Event Programme
Key: Sesson Types
9th Friday Programme
Conference Opening
Opening Plenary: From Alignment to Enablement: Building Learning Ecosystems for Quality Language Education
Quality standards provide guidance for management, CEFR implementation, teaching, and assessment, yet they rarely address how teachers learn to enact these practices. This plenary argues that the missing connection among these perspectives lies in Didagogy—the study of teaching teachers. Drawing on research into teacher learning and a framework of mediational episodes, the session explores how teacher education can become the mechanism through which quality standards are transformed into quality teaching and meaningful learning and assessment that informs management.
Empowered, Supported and Skilled: Rethinking Leadership Sustainability
Eleanor Roosevelt said “Good leaders inspire people to have confidence in their leader. Great leaders inspire people to have confidence in themselves.” Despite today’s volatile environment, educational institutions can survive and thrive if guided by empowered, supported and highly-skilled great leadership teams that create a culture of confidence and self-belief, which is key to successful change management and quality assurance. Thus, the sustainability of effective leadership should be a strategic priority. But how do we encourage a diverse range of people to enter leadership roles in this challenging environment? How do we maximize the chances of success of those chosen to lead? How do we support and develop our leadership team? In this session, Özlem and Mike invite participants to examine the key principles of sustainable leadership to maintain quality. Based on Hargreaves and Fink’s (2006) principles, drawing on findings from their own research and case studies in various contexts, they will explore sustainable leadership practices, with a particular focus on strategies for effectiveness in selection, ways of empowering and supporting leadership teams, and ongoing investment in development. The participants will leave with a framework allowing them to reflect on their own institutional practices to achieve sustainability in leadership.
Why connecting personally matters professionally.
In educational settings driven more and more by timetables, systems and accountability measures, it’s easy for human connection to be overshadowed and relationships to become purely transactional.
Yet work is better, smoother and far more fulfilling when we connect as people, not just roles. This session explores why personal connection is a core leadership capability, reducing friction, strengthening trust and improving collaboration. Through practical examples and small relational shifts, we’ll look at how managers can build stronger partnerships with their teams, create psychological safety and enable people to do their best work.
Reading with a Writer’s Eye: How Literary Devices Enrich Language Learning
When EFL learners encounter a metaphor, a startling juxtaposition, or an unexpected hyperbole, something shifts — language stops being a code to decode and becomes a craft to notice. This session argues that literary devices are not the exclusive territory of literature classes but powerful resources for deepening vocabulary, building stylistic awareness, and developing the nuanced reading that academic life demands.
Drawing on classroom practice from a university English preparatory programme, this session presents a practical framework for teaching six core devices :metaphor, simile, personification, oxymoron, hyperbole, and juxtapositio as language enrichment activities rather than literary analysis tasks. Each device becomes a lens: not “what does this mean?” but “what does this language do, and how does it do it?”
The approach is adaptable from B1 upwards and requires no specialist literature background. Participants will leave with a ready-to-use activity sequence and a set of principles for bringing literary language into any EFL or EAP classroom.
There’s always one! Dealing with difficult people in the workplace.
Is there a jerk at your work? Is there a fool in your school? Is someone a downright pain in the class? Whatever role we have, chances are there’s always at least one difficult person we have to deal with and if you don’t know any difficult people in your school, well, you know what they say…
In this session, we’ll be looking at some practical strategies for interacting with difficult people, whether they be teachers, trainees, students, parents of students, colleagues, or bosses. We’ll explore some of the reasons behind the challenging behaviour and you’ll hopefully leave the session feeling better equipped for dealing with difficult people.
Le voyage IA : du brouillon au quiz, jusqu'au feedback instantané
S’inscrivant dans le thème des pratiques innovantes, La présentatrice de cette session présente une étude de cas réelle sur l’intégration de l’intelligence artificielle (IA) pour soutenir des apprenants diversifiés dans le secteur de l’éducation internationale. La présentation expose un cadre pratique, étape par étape, qui transforme l’apprentissage linguistique à travers trois phases distinctes : l’IA comme assistant à la rédaction, comme générateur de quiz dynamiques, et comme outil de feedback autonome et instantané.
D’abord, l’IA sert d’assistant à la rédaction, aidant les étudiants internationaux à combler leurs lacunes linguistiques et à structurer leurs idées. Ensuite, elle génère des quiz dynamiques pour une participation flexible en classe ou une étude autonome. Enfin, un modèle d’IA personnalisé fournit un feedback instantané et ciblé, permettant aux étudiants de corriger leurs erreurs de manière autonome, sans l’intervention constante de l’enseignant. Crucialement, ce cadre piloté par l’IA est indépendant de la langue enseignée et hautement adaptable à divers contextes éducatifs, allant des départements universitaires aux instituts de langues spécialisés, et s’applique à n’importe quelle langue cible.
