13th - 14th June 2008
St Stithians College, Randburg, South Africa

Conference Overview

The APSAL Conference is inspired by the challenges facing teachers of African languages, especially those who teach these as Additional Languages.

The conference offers a forum for the teachers of African languages to participate in a professional exchange of knowledge and skills related to the teaching of additional languages. Teachers will be given the opportunity to establish relationships amongst themselves and share ideas. They will also learn innovative teaching strategies and be exposed to various teaching and resource materials.

The conference aims to motivate teachers by sharing good professional practices, based on research, to help delegates grow and succeed in their efforts of teaching and learning. Over 200 teachers, from the nine provinces, are expected to attend. They will have the opportunity to learn from speakers through presentations and workshops.

Tessa was invited to present a paper at the conference. See her abstract below.

Abstract for paper presented by Tessa Dowling

BRING ACTION BACK TO LANGUAGE LEARNING

One of the best ways of teaching children a new language is to get them to perform, to do, the actions represented by the new vocabulary. Whereas language teachers used to concentrate on naming objects (nouns), this strategy places more emphasis on actions (verbs). This approach also encourages play, and the more learners play with language, the more they are going to learn. As James J Asher (the Total Physical Response expert in language teaching) suggests "Encourage your students to doodle with the language... Working the daily assignments is not enough. Students need to play with the language like a toy." (Asher, J: How to become a prize-winning language instructor on http://www.tpr-world.com/). In this paper I will look at ways in which we can encourage African language learners to act while learning and to play while working.