MLTAV 2023 Conference Program: Monday 4 December 2023
Click on the hyperlinked text on the program below to view presentations from our very successful 2023 conference. On behalf of all the conference attendees and visitors to this site, MLTAV extends sincere gratitude to all conference presenters for generously sharing their knowledge and skills with the languages teaching community.
MLTAV Conference Program: Monday 4 December 2023 | |||||||
8:45 | Conference Opening (Celtic Hall) | ||||||
9:00 | Panel: Supporting Diverse Voices in Languages Education (Celtic Hall) Louisa Willoughby, Yvette Slaughter and Andrea Truckenbrodt | ||||||
ROOM | Celtic Hall | Simonds Hall | Studio 1 | Studio 3 | Studio 4 | Studio 8 | Studio 9 |
10:00 Session 1 | Amy Collins Demystifying planning across 7-10 Victorian Curriculum sequence | Matt Absalom | Cedric Chamontin Engaging activities for junior secondary language classrooms | Andrea Truckenbrodt Building students’ self-efficacy around writing in an emerging language | Michiko Weinman & Robyn Barallon | Susan Taylor | Yvette Slaughter (closed session) SLA collaboration meeting |
10:45 | Morning tea (Dining Room) | ||||||
11:15 Session 2 | Kylie Witt & VCAA Languages Unit VCE (Second) Languages: Ensuring SAC tasks meet the requirements of the Study Design and the principles of assessment | Stephanie Veber Tried and tested strategies for lower primary classroom success | Jaclyn Curnow Metacognition: How students’ self-reflection builds student agency | Linton Roe, Tahn Watson and Federica Mancusi | Kris Sapoetra Integrating Visual Arts and Languages through CLIL (Primary – Indonesian) | Victor Bao How to use Chinese readers in the classroom | Heulwen Sweet Auslan: Keep your hands up and signing |
12:00 Session 3 | Monika Szuryn & Nicole Burns | Mark Gabriele AI: An alternative to the traditional language resource | Eleonor Palacio | Kylie Farmer, David Moore and Sonia Morison MLTAV Literacy Project | Andrea Truckenbrodt & Aimee Pochinco Pre-service and early career languages educators networking session | James Rampant Using story maps, cards, gestures and rhythm to teach language to different learning styles | Hsu-Chia Chen The power of story-asking: Why and how I engage the whole class in a big role play |
12:45 Session 4 | Linton Roe, Kylie Farmer and Project Team Building languages leaders: 2023 project overview and 2024 expressions of interest | Hayley Hewat | Maud Fugier-Sola | Eleonora Luisetto, Tina Di Camillo & Ashley Green The impact of EPI within Victorian schools | Ivan Chan The development of a Science CLIL unit plan for Chinese language learners | Olimpia Rosenblum | Heulwen Sweet Auslan games, posters and YouTube: Resourcing in a digital time |
1:30 | Lunch (Dining Room) | ||||||
2:30 Session 5 | Shingo Gibson-Suzuki Online tools to increase student engagement and collect data | Nathalie Marchand | Ellen Murphy Secondary curriculum transformation: Towards MARSEARS and Comprehensible Input | Kasenya Grant Having fun with functional language and building students’ confidence through assessment | Carlos Franco Rethinking and applying the gradual release model in languages teaching and learning | Ting Zhang | Aimee Pochinco Making action research accessible for the language classroom |
3:15 | Plenary: Rage Against the Machine? (Celtic Hall) In his plenary address, Professor Emeritus Joe Lo Bianco will challenge us to be at the forefront of the debate about machine/human communication and to lead the reconceptualisation of languages education. | ||||||
4:15 | Conference Closing (Celtic Hall) | ||||||
4:30 – 5:15 | MLTAV Annual General Meeting (Simonds Hall) | ||||||
5:30 – 6:30 | Launch event: Integrating Indigenous Australian Knowledge and Japanese Language Learning (Studio 8) A University of Melbourne CLIL Teacher Education Lab project sponsored by the Australia-Japan Foundation | ||||||
10am - Session 1 Workshops
Amy Collins
This session provides a tried and tested approach to planning a lesson sequence using the Year 7/8 standards from the 7-10 Victorian Curriculum pathway. Through demystifying curriculum planning, oral focused pedagogy comes to the fore, promoting stronger vocabulary retention, engagement in the course and progression through the standards. This session will showcase planning templates, assessment samples, technology tools, student work and testimonials in an attempt to show that junior languages is the foundation for post compulsory studies to flourish.
