Scott Thornbury Archives

Scott Thornbury at iELT18: ‘No pain, no gain’ & ‘All work and no play’

January 31, 2020November 23, 2018 by Tim Gifford

Here’s a look back at the two talks Scott Thornbury gave at InnovateELT in May 2018 about fun in the ELT classroom. We hope they’ll get you thinking about how affective factors impact on learning; give you a sense of how to combine both the serious and the pleasurable and leave you with a more finely-tuned capacity to assess the claims of certain content merchandisers. All the slides are embedded throughout the videos so you won’t miss a thing.

Notes from the oil tanker

January 30, 2020May 20, 2015 by Brian Engquist

Few words have been so prevalent in ELT as ‘EdTech’ and it has not been unusual to attend conferences where perhaps more than half of the talks on the schedule made at least some reference to the impending digital disruption sweeping into our sector and how best to prepare for it, avoid it or pretend it didn’t exist. Pearson’s Brian Engquist gives us his take on how to proceed.

Reflections on Innovate ELT

January 30, 2020May 20, 2015 by Adam Beale

Last week’s Innovate ELT conference in Barcelona owed much of its success to the incredible delegates so naturally we turned to them for a write up. Keen blogger Adam Beale reflects on his experience for us.

Shaking up the ELT conference format

January 30, 2020March 27, 2015 by Jo Sayers

ELT conferences are great. They’re an opportunity to learn, to network, to make new friends. They’re also a chance to enjoy a few nights out where it’s acceptable that ELT is the only thing on the conversational menu! But having attended a couple of conferences already this year, with IATEFL on the way, and with my memories of past years still fresh, I increasingly feel that the ELT conference scene could benefit from a bit of a shakeup. On May 8–9th this year, ELTjam and Oxford TEFL Barcelona are hoping to do just that with our Innovate ELT Conference.

Here are a few of the things about ELT conferences that we felt were due an update and how we’ve decided to address those things for our event in Barcelona.

Top-five posts of 2014

January 30, 2020December 31, 2014 by Blog Editor

Looking back at the blog over the past year we can see we’ve had some fantastic people contributing posts and comments. It’s really interesting to see which posts got the most views, sparked the most debate and kickstarted conversations that resulted in fully-fledged follow up posts. This Top Five shows we really couldn’t run the blog without all of you, so a big thanks to everyone and here’s a look at the biggest posts

Intersubjectivity: Is there an app for that?

January 30, 2020November 10, 2014 by Scott Thornbury

If you reduce language learning to its bare bones, you can come up with a methodology that suits many of SLA theorists: intensive conversation with a willing partner, one-to-one, providing the language input you need to communicate your thoughts. Could an app one day do all that?

How could SLA research inform EdTech?

January 31, 2020June 16, 2014 by Scott Thornbury

The criteria for evaluating the worth of any language learning software must include some assessment of its fitness for purpose. That is to say, does it facilitate learning? But how do you measure this? Short of empirically testing the software on a representative cross-section of learners, we need a rubric according to which the learning power of the item can be estimated. And this rubric should, ideally, be informed by our current understandings of how second languages are best learned, understandings which are in turn derived from the findings of researchers of second language acquisition (SLA).

Who ordered the McNuggets?

January 30, 2020February 13, 2014 by Scott Thornbury

The first of a two-part series, by Scott Thornbury

Learning linguistic items is not a linear process – learners do not master one item and then move on to another. In fact, the learning curve for a single item is not linear either. The curve is filled with peaks and valleys, progress and backslidings.