The IATEFL has fourteen Special Interest Groups. There are two overall aims of the SIGs.
- They cater for the special interests of our 10,000 members around the world, fifty per cent of which belong to one SIG or more. These special interests range from Young Learners to English for Special Purposes, from ELT Management to Computers
- They maintain the international profile of the association by holding events in many countries around the world. So if members are unable to attend the main conference, which is usually held in the UK, there is an excellent chance for them to attend SIG events held in their own countries
In 1996 there were SIG events held in Argentina, the Czech Republic, Germany, Romania, and Turkey, as well as numerous events in the UK and the highly successful SIG Symposium, with representatives of all SIGs, held in Vienna, Austria.
Together with the IATEFL Newsletter, which reaches all our members world-wide, the SIGs have a central role in the international profile of the association.
So what benefits are there from joining a SIG?
- Members with an interest in a special area of expertise are catered for
- Members receive three newsletters a year
- Members can participate in special events organised two or more times a year by the SIG
- Members receive information about the SIG programmes both at its own events as well as at the main IATEFL conference
- Members can attend the Biennial SIG Symposium, which is a state-of-the-art conference; in Vienna in 1996 it had fourteen keynote speakers plus David Crystal giving the opening plenary
All SIGs can be contacted through the IATEFL Head Office: 3 Kingsdown Chambers, Kingsdown Park, Whitstable, Kent, CT5 2DL, UK. Tel: +44 (0) 1227 276528; Fax: +44 (0) 1227274415;
e-mail:100070.1327@compuserve.com
Business English
BESIG, the IATEFL Business English Special Interest Group is for the business English teaching profession and is one of the most popular of the IATEFL Special Interest Groups with a membership of over 800. We have members in over 50 countries across South America, Africa, and Asia, with the largest proportion coming from Europe.
We offer ways to improve your expertise in teaching business English, and a link with other people in the profession. Apart from our annual international conferences, regional workshops, regular newsletters and reports describing conference papers/workshops in detail, we do this by encouraging the setting up of regional groups. These regional groups are called SIGnets and at present there are ten in Central Europe. They exist to provide a professional network for Business English teachers through regular workshops and talks. We are now trying to establish such groups in Asia in order to link business English teachers who may be unable to attend international conferences.
The BESIG calendar has been full and varied in recent years with events in the UK, Romania, Latvia, Moscow, Austria, and Germany.
Judith Fortey, Co-ordinator
Computer
For a group which is concerned with new technology, it's worth noting that the Computer Special Interest Group is one of the oldest SIGs in IATEFL.
We started life as a independent group and then came under the wings of IATEFL a number of years ago. Our main aim is to provide a service to our membership by keeping them up-to-date with the world computers in language learning and teaching in all its facets. We also regularly offer training in new and more traditional areas.
Recent events have focused on a variety of events including the Internet, multimedia authoring, computer-based business English materials, and materials design. Conference papers have followed similar lines and many of these are reported in recent newsletters. The newsletter also publishes reviews of currently available material, ideas about classroom practice, and more discursive pieces that look at background issues as well as those directly related to the classroom.
Current trends in the computing world lead us to look at how we can explore the Internet with our students, and how to exploit the current general and ELT specific CD ROM-based multimedia materials. Computers seem to be increasingly used for independent learning with individual students buying materials to use at home, logging on to an e-mail list for learners to exchange views or ideas, searching the World Wide Web to help them in their task, or going to the self-access centre in their school or college to make use of text reconstruction or to play language games.
Other areas of continued interest have been in the analysis of text for materials production and for classroom use. Concordancing packages have changed the way that dictionaries are produced and have also had an impact on materials design through task-based learning. There are a number of readily available classroom concordances that both learners and teachers can use for their own hypothesis testing. Word processing for the improvement of writing skills seems to be a continued are of interest.
The early enthusiasm of a few pioneers has slowly been replaced by a wider audience of general teachers who see the computer as a useful tool to help enhance and enliven their classes and which allows their students more control over their learning.
Gary Motteram, Co-ordinator:Å@
http//www.man.ac.uk/IATEFL/
ELT Management
The ELT Management Special Interest Group was created in 1990 to meet the needs of managers in both state and private sectors of the industry.
The ELT Management SIG aims to:
- raise awareness among the ELT profession of management issues
- contribute to the development of good management practices within ELT
- provide a forum for the discussion of management issues
- provide opportunities for, and information about, relevant management training.
