[ELTWeekly Volume 6, Issue 18 | July 21, 2014 | ISSN 0975-3036]
The third UTIC 2014 aims to bring together innovative work and new ideas in ELT from a number of different experts in the area while providing a medium for English language teachers and practitioners in general to exchange and share ideas and experience in ELT. A special emphasis will be placed on learning material development; what are the underlying concepts and rationale for material design, what language skills it purports to teach, how it serves to promote language acquisition, and what appropriation required to address students’ cultural backdrops and classroom constraints in various teaching contexts.
Given the magnitude and the generally perceived success of the 1st and 2nd UTIC, we hope the 3rd UTIC will bring comparable success and more impact on our understanding of ELT and our professional development as ELT practitioners which in turn will bring most benefits to our students.
Theme: “ELT Materials Development in Asia and beyond: Directions, Issues, and Challenges”
Why Materials Development? Who will participate?
In the last three decades, much has been discussed about CLT and task-based language teaching with special emphasis on their strength to engage students in meaningful communication using English. However, research on this area also suggest that there remain unsettling problems such as how to balance form and meaning, accuracy and fluency, and the existing difference between ESL and EFL context. With this taken as the decline of teaching methods, there is a shift toward principled eclecticism which recommends the incorporation of different methods and available resources on a well-informed basis. This, among other things, has placed the design of learning materials as playing a central role in shaping classroom activities. Our challenge now is to work on the know-how and skills in material design and use this to design materials which can help learners develop their communicative competence. We invite researchers, lecturers, curriculum and material developers, graduate students, policy makers, ELT-related companies, teachers, and all related parties to participate in The 3rd UTIC 2014.