Category Archives: Conferences

Languages for Specific Purposes in HE 2015 – it’s happening!

Posted on 10/06/2015 | Leave a comment

So, happy days! I can now confirm that we are going ahead with the organisation of an event called Languages for Specific Purposes in Higher Education 2015. This will take place here in Manchester on 11th September. This is the event I talked about in my previous post (which goes back a while, yes).

As I explained previously, the idea of this event is to bring together colleagues from UK HEIs to discuss provisions and practices in LSP across the country. Think French for medics, German for engineers, and so on. It’s a very small scale event (20 attendees, for now anyway), and for this reason I won’t reproduce the call for registrations on this blog – the email was circulated earlier this week on the AULC mailing list. You can DM me if you are interested but missed the email.

I’m really excited about the idea that our event could make a very small contribution to the development of LSP provisions in this country. It’s been very interesting hearing about so many institutions who came back to us explaining what LSP courses they used to offer, and at the moment it certainly seems like the context is right for this type of courses to thrive again.

At some stage we’ll probably set a page, perhaps on this blog, to aggregate all slides from the event. More on this soon.

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Posted in Conferences, Teaching & Learning

Languages for Specific Purposes – A talk to kick things off

Posted on 12/01/2015 | 2 comments

Last week at the 2015 AULC Conference in Cambridge, Martin Kantus, David Tual (@AngloFLE) and I gave a talk entitled “What’s so special about LSP? (Languages for Specific Purposes)”. Martin and David teach languages to engineers in the language unit of the University of Cambridge, whilst I teach medical French here in Manchester.

The idea of this talk was to try and provide an overview of the literature in LSP, discuss the state of LSP provisions within UK language centres, share some of our experiences as tutors and course leaders, and generally speaking raise interest in LSP.

2015 AULC Conference

In a nutshell, it seems to us that the current upwards trends in so-called ‘non-specialist’ language teaching are creating a very fertile terrain for the development (in some cases, the re-development) of LSP provisions. We were very pleased to see the interest generated by our talk and were surprised to discover how many universities had, or had had, some form of LSP provision.

The next step is to gather in one room teachers, course leaders and policy-makers in order to get the ball rolling in our language centres. The demand for specialist language teaching is there, there is a surprising amount of expertise around, and the national HE context seems particularly favourable to the  development of LSP provisions. Now it’s up to us to get together, establish a road map and set the pace for this promising field in language teaching.

Interested in getting in touch and participating in a future LSP event? Get in touch. Lots more details as soon as I have them.

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Talking about Quizlet at #LLASconf14

Posted on 15/07/2014 | Leave a comment

So the 7th LLAS biennal conference took place last week in Southampton, and just like last time it was a really good opportunity to meet people I knew and people I didn’t, all working in, near or around languages in HE. I can’t get bored of attending LLAS events as they really help putting my job in perspective: I get to see the national picture, discover what other practitioners are up to, get feedback on my own practice through the stuff I present. If you work in languages and have never attended one of these, I urge you to register for the next one. It’s the second best medium for professional development I have found (second only to Twitter, of course).

So this year again I talked about the work that the French team at @UoMLangCentre have been doing with Quizlet on our general and medical French courses. I should really give credit to @simonjhowells77 for pointing us in the direction of Quizlet in the first place. If you have read my previous blog post, Quizlet is an vocabulary app which we’ve been using for collaborative work in the classroom.

The slides are below. If you’ve any questions or comments, please use the box below.

 

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