Such a lovely display

This year’s CAUTHE conference was held at the swanky Convention and Exhibition Centre in Melbourne. It’s nicely situated on the South Wharf and it was great to get out in the evenings for dinner and drinks along the Southbank. Sue Beeton and everyone else involved in organising the conference did a brilliant job and Channel View had another great CAUTHE!

Gladiators ready!

One of the highlights of the conference was the debate on the last day – Australian Tourism: Dying and Beyond a Full Recovery – which was Aussie(ish!) academics v foreign academics. The teams (captained by Michael Hughes and David Airey respectively) and the chair (Larry Dwyer) kept everyone highly entertained – the foreign devils won in the end but kudos has to go to the Aussie team for their lovely outfits…

The very bright dancefloor

The conference finished with a gala dinner at Melbourne Museum (including viewing the great Phar Lap) and included the usual dancefloor-embarrassment on my part – though I blame Paul Strickland entirely for the lip-syncing to the Grease-medley!

Sadly Australia lost...:-)

Happily for me I managed to sneak in some cricket-watching while I was in Melbourne – an amazing atmosphere at the MCG. Watch this space for our cricket and tourism book!

Needless to say, Channel View are eagerly anticipating next year’s CAUTHE debut in New Zealand – hopefully see you all in Christchurch.

Ellie, Laura and a new friend at TESOL last year

Our stand at last year's AAAL conference

If you’re attending any of these conferences please do come and say hello. We love to meet people face-to-face and discuss what they’re working on. We also sell all our books at special conference discounts so you can pick up a bargain while you’re there! We always bring a large display of our books so you can have a browse through our new titles. If you’re one of our authors and are going to be at a conference that we’re attending please let us know in plenty of time and we’ll make sure we have extra copies of your book on display. We hope to see you soon!

Publishers are encouraged to donate their excess stock to the charity who will ship the books to places where they are needed. The IBB only works with recipients who have been certified as non-profit organisations. It ships books to recipients all over the world including Africa, Asia, East Europe, the Caribbean, Central and Latin America. Their most recent shipments have been to South Africa, the Philippines, Rwanda, Malawi, Kenya, Tanzania, Burkino Faso, Uganda and Guyana.

If you would like to support the International Book Bank or would like further information about the organisation please visit their website at: www.internationalbookbank.org. You can also follow them on Twitter @IntlBookBank.

Many of our ebooks are also available for purchase on Amazon Kindle. These can be found by searching on Amazon’s website, or within the Kindle store on the Kindle or Kindle app.

Our books are also available to purchase through the Google Ebookstore, currently available in the UK, USA, Australia and Canada.

Ebooks are also currently available for download through ebooks.com, kobobooks.com and nook.com and a growing number of bookstores and websites. Search your preferred ebook retailer by Author, Title or Ebook ISBN for price and availability. Most of the above offer a reader app that you can download so that you can read our books on your computer, tablet or smartphone.

Library platform ebooks are available from the following aggregators: EBSCO, Ebrary, EBL, MyiLibrary and DawsonEra.

For a list of currently available titles or any other queries, please email info@channelviewpublications.com.

The readers of this blog might rightfully ask what the author has to do with specific learning difficulties: she is a linguist, a second language acquisition researcher and a former language teacher and teacher trainer, not a psychologist or special education expert. The fact, however, is that if we look around in our immediate environment, in no time we can find a dozen colleagues, students, friends, and relatives who tell us that either they themselves have apparent difficulties in reading or somebody they know very well is dyslexic. This is in complete accord with European statistics according to which approximately 7-10% of the population can be characterized as having some type of learning differences, which, among others, might cause difficulties in reading, writing and in other academic domains. Dyslexia, one of the most frequent types of specific learning differences, accompanies the dyslexic person all through their lives. This means that no matter whether we teach adults enrolled in a language school or children with English as an additional language in a primary school, one in every ten students in the classroom might potentially be dyslexic.

Teaching Languages to Students with Specific Learning Differences

Students with dyslexia might have very different ability profiles, and consequently might experience varying degrees of difficulties in language learning. It is a common misconception that language learners with dyslexia only find reading and writing in another language challenging. In fact, a large number of aspects of second language acquisition might pose difficulties for dyslexic students. For example, the memorization of words is often demanding for learners with an SpLD, and they need repeated encounters with words and conscious effort to successfully encode them in memory. Students with dyslexia also frequently mix up similar sounding words and words with similar meaning. Furthermore, language learners with dyslexia might find it difficult to understand grammatical concepts and apply grammatical knowledge in communicative situations. The reading speed of learners with dyslexia also tends to be slow and they frequently experience word recognition problems in another language. Additionally, dyslexic language learners might find it demanding to produce longer written texts because of their spelling problems and lack of sufficient vocabulary knowledge. If not handled adequately in the language classroom, these difficulties often result in loss of motivation to learn foreign languages, low self-esteem and the appearance of symptoms of foreign language anxiety.

