The London Language Show

Still rather jet lagged after returning from half term in New York hearing Spanish spoken by every other person,so it seemed, I got myself up to London last Sunday for the annual Language Show. Actually it wasn't as bad as all that- my husband drove me all the way up and back door to door!

It's the third time I have attended the show and this was the best one yet in my opinion. For Hispanists, many different regions of Spain were represented, and also the Spanish languages. Basque, Galician and Catalan were all there (www.parla.cat offers free online Catalan courses - if only there were more than 24 hours in a day!). However, as usual, there were rather too many stalls offering Spanish language immersion courses which tend to be of little interest to my adult students.
This year I picked up a good crop of freebies, including some nicely produced booklets from the EU publications office, written for young people but which could be very useful for students of all ages. I saw versions in French, Spanish( Vamos a explorar Europa), German and Italian.

Two of my friends from Second Life presented seminars on Sunday. Second Life is an online virtual world where one appears as an avatar, and can move around, create virtual 3D objects, interact with others, attend conferences, language classes.. The possibilities are endless and I guess we will be hearing much more about the educational uses of virtual worlds in the future. Gavin Dudeney (Dudeney Ge in SL) from the training organisation Consultants-E in Barcelona spoke about the qualities and additional skill set that an online language teacher needs to have. I don't teach online in Adult Education but we do have a Learning platform to supplement learning, and the points that Gavin made are equally as relevant to the issues that I find when trying to encourage learners to contribute to the Platform. A subject for another blog post perhaps..

Helen Myers (Karelia Kondor in SL) gave us a lightning tour of the wealth of IT resources she has discovered and ones she is investigating, looking to the future of language teaching. She gave us a comprehensive list of websites,at which I must have a good look this weekend. Our interactive whiteboard at Adult Education is now operational, so I'm going to need some technogical inspiration....