- add to the raising of levels of services which we offer our clients
Our main activities so far have included:
- The ELT Management Newsletter includes book and software reviews as well as a wide range of articles. Recent articles have covered marketing, staff development and training, time management, professional qualifications in ELT management, quality, customer care, and project management.
- Helping in finding jobs: the group organises a JobShop at the annual IATEFL conference, the Newsletter carries job advertisements, and IATEFL provides access to a job information service through its World Wide Web site.
- Workshops: these usually last a day. Topics covered have included personnel management, motivation and decision-making, managing conflict, quality, time management and strategic planning.
- Conferences: the SIG organises a management track at the IATEFL annual conference and the ELT management sessions at the biennial SIG Symposium. We organised our first international conference at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey in 1995 on the topics of quality Management and the Management of Change. The papers from this conference have been published by IATEFL and are for sale from the IATEFL Head Office.
English for Special Purposes
The ESP SIG has 406 members and membership has been growing ever since its foundation five years ago. The present committee represents the spread of the SIG members throughout the world.
The SIG publishes its newsletters three times a year. In addition, we have started to send so-called Co-ordinators' Circulars (CC) to all members to keep them abreast about the internal developments.
As for activities, we give support to regional, topic-based events and we organise our own events. Following the first international success of a joint BETA/BESIG-ESP SIG Conference in Romania, we put together our first one-day mini-conference in co-operation with the Volkshochschule Bielefeld, Germany, on the topic, What is ESP? A conference on Teaching and Learning English for Social and Medical Applications is planned for 1998 in Bulgaria under the auspices of the SOKRATES programme of the European Union.
J. Wolfgang H. Ridder, Co-ordinator
Global Issues(GI SIG)
The Global Issues SIG is the most recently formed SIG. Our membership is growing steadily and approximately 60% of the current members are from outside the UK. Our first newsletters have appeared and a Global Issues Day took place in January 1996. Links are being established with other organisations working in fields related to Global Issues and Education.
What are Global Issues?
Global issues include peace, justice and equality, human rights and social responsibility, racism and sexism, the environment, world development, and international understanding.
What is the purpose of the GI SIG?
The GI SIG aims to provide a forum among ELT practitioners to stimulate awareness and understanding of global issues, and to encourage the development if global education within language teaching. This approach aims to equip students with the knowledge, skills and values which can help them confront both local and global problems. The GI SIG aims to promote a less Eurocentric perspective within in ELT.
Learner Independence
The Learner Independence SIG has a network of members world-wide whose common interests cover:
- setting up self access centres
- teacher training in the use of learning centres
- learning centres for elementary students
- counselling for learning centres
- taking the learning centre into the classroom
- what learners do in learning centres
- the difference between learning centres in an English-speaking country and abroad
- learning styles and learning strategies
- motivating learners for self-study
- developing teachers for learner autonomy
- different cultural approaches to learner independence
- self-assessment and self-placement
- the effectiveness of self-access learning
- distance learning including e-mail and computer conferencing
- using radio, TV, video, feature films, and hi-tech media for independent study
- using dictionaries and making personal lexicons
- activities to do outside the classroom
Apart from newsletters and events, we are involved in other projects:
- a recipe book of ideas, tips and photocopiable worksheets for encouraging learners to take greater responsibility for their learning
- a register of self-access facilities throughout the world (contact us if you have not yet received our questionnaire)
- a register of post-graduate qualifications offering self-access/learner independence courses
We're also hoping to set up a Video Forum parallel to the Poster Forum at the IATEFL International Conference. We're also looking for groups or organisations to work with in countries around the world to set up events there and so to widen the interest and range of our activities.
Jenny Timmer, Co-ordinator
Literature and Cultural Studies
For many people, the first interest in a language comes from discovering its literature, an interest which is sustained by contact with the culture.
The Literature and Cultural Studies Special Interest Group exists to promote and encourage intercultural understanding through the medium of literature. It explores all aspects of literature, and their application to ELT. It does so through organising a specialised track at the annual IATEFL conference, planning a series of talks at the SIG Symposium every two years, organising workshops and conference of its own, and producing newsletters.
Our last event was a highly successful one day symposium with an impressive line up of speakers including Gill Lazar, Alan Pulverness, Roger Gower, Jane Spiro, and Teresa O'Brien. At the SIG Symposium held jointly with the British Council in Vienna there were strong contributions from local teachers and our keynote speaker was Guy Cook.
We are now planning an exciting two years. These events will include:
- a joint conference with the British Council in Bavaria
- a day symposium looking at ways of combining the use of films with teaching literature in EFL
- a day symposium devoted to cultural studies and their place within ELT.