In many cases, children are identified as dyslexic and are given assistance in acquiring literacy skills in lower primary school, long before they start learning a foreign language. In some other cases, however, children develop excellent strategies which help them cope in the lower grades, and it is possible that the difficulties caused by dyslexia only come to the surface in upper grades and in the foreign language classroom. Therefore foreign language teachers are often the first to notice that students have unexpected difficulties in learning another language and have great responsibility in ensuring that these learners receive adequate assistance and support from special educational experts. In our forthcoming book Teaching Languages to Students with Specific Learning Differences (co-authored with Anne Margaret Smith), we explain how language teachers with little or even no prior training in special education can help dyslexic students to acquire another language. All that is needed is awareness and understanding of the nature of specific learning differences, empathy, patience, and the application of instructional techniques that might be useful for non-dyslexic students as well. We hope that our new book will be a useful resource for foreign and second language teachers, teacher trainers and trainees, educational experts and researchers in the fields of education, second language acquisition and linguistics.

Language Cafés in Action

Located in the heart of Sweden, Dalarna University (Högskolan Dalarna) may be quite small, but it also happens to be home to one of Sweden’s largest language faculties with 11 bustling and busy language departments, and an online Language Centre to its name.

With so much diversity, it is only natural that the university’s Language Cafés have come to be as popular as they are today. Every second Monday, anybody who wishes can come to these free cafés, where “How are yous?” and “Who are yous?” and “How do you say thats?” are shared in a number of languages, with a native-speaker host there to assist when conversation gets stuck and grammar bars the way.

Language Café outdoors

What we, the delighted winners of this year’s Multilingualism in the Community Award, noticed, however, is that although our cafés draw people from diverse backgrounds (and certainly not always just students),  there were still members of the community that were conspicuous by their absence: where were our Thai, our Somalian, our Turkish, our Iranian (among others) community members? These are cultural groups that are integral to contemporary Swedish society and that are as welcome to our language cafés as our current (predominantly Swedish) participants are. Our mission has now become to find a means of involving them too!

Our ideas didn’t stop there either…

We also wondered about Sign Language: it too should have a place at our language cafés… and what about pupils with special needs who might not otherwise have the opportunity to learn a second language?

Now that we have won the wonderful amount of some 20 000 SEK, the doors of possibility have swung generously open.

Swedish Table

We want to use the money to be even more inclusive. All those kronor will allow us to organise more cafés at times and places that suit more people. We will visit organisations that work with newcomers to Sweden to learn about how we can provide them with this opportunity to share “Coffee with a Multicultural Flavour”. We want to give them the chance to get to know their Swedish neighbours in informal but planned language café get-togethers – a chance that will allow the “Swedish neighbours” to get to know them too. We would like to enrol student ambassadors (Education Students), who can spread the ethos of our language cafés to pupils with special needs. And of course multicultural events can only enrich these ideas, so why not organize events that are as meaningful to these many groups as “The Crayfish Party” is to Swedes?!

So yes, lots of ideas and lots of planning and lots of worthwhile work ahead. We at Dalarna University’s Language Centre would like to thank Multilingual Matters for providing us with this opportunity to develop and grow: tack så hemskt mycket!

Mandy Bengts, Coordinator of the Language Cafés at Dalarna University
Language Centre: http://du.se/languagecentre
Dalarna University: http://du.se

We will shortly be announcing the winner of the 2012 Multilingual Matters Multilingualism in the Community Award so please keep an eye on the blog for this as well as other news from the Channel View office.

The first is The Little Hands Trust who help to motivate biliteracy development among African children. Our contribution will help them to develop and supply storybooks in African languages as well as English, French, Portuguese and Arabic. The charity also mentors adults reading with children in reading clubs and collaborates with African  publishers to produce children’s books in African languages.

The second is The Family Holiday Association which is a charity dedicated to providing disadvantaged families access to holidays and recreational activities. Over 2 million children live in families who can’t afford a simple day out to the seaside let alone a holiday. Something that many of us take for granted is a luxury for some families and the Family Holiday Association helps these families take a much-needed break.

Our office will be closed from 23rd December to 3rd January as we will all be off enjoying the festive season.

Tracy

Last week we had the opportunity to have a training session with Tracy Johnson on de-escalation techniques and how to avoid potential conflicts. Although we all hope never to use these strategies, it was really useful to know how to get out of any nasty situations.

While the main aim of the session was to teach us how to avoid conflict, Tracy also showed us how to defend ourselves if we are ever physically threatened. Tommi kindly volunteered to be thrown to the floor by Tracy as she demonstrated her self-defence skills.

Although it was obviously a serious topic, we had a lot of fun practising our self-defence moves on each other. It was a really useful and interesting session and I think we all came away thinking differently about the way we behave. From now on we will all be alert when walking around and will be more prepared for any confrontation.

Tommi in a headlock

Tracy fighting Tommi

Tracy threatening Tommi with a knife

For more information about Tracy and the training she offers just take a look at her website Brainbox Coaching.

Channel View with Ninja Tracy