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We have two reports from the recent IATEFL Conference. The first is from Paul Lewis, the second from Tilly Warren. Both are the author’s opinions. Tilly’s is a little less formal, taken from an email message originally.

Paul Lewis

The 32nd IATEFL (International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language) conference was held in typically English weather (rain and snow), in Manchester from 14th to 18th April 1998. I flew in to attend as official JALT delegate, but spent a lot of time forming contacts at

N-SIG level as well. IATEFL has a very strong CALL SIG (it's pronounced to rhyme with "pal" and IATEFL don't use the "National" bit, so there's no room for confusion with us!), currently chaired by the very able Paul Brett.

My first official duty was to attend the IATEFL Associates' meeting, which lasted a full day. The range of countries represented was quite a surprise, and we began with a warm-up exercise--making contact with some of the other fifty delegates, and finding ways in which our organisations could further cooperate. Among other nationalities, I talked to the Cuban, Maltese, Lebanese, Macedonian, Chinese, and Canadian representatives. I focussed on their web-presence and development of CALL; surprisingly few organisations have managed to get even a National website organised. In some cases, this was due to lack or resources; in others, lack of expertise.

Coming from Japan, where we have such a seemingly endless supply of talent and resources, made me realise how much we can do to help other organisations get off the ground with a basic web-presence. Whether it be as simple as adding links to our N-SIG website, or providing access to mailing lists like <jaltnet> where expert brains can be tapped on all matters html, or something more substantial like offering a few megabytes of server space, or creating some "wizards," is a matter for us to consider in the future. However, extending a hand to help these (often struggling) organisations is something we need to think carefully about, if only for the excellent global contacts it would provide us with.

Accepting the offer of a drink from the past Chair of the IATEFL CALL SIG, Gary Motteram, I joined him to discuss further ways for our two groups to cooperate. He was very much in agreement about the need to help other EFL organisations get themselves onto the WWW, and was also keen to see some joint events. We talked about the possibility of a "virtual conference" next year, perhaps to be followed by an International CALL conference. With the first WorldCALL conference being held this summer in Australia, a precedent will be set, and we may be able to follow this in a couple of years. Certainly Gary was very keen that the event be in Japan--if any reader is willing to suggest a possible venue for this, please get in touch with me. Clearly, a lot of planning would be required, and we would need to find ways to cut the cost to participants flying in from abroad. We promised to stay in touch.

I can certainly recommend membership both of IATEFL, and of its CALL SIG, and there is a special rate for JALT members. Next year's conference is in Edinburgh, and promises to be well worth attending. For further information, please visit the homepages at http://www.iatefl.org/ and http://www.iatefl.org/callsig/

Paul Lewis JALT CALL N-SIG Telecommunications Chair

Tilly Warren:

I've just got back from the IATEFL conference in Manchester where I met Paul Lewis promoting JALT. I managed to buy a copy of the book he edited [Basics and Beyond –ed.] from him (much praised on the JALT CALL list I believe!). He's interested in the possibility of Japan being the venue for World CALL so as I'm the Computer SIG Events person at this end we may be getting together on that one.

It was a great conference (some disappointing sessions: for example native speakers READING their presentations unrelentingly - there should be a law against it!! but reasonable overall), marred at the higher end by Michael Lewis making an unfounded personal attack on Gwyneth Fox - he may be charismatic with good ideas but he's definitely unprofessional in his approach to personal relations!

The great surprise was the applause for L.G. Alexander (long snubbed by communicative approach pundits) - it went on and on! He said all the 'wrong' things like drilling is essential, and that syllabuses in course books now are simply the same structural syllabuses in different 'clothes'. But much more of what he said was such good plain sense that he got everyone on his side. He particularly advocated the chance for single authors to write textbooks according to an innovative idea rather than publishing house committees, since with all the publishing mergers and migration from house to house, there will eventually be nothing to choose from between course books!

Plenary Speakers were:

1) Svetlana Ter-Minasova on the socio-cultural aspect: a fundamental ingredient of ELT. She had some great anecdotes about the dangers and pitfalls for Russian learners of English. Also, a nice metaphor about each language being a unique mosaic for representing reality, where the pieces of one mosaic (words and associations of one language) will not necessarily fit into another, although learners will try to do this at first.

2) Martin Bygate on the framing, reframing and unframing of language: roles for tasks

3) Gwyneth Fox on Hocus Pocus and graven images: collocation '98. She focused on what had become the 'theme' of the conference – the importance of lexis and collocation, pointing out that John Sinclair's contribution to getting Cobuild started, and initiating the huge corpus now known as the Bank of English should be recognised)

4) Manny Vazquez on teaching language through content

5) Louis Alexander on course design and the management of learning. He talked through the stages of course design and discussed the relevant issues at each stage.

6) Rod Ellis on second language acquisition research - what's in it for teachers? It was packed out despite being the last session of a very long conference, he advocated collaboration between teachers and researchers as the work of neither should stand alone without reference to the other.

There were a few sessions given by Japanese PhD students studying in this country - I attended three, all of which were interesting, if technical at times;

Chieko Kuribara (Univ. of Reading) Acquisition of functional category determiner by Japanese learners of English (she found no evidence of parameter resetting according to the UG model of language acquisition),

2) Taichi Nakamura (Univ of Essex) Repetition Strategies used by Japanese EFL learners. He looked at the ways that Japanese students learn vocabulary comparing a group in Japan and a group in UK and found that those in UK were more likely to abandon the one word one translation model and use phrases, and phonetic information when initially focussing on the word. Interestingly he found that there was a significant difference between the sexes too with (no surprise!) girls in the UK being more flexible and 'sensitive' to how words are used in communication in Britain

Hanako Hosaka (Univ of Birmingham) on why L2 speech sounds different: an intonational study (she had recorded in parallel, readings of the opening pages of Peter Rabbit in both Japanese and English by both Japanese and English speakers and compared them on an intonational level - there was significant transfer of L1 intonational patterns to the L2 readings)

Thanks to Mr. Lewis and Ms. Warren for two unique looks at the conference.