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Prof.
Sean Lancaster
Grand Valley State
University in Michigan, USA
Dr. Sean Lancaster is currently an Assistant Vice
President of Academic Affairs and Professor at Grand
Valley State University in Michigan, USA, with about
22,000 students. GVSU is a public university that is
nationally ranked by US News and World Report. Dr.
Lancaster is also a Research Fellow with the
international Michigan Virtual Learning Research
Institute. He began his professor journey 23 years ago
and has taught courses around technology in education,
special education, and English language learning. Prior
to his current administrative position, Dr. Lancaster
served as a Department Chair of Literacy and Technology,
which included a graduate program in English Language
Learning. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of
Kansas, which had the #1 ranked Special Education
program and provided him with a strong focus on phonemic
awareness, phonics, and vocabulary, which has been
beneficial when teaching English language learning
classes. Dr. Lancaster has won three teaching awards
during his tenure as a professor, including a unanimous
selection as Outstanding Teacher from the graduate
students at the university. He has also won many
millions of dollars in National Institutes of Health
(NIH) research funding through the years to develop
educational software. His research has most recently
explored how teaching pedagogies can best make learning
equitable for students who have traditionally been
marginalized.
Title: The Intersection of Technology, Pedagogy, and Learning
Abstract: Research conducted at universities across the world makes vast contributions to the knowledge base in our respective fields and leads to advances that improve our world. An equally important contribution made in universities is in the provision of high-quality education, training, and preparation to students who will become future leaders and problem solvers. The ever-present and rapid-paced access to information insists on the use of instructional pedagogies that promote discernment, critical thinking, and discourse. This talk provides an examination of evidence-based practices focused on such pedagogies. Dr. Sean Lancaster will engage the audience in a discussion of ongoing research on essential pedagogical practices that technology can enhance and that engage all students.
Prof.
Kevin Balchin
Canterbury Christ Church
University, UK
Kevin is currently the Director of the Centre for
Language and Linguistics at Canterbury Christ Church
University. He has been working at the University since
2002 and before that taught English as a Foreign
Language in Spain and Russia for seven years. In recent
years, he has been involved in several international
projects, such as with the British Council in
Bangladesh, as well as contributing to a number of
undergraduate and postgraduate programmes and
supervising doctoral students.
Teaching and Supervision
Kevin has taught on the MA TESOL course including
supervising MA dissertations. He has been Course
Director for both the BA English Language & Linguistics
CELTA courses, and was involved with the B.Ed. TESL
course for Malaysian secondary school teachers. He has
also set up and taught on a number of intensive teacher
development programmes for overseas teachers of English.
He's currently supervising PhDs relating to different
aspects of teacher education, English language teaching
methodology, and the integration of technology into
language classes.
Research
Kevin’s research interests are in English language
teacher education and incorporating technology into
English language teaching.
Title: Reflecting in
English Language Teacher Education
Abstract: This talk considers student teacher
reflection on English Language teacher training
programmes. It discusses the degree to which student
teachers are equipped to reflect effectively, the
purpose(s) of reflection within the training programme,
the depth and scope of the reflections that take place,
and the role of emotions in the reflection process.
As a student on English Language teacher training
programmes, I was often asked to reflect on my teaching,
and now, as a teacher trainer on similar programmes, I
find myself asking my own student teachers to do the
same. However, I’ve recently begun to question the
reflection process, including whether student teachers
are given enough guidance on reflection in the first
place. Drawing upon the seminal work of Schön (1983,
1987) on reflective practice and more recently the work
of Farrell (2015) on ‘promoting teacher reflection in
second language teacher education’, issues considered in
this talk include:
• the extent to which student English Language teachers
feel equipped to reflect on their teaching;
• the extent to which student teacher reflection should
focus on the ‘here and now’ of teaching;
• the extent to which student teacher reflection helps
to develop the necessary skills to embark upon and
sustain a career in teaching; and
• the impact of emotions on student teacher reflection.
Among the conclusions reached are that student English
Language teachers’ reflections can often be primarily
concerned with solving their surface-level and immediate
problems in the classroom. If student teachers are to be
encouraged to move beyond this, then there is a need for
greater levels of guidance before and during the
reflection process, for the process itself to be more
clearly defined and structured, and for the emotions
involved in reflective process to be recognised.
Prof.
Yizhong Xu
Nanjing University of
Aeronautics and Astronautics, China
Dr. Yizhong Xu is professor and associate director of
College of Foreign Languages at Nanjing University of
Aeronautics and Astronautics. His research interests
include contrastive studies on Chinese between Foreign
languages and cultures, theoretical linguistics,
cognitive linguistics and experimental phonetics. He was
a visiting scholar at the Institute for Electronic
Science, Hokkaido University and the Department of
Psychology, Lancaster University, UK. He won the second
Prize of Project of Social Science Foundation of Jiangsu
Province in 2021 and was the training subject of “333
high-level Talent Project” of Jiangsu Province. He has
published more than 20 papers in the prestigious
journals, including Contemporary Linguistics, Journal of
Foreign Languages, Chinese Scientific Journal of Hearing
and Speech Rehabilitation, Language Sciences, Studies in
Language and Linguistics, Applied Linguistics, Foreign
Languages and Their Teaching, Journal of Zhejiang
University Science. He was in charge of two projects of
the National Social Science Foundation of China. He is
the assessor and reviewer of the National Social Science
Foundation, the reviewer of Humanities and Social
Science Foundation Projects of the Ministry of
Education, and reviewer of Chinese Teaching in the World
and Language Sciences as well as communication expert in
the graduate dissertation evaluation of China Academic
Degree Center.
Prof.
Donghui He
Whitman College, USA
Professor He received a Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of British Columbia. Before joining the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at Whitman College in 2008, she had taught at Peking University, Vassar College, and the University of Tennessee, where she also served as the Chinese Program Coordinator. Her expertise is in modern and contemporary Chinese culture (literature, cinema, spoken drama, and the Chinese cultural diaspora), comparative literature, eco-criticism, sociolinguistics, and language pedagogy. Professor He has written on Chinese eco-cinema, Sino-Soviet cultural connections, avant-garde theatre, the contemporary Chinese intellectual mainstream, and constructions of the countryside in modern Chinese and English fiction. She is currently completing a book project that explores representations of the natural landscape in Chinese public culture.