Kourosh Lachini

The First International Language Assessment Conference
in Armenia (ILACA)
will be held at the
American University of Armenia,
July 2-4, 2009.

ILACA, the first international language assessment conference in the region, is planned to bring together testing experts, university instructors, and graduate students from Armenia and all the neighboring countries to exchange ideas in communicative and task based assessment, psychometric principles of language tests, and ethics in language testing.

The conference will provide opportunities for participants to enjoy plenary talks and presentations, as well as to attend workshops conducted by experts in language assessment from all over the world.Follow this link for more information and registration

Chairing ELT International Conference, Tehran, Iran, May 1-3

Dr. Lachini has been appointed by the president of IAU at Tehran, Dr. Gozashti, to organize and chair the first nation-wide ELT International Conference on the current trends in English language teaching and assessment intended to be held on May 1-2 at the Campus of Science and Research of Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran. IAU is a huge university with about 1,000,000 students and 150 campuses around the country.

Invited speakers who have agreed and confirmed their presentations at the Tehran Conference are:

1. Zohreh Eslami Rasekh, Texas A&M University, USA

Zohreh R. Eslami is an Associate Professor of ESL Education in the Department of Teaching, Learning, and Culture in the College of Education at Texas A&M University in College Station. She has a joint appointment with Texas A&M University at Qatar. She has taught and educated teachers of ESL/EFL for more than 10 years.  Her current research interest include sociocultural aspects of ESL teaching and assessment, intercultural and developmental pragmatics, EAP, and ESL teacher education. 

The rise of English as an international language (EIL) and the advancements in information and communication technology has lead to increasing online communication, including emails from students to professors written in EIL.  With its high transmission speed, e-mail has been widely used for both personal communication and institutional communication (Baron, 2000; Crystal, 2001). The wide use of the e-mail medium, however, does not necessarily mean that it is used without difficulty. When writing emails, students have to make pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic choices concerning forms of address, suggesting new ideas, making requests, expressing disagreement, and closing the email with respect to the level of formality and relationship between the interlocutors (Baron, 1998, 2000; Kling, 1996).
This study investigates level of formality in email openings and closings in international students’ emails sent to faculty members. Hofstede’s (1980) cultural dimension of power distance (PD) is used to distinguish between relatively high and relatively low PD cultures. The students’ choice of openings and closings is discussed with respect to PD ranking, rapport management and the sociopragmatic conventions established in business communication literature. The analysis is based on 500 emails written by 89 students. The findings indicate that students from relatively high PD cultures are more likely to opt for formal alternatives, concluding that national culture is an aspect to take into account when analyzing lingua franca English communication.

The structure of the presentation is as follows. First issues related to English as a lingua franca, cultural aspects of lingua franca emails and the norms for writing emails will be discussed. Then, I will discuss the power distance model used in this study. Following that, the email data will be described along with taxonomy of various national cultures according to the power distance scale. Then the results with respect to email openings and closings are discussed. Finally, the pedagogical implications of the study will be presented.

References
Baron, N. S. (1998). Letters by phone or speech by other means: The linguistics of email. Language and Communication, 18, 133-170.
Baron, N. S. (2000). Alphabet to email: How written English evolved and where it’s heading. New York: Routledge.
Crystal, D. (2001). Language and the Internet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hofstede, G. (2001) Culture’s consequences. 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Kling, R. (1996). Social relationships in electronic forums: Hangouts, salons, workplaces and communities. In R. Kling (Ed.), Computerization and controversy: Value conflicts and social choices (2nd ed.) (pp. 426-454). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.


 

2. Rod Ellis, University of Auckland, New Zealand

 Task-Based Language Teaching: Sorting out the Misunderstandings

Kourosh Lachini, University of Qatar

    Incorporating Critic-o-analytical Thinking into English Language Teaching: Theory to Practice

Critical thinking is an important and vital topic in modern education. All educators are interested in teaching critical thinking to their students. Many academic departments hope that its professors and instructors will become informed about the strategy of teaching critical thinking skills, identify areas in one’s courses as the proper place to emphasize and teach critical thinking, and develop and use some problems in exams that test students’ critical thinking skills. The purpose of this presentation is to move from purely far-fetched and conceited logic-o-philosophical ideas to some down-to-the-earth practical pedagogical suggestions and implications; what can and should actually take place in a higher education classroom to enrich our students’ critical thinking abilities? Here, The immediate purpose is to focus on such topics like definitions, characteristics, attributes, skills, and measurement of critical analytical thinking (CAT). The presenter would also shed some light upon such issues like why CAT is a necessary ingredient of any higher education institutions, pedagogical aspects of CAT especially for teaching sciences and mathematics and other related course areas, purpose and rational for teaching critical thinking, a critical thinker vs. a non-critical thinker, and how to train our students to think critically. This presentation will also benefit from a good number of practical instances and samples to exhaust CAT in a Socratic manner. PowerPoint presentation will be also backed up with handouts and references for the audience self-study and further self-development.
 

World Teachers' Day, held annually on October 5th since 1994, commemorates teachers’ organisations worldwide. Its aim is to mobilise support for teachers and to ensure that the needs of future generations will continue to be met by teachers.

According to UNESCO, World Teachers' Day represents a significant token of the awareness, understanding and appreciation displayed for the vital contribution that teachers make to education and development.

Education International (EI) (the global union federation that represents education professionals worldwide) strongly believes that World Teachers' Day should be internationally recognized and celebrated around the world. EI also believes that the principles of the 1966 and 1997 Recommendations should be considered for implementation in all nations.

Over 100 countries observe World Teachers' Day. The efforts of Education International and its 390 member organisations have contributed to this widely spread recognition. Every year, EI launches a public awareness campaign to highlight the contributions of the teaching profession.