Manchester Programme

Saturday 11 April
0900-1025: Opening & First Plenary Session
0900-1025 Opening Announcements and Plenary Session
The conference will be opened by the IATEFL President, Carol Read.
Exchange Hall
(1600 audience)
Plenary session by Donald Freeman
SATURDAY
Donald Freeman is a professor at the School of Education, University of Michigan,
where his work focuses on designing and documenting new approaches to large-scale
improvements in language teaching that support the work of classroom language
teachers. For 25 years, he was on the graduate faculty at the School for International
Training, where he chaired the Department of Language Teacher Education, and
founded and directed the Center for Teacher Education, Training and Research. He is
author of several books on language teacher education including Educating Second
Language Teachers: The ‘same things done differently’ (forthcoming, OUP), as well as
Teacher learning in language teaching (with Jack C. Richards), and Doing teacherresearch.
He is senior consulting editor on ELTeach, an online professional
development program, and editor of the professional development series,
TeacherSource. Freeman has been president of TESOL, and a member the
International Advisory Council for Cambridge English.
Frozen in thought? How we think and what we do in ELT
English language teaching is rife with prescriptions for what ‘good’ teachers ought to
know and be able to do. These prescriptions are anchored in central ideas in the field
that we generally take for granted. We do not challenge them, even though they
inexorably shape all aspects of the work of ELT-- from national policies and standards
for teaching to administrative procedures and day-to-day work in ELT classrooms.
These central ideas come from diverse sources: some are loosely derived from
research, while others are inherited in the history of what we do. The ideas
themselves are taken as common sense, and thus are woven into the social
expectations of the work of teaching. In my title, I refer to this process as being ‘frozen
in thought’, by which I mean the field of ELT has become immobilized in a critical
sense by these ideas and what they mean for what we do as teachers and teacher
educators.
This talk examines some of these central ideas that we live by in ELT, including ideas
about how teaching and learning work, about the teacher’s role, and about the
classroom goals of English instruction. I examine what the ideas mean for the work of
classroom teachers given how English functions in the 21 st Century, and how they
shape and constrain our thinking in teacher education and research. I argue that, if
they are left unscrutinized and unchallenged, the ideas can undermine teachers’
professional confidence and stunt training and research. Therefore re-examining
them, thereby thawing our thinking, is a critical step in reasserting social control over
the public work of English language teaching.
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