In a world where the vast majority of texts our students are encountering and dealing with are visual texts or multimodal texts that use visuals, the importance of visual literacy increases greatly. In this session, we will explore what visual literacy is, why it is important in language education, how two new skills, viewing and visually representing, have been added to the traditional skills of reading, writing, listening and speaking in the English language curricula of a number of countries, and explore a number of simple, tried-and-tested viewing frameworks that help students become more active and effective viewers of photos, paintings, films and videos.

Teachers will go away from the session with a clear understanding of what visual literacy is and a number of tried-and-tested viewing frameworks to use with their students.

Videogames have evolved from an emerging fad of the Super Mario Bros. era to perhaps the dominant media past time. Yet with this colossal growth videogames have not seen the classroom adoption we might expect. The challenge for educators is in how to incorporate videogames into the classroom when they are fundamentally different from the traditional media we use such as film, books, and music.

In this session we explore that difference and how we can structure and scaffold our classroom activities to best support the interactivity, and choices that videogames provide. Along the way we will investigate the research on how videogames can support language learning, how gaming culture can provide career opportunities for our students, and the ways educators can more effectively support students hoping to enter the US$150 billion-a-year videogame industry.

Filmmaking has never been easier thanks to the widespread use of social media and mobile devices. While its educational value has been widely acknowledged, its role in the language classroom is rather underexplored. However, in a world where communication is becoming increasingly multimodal, short film creation can offer tremendous learning opportunities for students of almost any age.

Informed by the PPR framework (Mavridi, 2019) and digital literacy pedagogies, this session will explore the role of filmmaking in supporting the development of language skills and digital literacies. We will also look at how teachers can guide students through the process of planning, drafting, editing and revising short films and how they can embed this process in a student-centred and engaging way.

Let’s assume you’re a dynamic, trained professional with something to say… but you’re not famous enough to get invitations to present here and publish there. How do you break in? This presentation outlines practical steps you can take to showcase your talents and contributions and advance your career to the next level. Come prepared to take notes and leave with an action plan!

Soft skills have long been hailed as being of fundamental value to young people’s education. This talk considers why certain new competencies are increasingly being recognised as vital by employers and societies around the world. Based on what current research indicates as being instrumental for young people seeking to achieve success in their professional and personal lives, this talk also consists of some suggestions for how students in ELT contexts can be enabled to develop these competencies.