This presentation is based on the teaching and learning online experience of teachers and adult learners in New Zealand and Asia during the first two years of the Covid-19 pandemic. It reviews recurring themes from teacher and student feedback regarding programmes focusing on English for Specific Purposes (Academic Skills, Leadership, and Sustainable Development), taught by staff from a university in New Zealand. It compares programmes taught online with minimal/no planning in early 2020, with those formerly face-to-face taught online in 2020-2022 with a few months’ warning. It compares our experiences with those reported by practitioners and researchers worldwide, making use of local research and international publications. Comments include what goals students and teachers felt have been achieved with the online programmes, and how they were achieved. The presenter makes suggestions for the future regarding infrastructure, schedules, ‘overloading’, and staff/student familiarity with the use of both software and hardware.

The purpose of this session is to highlight how collaborative group discussions on historical fiction can help facilitate cultural understanding. The session will begin by briefly discussing the research of Jaran Shin, who suggests that teaching historical fiction both helps with language proficiency while also developing cultural knowledge. The speaker will then introduce the historical fiction novel “Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet,” which gives students an understanding of both past and current racial and class tensions in the United States. The speaker will then describe collaborative discussions on the novel in the form of Discussion Circles, which allow students to form their own hypotheses about characters and events, form their own questions about the target culture, and shape their understanding of the United States. Attendees will come away with an increased awareness on the usefulness of historical fiction and peer discussion for developing cultural knowledge, especially in the context of Discussion Circles.

This presentation will highlight the usefulness of students’ personal stories and experiences in developing inferencing as a reading skill, particularly when reading literature. To better understand inferencing, students can be asked to recall times in their own lives where they made assumptions based on observing details. When recalling these assumptions and their conclusions, an easy-to-understand parallel can be drawn with inferencing, or forming hypotheses based on details in a text. This is especially useful when reading literature, as a story’s plot and background is often suggested through details and is not explicitly declared. The presentation will give examples of connecting these “real-life” inferences to inferring personality traits of a novel's characters based on details about their actions, wardrobe, settings, etc. Attendees will come away with a fresh perspective on teaching inferencing as a reading skill and a greater appreciation for the use of personal experiences to inform reading skills.

Photo Voice is a qualitative research method for community-based participatory research to document and reflect reality. It was first used in rural China to learn about the lives of women farm workers (Wang and Burris, 1997).The women used their photographs to make an impact on the region’s policies. Since then, it has been used around the world as a vehicle for social change. In most cases, Photo Voice is used as a type of action research with participants as an integral part of the research process, using pictures they take to develop new ideas and solutions to challenges. Participatory photography through photo voice creates a space for discussion and action on issues of student engagement, school reform, and social services. (Examples can be found at https://photovoice.org/projects/) Drawing from this relatively new field, a group of teacher leaders in Cambodia decided to apply the Photo Voice technique as a way to understand the community and develop language and communication skills in English and Khmer. This Pecha Kucha will introduce Photo Voice, showcase student projects, and discuss how this type of participatory research led to understanding stakeholders’ needs and assets all while building the language skills of participant researchers and students.

The EFL classroom is a great place for students to ask and answer important questions and develop their language while doing so. The question is how can a teacher facilitate this? In this pecha kucha, the presenter will offer some handy guidelines based on his own experiences. These include how to frame important questions for students (justice), how to get them engaged with those questions (debate), and how they can be taught to argue more persuasively (rhetoric). This presentation includes an overview of the concept of justice (taken from “Justice” by Michael Sandel), which can inform the design of debate/discussion classes. It also includes an outline of the presenter’s preferred approach to implementing pair/small-group debates in EFL classes with minimal preparation. Finally, the presenter will suggest an accessible way to teach students to argue more convincingly based on a 3-part definition of rhetoric: ethos, logos, and pathos.

ESL materials are often improved with the inclusion of high-quality recordings. Unfortunately, producing such recordings can be expensive, time-consuming, and complicated. Moreover, when recordings are included, they have typically been limited to Standard accents, even though non-Standard English is a natural part of ESL listening. Not only does this limit the students’ familiarity with non-Standard accents, but it also promotes accent discrimination.

AI speech models have improved dramatically and now have many expressive and naturalistic features. Moreover, these are available in a wide range of voices and languages with fine grained control over speed. Interestingly they can produce English speech in typical foreign accents. Finally, all of this is generally available to anyone producing language materials.

In this presentation, I introduce a set of these models, demonstrating what they can do and what we can do with them in ways that promote equity, diversity, inclusion and good language learning.