Matt Absalom
An urgent issue for many people today is being appropriately represented linguistically. Over the past five years I have modelled gender-just language use in my teaching of Italian and explicitly taught issues related to language and gender. In this workshop, using Italian as an example, I will detail the types of strategies that can be implemented as well as a series of ideas for structuring units of work around issues of gender and language. We will explore issues such as heteronormativity and structural sexism as well as approaches such as people first and identity first language.
Cedric Chamontin & Phillip O’Brien
Teaching languages across the junior years of high school is more than just content, it requires engagement that builds confidence, improves participation and promotes a lifelong connection to language learning. This workshop will explore a range of practical games and activities to support language learning and intercultural understanding.
Andrea Truckenbrodt
Students typically find writing in a new language challenging for many reasons. While technology (Google translate, ChatGPT) provides short-term solutions, building students’ self-efficacy and capacity to express ideas and information using their full linguistic repertoire and literacy knowledge is more rewarding and sustaining. In this session, I will share research perspectives and practical suggestions of how we can build and support students’ self-efficacy around writing a traditional tale. Teachers will leave with a possible planning template, an exemplar that they can trial and some strategies for leveraging students’ English literacy skills and plurilingual knowledge when creating and crafting a text in the additional language.
Michiko Weinman & Robyn Barallon
This interactive and hands-on workshop invites both practising and aspiring CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) teachers across different languages and content areas to come together as a community of practice in a digital ‘third space’. Using the digital platform Mural as our third space canvas for collating and sharing, this session will engage you in small group work, visual reflection prompts and real-life CLIL scenarios.
Please bring your own device – laptop or iPad – to get the most out of the session.
Susan Taylor
The question is how to get learners to spontaneously use language. We teach, they learn, yet they rarely use the language in unscripted, unscheduled ways. Scenario practice might be the missing link between learning and using the language. Scenario practice is a workshopping phase, where space is made to experiment with constructing responses to any scenario. It is an easy, fun, low preparation strategy. Students working this way become hungry for more language knowledge.
Yvette Slaughter
Single Language Association collaboration meeting.
11:15am - Session 2 Workshops
Kylie Witt & VCAA Languages Unit
This presentation will provide an overview of the VCE Second Languages study designs to assist teachers to design and deliver VCE programs that are in accordance with the requirements of the study design. We will address the importance of the five key principles that underpin the assessment of progress and achievement in the VCE; that assessment must be valid, reasonable, equitable, balanced and efficient. We will discuss what these principles mean when developing SAC tasks for VCE Second Languages and provide a brief guide to the supporting documents that the VCAA has published for teachers. We will give a brief overview of the VCE school based assessment audit, and offer some tips to support teachers when undertaking the audit.
Stephanie Veber
This session will provide strategies for teaching students in the lower primary years and includes classroom management. It is aimed at graduate teachers, high school teachers moving to primary or those who wish to learn more about teaching lower primary students.
Jaclyn Curnow
Metacognition helps language students learn more efficiently with greater retention, which leads to less stress and anxiety. Metacognitive activities also help students to manage their own motivation. This workshop explores the use of metacognitive strategies to empower students to think about their own thinking. As awareness of the learning process enhances students’ control over their own learning, these metacognitive strategies are effective for beginning and advanced students (suitable for upper primary school and senior secondary).
Bring along your device, as you will explore free, quick and easy digital resources for metacognition such as “Menti” and “Flippity”.
Linton Roe, Tahn Watson and Federica Mancusi
Kris Sapoetra
The session will share ways of integrating elements from the Visual Arts curriculum using the CLIL approach to engage junior primary learners in their languages learning. As young children learn and develop their own language to interact with their surrounding environment, the Visual Arts can be used as a medium to foster authenticity and purpose for practising additional languages.
In this session, participants will participate in an Art activity while practising Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian).
Victor Bao
There are more and more Chinese readers for Chinese second language learners, how to use these readers in classrooms is a question that we need to think about. In this workshop, the workshop leaders will use some readers as examples and share some activities that the teacher can use.
Heulwen Sweet
This is a session for Auslan teachers. In the session I will show you you to access YouTube more effectively, especially YouTube Shorts. There will be an opportunity for Q&A where we will model together some language ideas.
12:00pm - Session 3 Workshops
Monika Szuryn & Nicole Burns
In the rapidly evolving landscape of language education, it is imperative for educators to employ effective strategies to gauge students’ comprehension of lesson objectives and success criteria. This workshop is designed to equip language teachers with practical tools and insights for ensuring that students not only meet learning objectives but also grasp the criteria for success in each lesson.
