The Literature in Language Teaching Special Interest Group is very happy to announce that we, along with the help of the Extensive Reading SIG, the C-Group, and Pilgrims English Language Courses will be sponsoring Jane Spiro as a featured speaker at JALT 2015 in Shizuoka City.
Dr. Jane Spiro has been an active member of the ELT community for 35 years, directing language, literature and teacher development programs in England, Switzerland, Poland and Hungary. She is currently a member of the C-Group, dedicated to the idea that creativity can be reinforced in ELT through collective action. She has taught English to asylum-seekers newly arrived in the UK; retrained Russian teachers in Hungary supporting the replacement of Russian with English in the Hungarian school curriculum; and run programmes on teacher development, literature and language, creative writing, academic literacies, and materials writing worldwide, including in the Netherlands, Mexico, Japan, Kenya, China and India.
Her publications include two books on creative writing pedagogy with Oxford University Press Creative Poetry Writing (2004) and Storybuilding (2007) adopted by language teachers in Malaysia, Ireland, Finland, Sweden, Croatia and Japan. Creative Poetry Writing is considered an essential text for teachers using the medium of poetry and poetry writing in a second language classroom.
In 2010 Dr. Spiro won a National Teaching Fellowship for her international recognition in bringing creativity and creative writing into the language curriculum.
Jane will be joining both the ER SIG colloquium and the LiLT SIG forum at the conference as well as giving two workshops which we are happy to announce here:
Writing mirrors: teacher-writers & learner-writers (90 minute featured speaker workshop)
This session suggests a scaffolded approach to the language learner’s journey from appreciative reader to reflective writer. A teaching cycle is explained, informed by Dr. Spiro’s ‘real-life’ processes as a creative writer. The session explores how this teaching cycle enabled learners to develop their own writing to arrive at something of significance. The workshop ends by developing the principle that writing processes effective for the teacher can also be effective for their learners.
Pinning down the butterfly: assessing creativity (60 minute workshop)
This session looks at creative writing as part of a language programme and asks: can ‘creativity’ be assessed and can assessment be ‘creative’. It will share examples of student writing and ways of assessing these, so processes are transparent, objective and meaningful to learners. The session will demonstrate that assessment can be a creative opportunity, and will share examples of what this means in practice for both teachers and learners.
