2004 Conference of English for International Purposes

On Saturday, we were all supposed to present our conference talks. Actually, we were supposed to have presented the day before, but when our plane got delayed, we missed the whole first day of the conference, leading to much rescheduling and confusion. It ended up getting sorted out though, leaving us all to present on Saturday afternoon.

First, though, we went to listen to Eva's talk on intercultural communication, her specialty. She had a lot of information to cover, and since she really organized the conference with her former students in mind, I think she spent most of the time really talking to them, because they were all smiling and nodding, and the rest of us were trying to sort out where she was. After her talk, there was a coffee break, followed by another plenary by a Dr. Wu. Dr. Wu, it was reported to me later, talked about curriculum design and how teaching to the test affects students and teachers. I'm rather sorry I didn't go to his talk, as Lee reports he was brilliant, but I had to work on my own talk, since I hadn't done it on the plane.

After lunch, it was time for our American "expert" group to give our talks. We were in different rooms all over the building in two different time slots. My talk was scheduled for the second time slot, so during the first one, I had a pick of Gina's talk on popular American TV shows, Pat T.'s talk on small group facilitation, or Lee's talk on social achievement in middle and high school students. I figured Gina was stealing enough audience members from other people already, what with this being a media college and all, so I went up to the fourth floor. I ended up at Lee's talk because it was the room I found first, and it ended up being an interesting discussion. The room was full of big armchairs instead of desks or a meeting table, so it had a rather informal atmosphere. The Chinese teachers were eager to talk, so the session actually went over the allotted time.

I dashed upstairs to my assigned room on the 5th floor. The room turned out to be at the very end of the hall, so it was kind of hard to find, and there was no moderator or anyone there. I'm not sure if they forgot I was there, or if I wasn't considered important enough to need a moderator. I did end up with 5 Chinese teachers, but for the first 15 minutes, there was only me and Lee, who was returning the favor of attending my presentation. Things in China don't really run on time very often. I think my talk went pretty well. I was talking about teaching English wholistically, as opposed to the skills-based approach taken in most of Asia (and at MSU), and several of the teachers had questions at the end about how to implement this kind of approach in their own system. I think it went pretty well, because they all seemed interested and agreed with a lot of the points.

On Sunday, we had one plenary talk, which was supposed to be about the new TOEFL, but wasn't really. After that, we had a final panel discussion, where all the Michigan people went through a brief summary of what their talks had been about. This seemed to impress a lot of the people in the audience, because ever since the conference finished, Eva and her co-coordinator, Qian, have been getting lots of calls inviting us to other universities. The panel was followed by final remarks and the awarding of 3 lifetime professorships to Eva, Joan Morley, and Pat P. This was of course followed by an extended round of Asian group photos, and then we were finally herded over to a different building's cafeteria for a final banquet, which indeed offered us far, far too much food than we could possibly eat.