Mark Gabriele
As technology continues to influence modern education, harnessing the capabilities of AI (Artificial Intelligence) has emerged as a key avenue to enhance pedagogical practices in the language classroom. By drawing parallels between conventional resource development and AI-generated content the session will outline the comparative advantages of adopting this innovative paradigm. The session will showcase the myriad ways AI can be harnessed to scaffold resources in a dynamic and adaptable manner. Emphasis will be placed on the extending of text complexity to meet learners at their developmental stages, fostering autonomous learning experiences. We will delve into AI’s capacity to personalise learning materials, catering to individual learner preferences, interests, and strengths. Attendees will gain insights into the potential to foster learner engagement, motivation, and overall learning outcomes, and will leave with actionable insights to revolutionise instructional practices, harnessing AI to create meaningful, relevant, and individualised learning materials for the modern educational landscape.
Eleonor Palacio
Listening is often perceived as the most difficult of language skills. As such, we know that its development is an area of challenge for teachers and anxiety provoking for students. We also know that listening is key to language use and deserves specific attention in the classroom. This presentation will share the Collaborative Extended Practitioner Inquiry conducted in the framework of the Teaching Excellence Program by the Victorian Academy of Teaching and Leadership. This inquiry explores how metacognition can be used as a way of intentionally building students’ self-efficacy in listening skills. The workshop will provide research-based approaches and tools for teachers wanting to develop their students’ listening skills.
Kylie Farmer, David Moore and Sonia Morison
Attend this workshop to hear from the leaders and two participants involved in this Action Research Project which draws on the MLTAV Literacy and language learning resources. Find out about the specific literacy intervention strategies trialled, their findings and their recommendations for other teachers of Languages. Also find out about how you could be involved in this project in 2024 if you are interested in tapping into the ‘power lever’ of literacy.
Andrea Truckenbrodt & Aimee Pochinco
James Rampart
A common plea from language teachers is that there is not enough time in a week to embed the target language we teach in students’ long-term memories. In this workshop I will show how I structure a unit of work: starting with a shared story that we learn through a story map and gestures then building vocabulary using rhythm and games that encourage functional recall. I will show you how I help my students to plan and create their own stories and how they can test the language skills they have acquired by deciphering a piece of text or media. By refining this routine over the years, I have had success in teaching to the different learning styles of my class and creating different contexts that aid in moving the language taught from short term memory into long term memory.
Hsu-Chia Chen
Story-asking is a powerful tool to teach key structures in a fun and engaging way. You can master this skill without being a Comprehensible Input (CI)-based language teacher. This session will share with you the insider’s secrets, including how to use story-asking in your current learning programs, how to set up your class to engage everyone, and how to come up with story ideas with ease. It is ideal for those who already have a basic understanding of CI theory and circling skills, but everyone is welcome.
12:45pm - Session 4 Workshops
Linton Roe, Kylie Farmer and Project Team
Building Languages Leaders is an MLTAV initiative funded through the Department of Education’s Victorian Challenge and Enrichment Series (VCES). Attend this workshop to hear from the MLTAV team who facilitate this project about strategies and resources available to build Languages leaders in your school. Also find out how you could host a free event in your government primary school in 2024.
Hayley Hewat
In this workshop I will demonstrate different tools, platforms and programs that can be used effectively in language teaching and learning to enhance productivity, engagement, and outcomes. The workshop is separated into the ‘Big 3’ (Google, Apple, and Microsoft) plus some extras! You will have the opportunity to join a ‘tech playground’ where you can experiment with some different programs. This workshop is ideal for anyone who is interested in including more technology into their lessons but might not know where to start. It’s also great for those wanting some inspiration or recommendations for new activities and tools. An open invitation also goes out to those who already use digital learning tools and are willing to share their hard-earned technological tips and tricks and their enthusiasm!
Maud Fugier-Sola
How can we make sure that students are ready to learn in our language class? The answer could lie in neuroscience. Understanding how the brain processes and stores language optimises learning techniques. Together, we will look at a toolkit to see how being aware of this can impact our everyday teaching and learning approaches. Understanding the role of neuroscience in language allows us to unlock benefits like enhanced vocabulary retention and learning process, sentence building, language acquisition, understanding, motivation and engagement. Speaking a second language increases neuroplasticity, enhances cognitive skills, improves language proficiency (be it first, second or third) and optimises language learning outcomes. You will take away hands-on techniques to apply in the classroom ranging from teaching the students from a new angle in the room to a variety of healthy brain breaks and storytelling to approach grammar and engage the brain’s narrative processing systems helping students remember words in context.
