages, Sabanci University
The latest IATEFL TEA SIG Conference was held at the Salamis Bay Conti Hotel, very near Famagosa, located on the seaport of the north east coast of Cyprus. The conference, which hosted about 145 participants from 16 countries, dealt with the crucial areas of assessing speaking skills with its 24 sessions, 4 plenaries and a round up discussion. Cocktails, social activities, folk dancing and a Cypriot menu accompanied by the warm sea with the sunny beach made the event an unforgettable one for all the delegates. Everyone was so inspired that no session was missed, notes were taken and hot discussions took place both in the session rooms, at coffee breaks and on the beach.
The conference has achieved its aim by looking at different contexts of teaching, assessment and speaking as well as exploring related issues.
The first day started with Zeynep Ürkün’s intriguing opening speech, which was followed by Liz- Hamp Lyons’ plenary talk entitled “Spoken English Proficiency: Bringing together teaching and assessment” describing an innovative speaking assessment that they have developed in Hong Kong, focussing on not only how the criteria for assessment have arisen, and how they have been validated and communicated to the stakeholders, but also the role of teacher as an assessor in a classroom-based assessment context.
On Friday morning my session entitled “Let’s assess life skills: Here is the criteria” aimed to discuss a seminar presentation criteria designed to assess Freshman English learners’ seminar skills. A learner’s seminar presentation video was shared and half of the participants were invited to evaluate learner performance by using the chunks of an analytical criteria while the other half used a holistic criteria. Student involvement in oral assessment was explained in detail.
In the afternoon Meltem Bizim and Devrim Demirezen Uygan had a workshop called “Optimizing Speaking in the EFL classroom”, which emphasised the recent trends in the field of teaching speaking and the crucial role of task design to optimize speaking skills in EFL classrooms . They shared the highlights of the study that they conducted at Sabancı University, the key principles for designing tasks, and sample tasks that they designed as part of their study. One section of the workshop was also allocated for providing hands on experience.
The second plenary session was by Evelina Galaczi on “Assessing Speaking: An approach grounded in theory and practice”. Galaczi stressed the fundemental role speaking skills played in language learning, teaching and assessment. She explored the close relationship between learning and assessment through a focus on specific exam features. She argued that the role of speaking tests should be to promote beneficial washback.
The Saturday morning plenary speaker was John H.A.L. de Jong whose session was on scaling speaking. Jong discussed the issues related to scaling that are either not understood or ignored, including the mathematical relation between levels and the definition of the boundaries between levels. Examples of the scaling speaking of speaking tests and the procedures underlying the levels of CEF were provided.
The final plenary talk was by Susan Davies who highlighted crucial areas of the issues in testing spoken English. Her workshop aimed to raise participant awareness on the various challenges of portfolio assessment or use of a test. She stressed that it was possible to overcome some specific issues in testing spoken proficiency and to understand the process which would enable them to take up the challenge of producing their own tests.
On Saturday afternoon Adam Simpson’s session “What constitutes effective pre-oral exam practice?” shared findings of research conducted on student perceptions of what constitutes effective pre-oral exam practice. What students consider beneficial, what they find less useful, overall feelings regarding oral assessment and the mismatch between teacher and student perspectives at the preparation stage were highlighted.
The conference ended with a round-up discussion by the plenary speakers.
Alone together…
Inspired by new and alternative ways of thinking, SL Director, Deniz Kurtoglu Eken explores personal and professional growth in her recent article in English Teaching Professional (November 2009). ‘We experience togetherness in many aspects of our lives, both at a personal and professional level, and we certainly are not alone in a lot of things we do. Yet to be what Timothy Gallwey (2002) calls ‘ourown close friends’, we need to look both inward and outward to see the beauty in being ‘alone together’.
Sonja Tack Erten’s paper on translation has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Specialised Translation. This paper “started life as a final essay for a theory of translation course for the MA in Translation Studies at University of Portsmouth, UK. The abstract is as follows:
Establishing norms for functional translations from Portuguese to English: The case of academic calls for papers
There is growing recognition that the greater the translator’s awareness of how specific genres operate at both the cultural and textual levels in particular language pairs, the more likely the resulting translation is to achieve the goal of functional equivalence. This study uses a small comparable corpus to investigate the similarities and differences in the genre conventions of academic calls for papers (CFPs) written in American English and Brazilian Portuguese. The schematic structure and textual functions of CFPs are identified, and Halliday’s systemic functional grammar is used to sketch out the broad common features of this genre. Significant differences at the micro-pragmatic level of discourse are then described, and several practical translation strategies are suggested for translators working from Portuguese into English. The overall aim is to encourage translators to make a series of choices that will achieve an overall effect which is highly appropriate to the pragmatic norms of the target text.
Sponsored by OUP, SL Director Deniz Kurtoğlu Eken gave professional development seminars to English language teachers and managers at Eastern Mediterranean University’s (EMU) English Preparatory School between October 14 and 16, 2009. Her plenary entitled, Alone Together in Development and Change: Creative Processes for Personal and Professional Growth was attended by over 100 teachers. There were follow-up workshops for teachers in two separate groups, called Teachers as Learners and Researchers. Kurtoglu Eken also worked with EMU Preparatory School managers on performance management and assessment principles and processes. The three-day event was very well received by teachers and managers generating a wide range of ideas for reflection, discussion and implementation.
Media coverage of the seminars: Picture 1 / Picture 2 / Picture 3
SL in Action: Columbia University Summer Institute American Culture and EFL Teaching in Turkey
Hülya Görür Atabaş, School of Languages, Sabanci University
The 2009 Columbia University Summer Institute entitled American Culture and EFL Teaching in Turkey was held between June 15-19 at the Sabancı University Karaköy Communication Center.
The five-day institute, which was jointly sponsored by the English Language Office of the U.S. Embassy’s Office of Public Affairs, and The Center for Multiple Languages and Literacies, Teachers College, Columbia University, and hosted by Sabancı University Writing Center and the Educational Reform Initiative, aimed to bring together 50 educators from various universities in Turkey to explore areas such as technology, standardized testing, alternative assessment, as well as American culture, literature, and politics in relation to teaching English as a foreign language in Turkey.
The institute hosted participants from Faculties of Education, Arts and Social Sciences, Western Languages and Literatures, Cultural Studies, International Relations, Humanities, and School of Languages from not only metropolitan cities such as Istanbul, Izmir and Ankara but also from cities such as Adana, Çanakkale, Edirne, Eskişehir, Gaziantep, Konya, and Trabzon. I thought that this diverse background did not only cater for a better understanding of issues pertaining to the use of English at institutes for higher education in Turkey but also provided us with an opportunity for the exchange of ideas and practices on American Literature and Politics, Use of Technology, Skills Development and Integration, Testing and Assessment, and Materials Development.
The 50 participants in the institute were invited to discuss, work on, and present various issues that arose from a combination of a carefully selected digital packet of readings, the input sessions provided by the team of professors from Columbia University Teachers College, and workshops led by colleagues from the Writing Center.
Among the various strands in the institute were:
Focusing on how different languages and literacies can be used as resources to advance human development, education, and intercultural understanding.
The exploration of ways in which virtual worlds such as Second Life might be used for experiential learning. Columbia Teachers College has already made a breakthrough in this respect by creating a learning community on a virtual island there.
Alternative strategies in educational assessment in the digital age.
Ideological perspectives on teaching “Englishes” as opposed to a “standard” English.
The role and use of literature in higher education and society.
All in all, it has been a highly useful and rewarding experience for me to be involved in the preparation stages and the running of the institute as well as being one of the participants.
Istanbul
7°