- a joint symposium with the Teacher Trainer SIG in Hungary
Amos Paran, Co-ordinator:
http://www.man.ac.uk/IATEFL/
Media Special Interest Group
The Media Special Interest Group offers international connections to the most international of language materials: the media. Our open-house committee meetings in 1996 were held in Chicago (USA), Keele and London (UK), and Vienna (Austria). The current issue of our newsletter, Screen, was guest edited from Taiwan--the next could be done by you! It reaches a world-wide membership at least three times per year. The SIG members run training workshops and seminars at conferences--London, Vienna, and Orlando--or anywhere on demand. We'll help you run your own workshop--just get us near enough to your country or region.
The Media SIG deals with visual materials in language learning and teaching. The Media SIG members focus mainly on screen images: video, film, moving images in CD and other computer programmes, and of course television, whether satellite, cable, or terrestrial. We have a reference archive of all UK-based EFL materials.
When the SIG was founded (as the Video SIG) there were some television series perhaps available on video. Since then, the technology available to schools, colleges, study centres, and the home or office-based learner has developed at an amazing rate. The advent of satellite TV around the globe led to a huge development in techniques for capitalising on the undoubted benefits of television--real TV, aimed at native speakers, and covering far more than the topics of a textbook course or national curriculum. The members of the Media SIG have built up an unrivalled knowledge in this area. Their expertise ranges from teaching in classrooms for children, university students, or adults, to designing TV programmes, producing and directing them, writing textbooks and training manuals, and visiting most parts of the world to train teachers and learners how to exploit this valuable resource. The arrival of computer-generated images has brought a new dimension to the work of the Media SIG: maintaining the methodological and pedagogical gains made in using the screen in teaching. Join the Media SIG and share the experiences!
Jack Lonergan, Co-ordinator
Pronunciation
Research is increasingly showing that poor pronunciation is the biggest cause of misunderstanding. The IATEFL Pronunciation group is trying to do something about this.
Our group is the only international group dealing with the teaching of pronunciation within English language teaching. It is for people who realise the importance of pronunciation--in terms both of speaking and of understanding speech--and believe that it should and can be dealt with in a systematic way in the classroom. Most important, it bridges the gap between the academic world of phonetics/phonology and the world of the ordinary classroom teacher.
Perhaps the most noteworthy of any of the events organised by the group was the joint IATEFL/TESOL Pronunciation Institute held at Long Beach, California, in the context of the 1996 TESOL Convention. This event brought together experts from both sides of the Atlantic.
For those unable to attend our conferences and workshops, the main reason for joining the group is to receive the journal Speak Out!, a publication of international standing. This comes out twice a year, a mixed issue in the winter, and one devoted to a single topic in the summer. Winter issues cover a wide range of relevant topics, from important new theories to tips for immediate use in the classroom, from book reviews to details of relevant computer programs. Summer issues have included such topics as coping with the problems of specific L1s (including Japanese!) and the technology of pronunciation teaching. Three, so far, have come with audio cassettes. These include the most recent 10th anniversary issue Changes in Pronunciation," a 68-page document with contributions from such distinguished authors as David Crystal and David Roach.
Michael Vaughan Rees, Co-ordinator
Research
The Research Special Interest Group has two broad aims. Its first aim is to promote the concept of classroom research, particularly undertaken by practising teachers. It assists practitioners to see that small-scale discovery projects can make an important contribution to their development by enabling them to find out more about themselves as teachers and more about their students as learners. It also provides a forum for those already engaged in classroom research to exchange ideas and compare outcomes.
Research SIG's second aim is to build bridges between researchers and practitioners. With this aim in mind, it is organising a series of major conferences on teaching and learning of language skills. Plenary papers are given by leading figures in each of the fields who are not necessarily mainstream EFL specialists; contributions from participants draw both on research and on experience. The first conference was on Reading Skills. Future topics are listening, vocabulary acquisition, and speaking.
The SIG's newsletter contains reports on research projects in progress, discussion of important issues in language learning, requests for cooperation and advice, and details of academic research which is of interest to members. To promote classroom research, the SIG is offering a bursary of £300.00 to enable a teacher to undertake a project which would not otherwise be possible.
The SIG is currently fostering ideas on how to undertake research. It recently set up a Study Day on research methods in co-operation with the University of Leuven in Belgium and a further Study Day in the UK. Every two years, the SIG helps to co-ordinate one of the major tdtr (Teacher Development Teachers Research) conferences which attract a great deal of international support. The next one is in Israel in September 1997.