Eleonora Luisetto, Tina Di Camillo & Ashley Green
In this workshop we will delve into the transformative impact of EPI (Extensive Processing Instruction). Dr Gianfranco Conti’s ground-breaking approach, EPI, offers a fresh approach to language teaching. We will unravel its’ profound implications for educators and students in a Victorian Languages Curriculum setting. We will look at how EPI has been applied across three schools in Victoria and explore the remarkable correlations in outcomes within our target groups. Through hands-on activities, case studies, and collaborative discussions, participants will gain practical strategies and tools to integrate EPI principles into their teaching practices. Whether you are an experienced educator or just beginning your teaching journey, this workshop promises to provide valuable insights and innovative approaches to support students in their quest for second language proficiency. EPI is a game-changer in the realm of second language learning. Together, we can empower our students to thrive in an increasingly interconnected world.
Ivan Chan
Mandarin Chinese has recently become one of the more popular languages for additional language learners in Australia and elsewhere. Given this rise in interest, researchers have been searching for optimal teaching methodologies to deliver the desired educational outcomes by investing additional time on tasks in learning Chinese as an additional language. CLIL is renowned as a modern teaching methodology that aims to provide subject content knowledge through the target language so that students have sufficient time to acquire the language whilst learning the content across one or more additional learning areas. This workshop describes an opportunity to teach a Science unit in an Australian school, using the CLIL model with Chinese as the medium of instruction. It endeavours to explain how a CLIL Chinese unit plan can be developed from scratch. Every aspect of the unit plan design, from identifying the teaching content, recognising students’ prior knowledge, developing teaching sequences and learning activities, to choosing assessment tools will be discussed along with the literature on CLIL.
Olimpia Rosenblum
“Visual Listening” is an approach to second language learning underpinned by visual thinking and dual coding strategies and uses a combination of multimedia elements. It is an approach that engages students, fostering the development of fluency in second language acquisition and covers the skills of listening, reading and viewing. In this hands-on workshop, we will examine story genres, how to choose stories for adaptation and discuss different options of telling the story to students. You will learn how to create a unit of work with a short story or fable and learn how to break it down by using the visual listening approach. You will discover different output options and look at different classroom activities that can be integrated with this method with the objective being to set up a library of ready-made digitised visual stories. We will consider curriculum assessment requirements and ways of integrating this approach to your current teaching courses either as an add-on or stand-alone program. The presentation will demonstrate how the use of engaging visual stories can be integrated as a learning pedagogy at the upper primary and junior secondary language levels, where the focus of second language learning is vocabulary acquisition and not grammar.
Bring: a one-page short story or fable or poem in the language you teach either in hard copy or digital form and highlighters
Heulwen Sweet
Looking for more short, sharp, activities to keep those hands up and signing? Then this will work for you. The workshop will cover Foundation to Year 8. Support videos will be provided via YouTube. We will cover games like Auslan Baseball, Pair, Share and Relax, or even Interpreter. What about Speed Buzz or Speed Alphabet?
2:30pm - Session 5 Workshops
Shingo Gibson-Suzuki
With the advancement of technology in education, teachers have access to an abundance of online based ICT tools and websites to engage students and assist them with their language learning. This session is aimed at language teachers seeking to incorporate various ICT tools to increase student engagement in class while checking their understanding and collecting student data at the same time. Attendees will become familiar with various inclusive, formative assessment tools, which can be used in both ICT and non-ICT classrooms. The presentation will focus on different ways to incorporate online based formative assessment tools that are easy to set up and use in both primary and secondary language classrooms. Attendees will get to experience each ICT tool as learners and have opportunities to discuss and share their ideas about how different tools can be used. ICT tools can stimulate student engagement and give teachers immediate insight into how each student has responded to their learning environment.
Nathalie Marchand
While we all strive towards using effective differentiation in each of our lessons, it can often seem daunting, time-consuming, and eventually just too hard to implement in the Languages classroom. However, with the right tools, differentiation can be achieved relatively painlessly and consistently. This session will highlight how using skill progressions can help teachers provide meaningful learning and target their instruction to extend the knowledge and skills of every student, regardless of their starting point. Through some practical and trialled examples, participants will discover how to create effective formative and summative assessment tools that foster metacognition and self-regulation, thus empowering students to monitor their own growth.
Ellen Murphy
This workshop delves into the transformative journey of curriculum adaptation, specifically the transition from grammar translation to the innovative “Contification” approach. Drawing inspiration from the MARSEARS language teaching model, which emphasises immersive listening and reading experiences, purpose-driven communication instruction, and the integration of interactive, low-prep high-engagement games, this session explores the implementation of these principles and what was learned along the way.
