Coming of Age. The RATE Conference in Iasi, October 2006

Ovidiu Aniculaese, Romania

Ovidiu Aniculaese is a teacher of English, British and American Cultural Studies at "A.T. Laurian" High School in Botosani; a Cambridge ESOL oral examiner in Romania; acting content manager of MATE, the English teachers' association in Eastern Romania; won a Ph.D. with a paper on American popular culture. E-mail: teacherovi@yahoo.com

Going to a conference is always a risky venture. The trip, the accommodation, the venue could render many guests incapable of thinking about much else; assuming one has managed to get the ability and the patience to attend the sessions, then the speakers could prove a bitter disappointment for a variety of reasons: they could lack the necessary appeal, the gripping voice, the coherent speech or even the relevant topics to draw the attention of our practicing English teacher. Despite the odds, the 2007 RATE Conference in Iasi was, from a guest's point of view, a genuine success.

There are numerous wrong reasons for a conference experience to go well. I remember early years when participants would feel content for having gathered a fair share of free samples of books from one publisher or another wanting to make its name on the local market. I also know how many used to crowd into the room where a native speaker was going to give a presentation merely attracted by their relaxed, skillful or jocular manner of delivering their speech. Finally, there is always the category of teachers wanting to meet old acquaintances or make new ones among the established names of our guild. Curiously enough, I have seen nothing or very little of that in Iasi. Publishers now give away hardly anything to conference participants, so any contentment they get has to be attributed to the conference itself; native speakers have been more numerous and, unlike in the good old days, that status alone did not guarantee all of them a generous audience. We have even seen people starting to challenge the old assumption that non-native speakers are fatefully and invariably not worth listening to. Starting with keynote speakers - of which two were non-native - and going on to workshop presenters, all received increased credit from conference participants. Whichever category Mario Rinvolucri falls in, he managed to pool together all those skills and assets necessary to become the main point of attraction and even of discussion during the conference days and after.

Naturally - and fortunately - each and every one of the plenary sessions had something to teach or suggest to the teacher sitting in the audience. Rod Bolitho inspired the audience with his plea for genuine communication in the classroom and suggested activities to encourage talk in class such as setting ground rules for group work, using buzz groups or assigning discussions as homework, while Craig Dicker convinced us of the dire need for more content and language integrated learning, since the mere teaching of interpersonal skills leaves students unprepared for college and career. Hugh Dellar questioned the practical effectiveness of the well-established Present-Practise-Produce type of lessons and was joined in his plea for more effective teaching of grammar by Anna Sikorzynska, who recommended recovering some older techniques like drilling when it comes to common communication clichés, but also creating situations and characters for students to discuss in order to practice naturally associated chunks of grammar and vocabulary. Liz Kanaki and Mario Rinvolucri also made a team, this time in promoting neurolinguistic programming to the Romanian audience. The former focused on ways to appeal to the three types of memory - rote, motor and spatial - while the latter charmed those present with the idea of a subjective approach to the words one learns and that of mixed language storytelling. Finally, Natalie Kuhlman revealed the painstaking job of making standardised tests accountable and objective, while David Newbie brought a smile on the participants' faces with his own revelation on recent developments within the English language: teachers learned that English teenagers use the words "mum" and "nice" far more often than "sex" only to then seriously reflect on teaching a language aspect together with its natural context and, more importantly, on having distinct lessons for the various different uses of a given structure.
All things considered, there was a wealth of material to reflect on and try at home for the teachers present at the RATE Conference in Iasi. Ultimately, although much of that material may have sounded irrelevant or unappealing to many of us, I am convinced that dealing with it for a couple of days in Iasi has led many to make their own discoveries and resolutions for the coming years of teaching practice.

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