Research SIG is currently developing its own publications. It produces an annual collection of papers, presenting recent findings by Research SIG members which are of significance to the profession at large. The Group also produces an occasional series entitled Update on . . . ., which enables members to refresh their knowledge of particular areas of ELT theory. Currently under discussion is the possibility of publishing a Handbook of Classroom Research, with contributions by well-known names. Research SIG publications are provided to SIG members free of charge or at a discount.
Our members perhaps have the widest range of backgrounds of any of the IATEFL SIGs. They include experienced teachers, directors of studies, researchers in universities and teacher training institutions, freelance teacher trainers, and materials writers. They come from all over the world. Their range of research interests is stimulatingly diverse: everything from cognitive psychology to action research, from discourse analysis to vocabulary acquisition, from skills-based approaches to classroom interaction. Our long-term plans include setting up a register to enable those with similar interests to make contact with each other.
John Field, Co-ordinator
Teacher Development
The Teacher Development SIG aims:
- to provide a forum for teachers for whom an important priority is to develop their own unique potential as teachers
- to develop their skill and awareness in meeting the inevitable problems of being a teacher
- to keep alive a sense of challenge and satisfaction in the job.
The Teacher Development SIG was formed by Adrian Underhill in 1985, and was the first SIG to be created as part of IATEFL. Typical priorities include:
- What does development mean to me in my context?
- How can I become the best teacher that I can be?
- What hinders and what helps me in doing that?
- How can I help myself by working with others who are also interested?
Our newsletter editor, who lives in The Netherlands, usually invites a SIG member from another country to co-ordinate a series of articles for a particular newsletter. In the past, guest co-ordinators from Switzerland, Slovakia, Czech Republic and The Netherlands, have contributed, and further contributions from the USA, India and Austria are planned. If you are interested in co-ordinating a series, you can contact Rosie Tanner through the IATEFL Head Office.
We organise practical and experimental workshops in the UK. For example, past events have included a half-day workshop on using one's voice, and a two-day workshop on Neuro-Linguistic Programming.
In addition, we co-operate with other SIGs in organising joint conferences outside the UK. In 1996 there was a one-day joint Teacher Development and Research workshop entitled Learning from the Classroom, investigating the methods and outcomes of teacher-directed research.
A joint conference entitled Teacher Training and Teacher Development: Integration and Diversity is planned involving the Teacher Development SIG, Teacher Trainer SIG and the University of Bilkent, Turkey.
We encourage teachers to form local groups outside the UK (called SIGnets) with the purposes of networking, organising events, and sharing their insights and experiences. In this way, individuals and groups of teachers can undertake activities focusing on personal and professional development.
Chris Jacques, co-ordinator
Teacher Training
Are you involved in teacher training? If so, why not become involved in the IATEFL Teacher Trainer Special Interest Group?
We aim to represent the interests of the teacher trainer community as well as to enhance the professional development of its members. We organise events both at regular IATEFL conferences and symposiums and on other occasions, and we publish a newsletter three times a year, and keep our members up-to-date with key issues in the profession.
At the moment we are in the process of redefining how we can meet our members' wishes and needs more precisely, and are responding to a questionnaire sent out in 1996. Better networking with parts of the world where we have not previously been present has been strongly requested by the membership and we are looking into ways of achieving this.
The Teacher Trainer SIG was present this year at the IATEFL conference in Keele, and members unable to attend this conference will be able to read the papers that were given in a forthcoming newsletter. We had a lively track at the Vienna IATEFL Symposium and the papers presented are included in the proceedings.
Gillian Porter Ladousse, co-ordinator
Testing
Promoting evaluation, assessment and teaching within EFL--this is the aim of the Testing Special Interest Group.
As the approach to learner assessment slowly changes from psychometrics to more educational assessment, so the focus of the Testing SIG opens up. We invite members to share their experience of testing and alternative assessment processes.
The Testing SIG has been co-operating with other SIGs and has been active internationally. We have had shared symposiums with the Learner Independence SIG, the Young Learners SIG and Research SIG. Proceedings from both events have been published by IATEFL, Putting Learners in their Proper Place and Entry Points. We have a track at the annual IATEFL conference. Past events have been held in Austria, UK, Argentina, and future events are to be held in Germany and Poland.
Young Learners
Many teachers are now working with learners between the ages of five and sixteen. As the interest in teaching English to young learners steadily grows there is a greater demand for communication and exchange of ideas in this field. The Young Learners SIG aims to help teachers and teacher trainers circulate these ideas and the latest theories through their ever-increasing global network of members.