Kasenya Grant
I have been using TPRS for a few years now and find it an engaging and effective teaching tool. TPRS incorporates functional language but after attending an MLTAV workshop on function language with Linton and Kylie I decided to really up the ante on the amount of instructional classroom language I am using. My junior primary classes had such fun I’d like to share how we used it in our Indonesian classes (in a way that could easily be adapted to any language). This year I was also lucky enough to be part of TEP at the Victorian Academy of Teaching. My inquiry projects as part of this course were on assessment for learning and the benefits of self-assessment. I will spend the last ten minutes of this workshop sharing some self-assessment tools I have used this year with grade 3-6 students and the impact they have had on student confidence.
Carlos Franco
By following the “I do—we do—you do” release, the teacher decides when and how to hand over power to the students. This presentation focuses on enhancing this model for language teaching and learning by reversing the order making the student the main decision maker. YOU DO, with a rich task to focus on process, not necessarily the answer with provisions of multiple entry points and allowance for varied solution paths. WE DO focuses on complex instruction for students to be given opportunities a need for instruction to equip them with ways of representing their thinking. I DO, with the opportunity for students to apply gained knowledge and skills during the decision making process. Topic-based concrete examples of what this entire process could look like in the language classroom will be provided for primary and secondary. Participants will be provided access to an online template to have a quick go, represent their thinking and share their learning.
Ting Zhang
TPRS (Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling) is a student-centered language teaching method that emphasizes the use of compelling and engaging stories to facilitate language acquisition. By immersing students in meaningful and context-rich narratives, TPRS aims to enhance their speaking, listening, reading, and writing skills while making the learning process enjoyable and effective. In this workshop, participants will explore the impact of TPRS on language acquisition for students in junior levels (Year 7 – 9). Participants will: gain an understanding of the TPRS method; experience a mini-demo TPRS lesson; learn how to introduce a typical four-stage TPRS lesson planning sequence and; collaborate in language teams to transform a chosen topic into a TPRS lesson. By the end of the workshop, participants will have the tools to implement several TPRS techniques in their classrooms.
Aimee Pochinco
This presentation will explore examples of individual and collaborative action research conducted in languages classrooms. Action research allows language teachers to focus on a small aspect of their teaching practice, gives them space to undertake research on their topic of choice and implement actions which have the potential to make a big difference to student outcomes. While the examples are drawn from individual and a collaborative action research conducted in French during my time as a participant in the Teaching Excellence Program (TEP), this presentation is suitable for teachers of all languages and for teachers in primary and secondary teaching contexts.
I will conclude the presentation by highlighting the benefits that come through sharing our results with our colleagues – how it can inspire us (and others) to try out new ideas, create meaningful discussions, engage our learners, and even slowly create change in the perceptions of the profession.
3:15pm Plenary Address - Joe Lo Bianco
Rage Against the Machine?
In this talk I will explore some of the emerging interpretations that administrators, the mainstream media, and general public made of communication technologies, and especially of generative AI, and its impact on languages. Is it the end of mass language teaching in schools? Is it a supplement or enrichment to the work of language teachers? How are people responding and what questions are they asking? I will begin by tracing ‘instrumentalism’ in language teaching over the past few decades and build a case about how ‘we’ have been gradually drawn into a discussion and conceptualisation of the work on learning and teaching languages that we need to review, redo and reassemble. I am optimistic that we don’t need to ‘rage against the machine’, but the task of understanding where it/they push us is urgent and language teacher associations should be in the forefront of debate about the machine/human/communication fusion. Reconceptualisation is both defence and attack.
Joseph Lo Bianco, AM, is Professor Emeritus in Language and Literacy Education at the Faculty of Education, University of Melbourne. He is Past President of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He recently received the 30th Ramon Llull International Prize for his effort in Australia and SE Asia on language rights and language policy. For many years he has worked with UNESCO and UNICEF in South and South-East Asia on multilingual education, indigenous rights and access to education, literacy, girls’ education, and multiculturalism. He designed and managed the UNICEF Language, Education and Social Cohesion Initiative in Malaysia, Myanmar/Burma and Thailand which resulted in several advances for ethnic rights in the countries and extended to preparation of a Peace Building National Language Policy in Myanmar. He was author of the National Policy on Languages in Australia in 1987, widely regarded as the first multilingual comprehensive rights-based language policy. He retired as chair of language and literacy education at the University of Melbourne in 2020 and was appointed Professor Emeritus.
He has more than 150 publications on language, policy and planning, language education, literacy, culture, and identity.
