The Languages Show at Olympia in London has become a regular outing for the Oaklands MFL team and this year was no exception. The show usually runs over the last weekend of half term (30 October to 1 November).  It is packed with stands and displays with freebies and books and teaching materials at discounted rates. I always like to add to my dice collection, when I visit the Languages Show.  I have dice with personal pronouns on, various irregular verbs and the French for no one, never etc.  They are brilliant for active learning especially for kinaesthetic learners (or anyone who gets bored with just sitting and listening).   Last year, I resisted the dice with pictures on, on the grounds that I could make my own.  This year, as I still hadn't made any, I bought three sets: Transport, Parts of the Body and Everyday activities (with clocks).  I'll let you know how I get on with them, when I've tried them out.  All the dice are sold by Linguascope.

 There were also talks and lectures for language teachers.  For my ICT-fix, I attended ICT - what's new? (and what's still going strong) by Helen Myers of the Ashcombe School and ALL.  The Ashcombe School website has a wealth of resources for language teaching.  Another enjoyable session was Joe Dale's Exploring the modern and foreign in languages.  Joe Dale is now advisory teacher for CILT.  His session was also ideal for e-geeks like myself.

Watch this space for details of next year's Languages Show.

At the end of September I attended a week-long course on using an online assessment tool called WebCEF.  The course was for teachers of all European languages.  The aim was to make possible collaborative Europe-wide evaluation of spoken language using the WebCEF online tool.  The Common European Framework of Reference is a Europe-wide scale for assessing language skills, which is particularly important for people who wish to study or work in another European country. Using the WebCEF tool increased our range of ICT skills. It was an exercise in Europe-wide collaboration on a small and large scale - on a small scale because the 24 participants came  from Greece, Luxembourg, Slovakia, Spain and many other parts of Europe and we learned a lot from working together.  On a large scale, the WebCEF tool allows the Europe-wide community of practice to collaborate on broad pedagogic issues as well as the detailed work of assessing language skills consistently across the continent.  We were very well looked after in the beautiful East German city of Dresden.

If you are interested in finding out more about WebCEF, particularly for use with adult learners, please email me.

Click here for my article about the WebCEF tool.

The CILT Summer Conference for teachers and managers of languages in adult and further education is unmissable.  This year it was held at the Institut Français in London. 

A report of the conference and the presentations of the keynote speakers are available on the CILT website.

Our new action research project at Oaklands College, Hertfordshire, sponsored by the LSIS Excellence and Improvement Fund, is Let's differentiate. We are a team of 5 MFL lectureres, myself, Maryse Birba, Patrizia Hall, Ana-Fe Escutia and Li Xiao.  We meet regularly to discuss differentiation strategies, try them out in our teaching, report back and start work on the next strategy.  We also peer observe each other, which is a very good way to get feedback and new ideas.  Look out for the  Let's differentiate pages on this site in early 2010..

If you haven'tfound what you want on this visit, please don't give up.  We are always making and adding new resources.