Cette session explore une tendance éducative actuelle et majeure, offrant des solutions pratiques et évolutives que les participants pourront immédiatement implémenter au sein de leurs propres institutions. Les participants repartiront avec des stratégies transférables et exploitables pour concevoir des parcours d’apprentissage personnalisés pour des étudiants de divers horizons, transformant le rôle de l’enseignant de correcteur traditionnel à facilitateur stratégique
Making the CEFR Visible: European Language Portfolio with Young Learners
This presentation reports on a 2025 action research investigation exploring the use of the European Language Portfolio (ELP) as a CEFR-aligned assessment tool with Young Learners (ages 9–11).
Developed by the Council of Europe, the ELP promotes learner autonomy through self-assessment, reflection, and evidence-based learning. Despite its strong theoretical foundations and alignment with the CEFR, it remains underused in many Young Learner contexts.
Moving beyond theory, the session highlights classroom applications and key recommendations to strengthen the implementation of the ELP.
Key takeaways include:
- Practical, robust strategies to support Young Learners in self-assessment activities.
- How AI tools can support alignment between syllabus objectives and CEFR “can do” descriptors, enhancing reflective practice.
- Recommendations for adapting descriptors to better reflect Young Learners’ developmental and linguistic needs.
Overall, the presentation offers evidence-informed guidance for teachers, academic managers, and curriculum leaders seeking to implement portfolio assessment effectively in Young Learner classrooms.
Beyond Borders: Practical Leadership in Multi-Country Academic Management
Working in international contexts often pushes academic managers beyond familiar ways of operating, as approaches that feel straightforward in more homogeneous settings can become complex across multiple countries, cultures, and institutional environments. Differences in expectations, communication styles, and operational realities can make established systems feel less predictable in practice.
In this context, academic managers are increasingly responsible for leading teams across diverse settings. While institutional standards remain essential for ensuring coherence and quality, their implementation is often shaped by local interpretation and adaptation. This can create a gap between intended procedures and how they are understood and enacted in different contexts.
This presentation draws on experience leading adult education teams across Black Sea Wider Europe region. It explores how academic management decisions are influenced by contextual variation, and how leaders work with both structure and flexibility when implementing systems and supporting teams in practice.
The session shares practical examples and explore approaches to:
• coordinating academic systems across diverse contexts
• supporting alignment in distributed teams
• fostering inclusive and culturally responsive team cultures
• making context-sensitive leadership decisions in practice
These examples are intended as illustrative rather than prescriptive, recognising that effective academic management depends on situated professional judgement rather than uniform solutions.
Developing Critical Thinking through Integrated Classroom Activities
Critical thinking has increasingly been recognized as a key component of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) contexts. Despite being central in academic success, it is often implicitly expected rather than explicitly taught, creating a gap between curricular aims and classroom practice. This becomes particularly evident in university preparatory programs, where learners are required to move beyond comprehension and demonstrate evaluative and analytical engagement with academic content. Teachers may also find it challenging to move beyond comprehension-based classroom practices and to incorporate activities that genuinely promote higher-order thinking skills.
This session explores practical ways of integrating critical thinking into language teaching through interactive classroom activities. Utilizing examples from an EFL university preparatory context, it illustrates how speaking, reading, writing, and collaborative tasks can be designed to foster analysis, interpretation, and evaluation rather than surface-level understanding. It also presents how such practices can be connected to CEFR-informed learning outcomes and formative assessment principles, ensuring that critical thinking is not an add-on but embedded within course goals and objectives.
Overall, participants will leave with adaptable activity ideas and practical strategies that can be implemented across different teaching contexts and proficiency levels.
Linking CPD, TBLT, CEFR and Assessment
Many teacher development sessions introduce methodology, but teachers may still find it difficult to connect new ideas with CEFR outcomes, classroom teaching, and assessment. This session presents a practical CPD model in which teachers use one authentic material, such as a university event schedule or festival poster, to design a task-based lesson.
The talk shows how academic managers and trainers can guide teachers from task design to language focus, CEFR-related speaking outcomes, and assessment evidence. It also explores how a CPD session itself can model task-based principles, making professional development more experiential and classroom-focused.
Participants will see a sample workshop sequence, a task-design outline, and a simple CEFR-informed assessment checklist. The aim is to demonstrate how teacher development can move beyond theory and become a practical bridge between institutional goals, classroom teaching, and learner performance.
Opening Plenary: From Alignment to Enablement: Building Learning Ecosystems for Quality Language Education
Quality standards provide guidance for management, CEFR implementation, teaching, and assessment, yet they rarely address how teachers learn to enact these practices. This plenary argues that the missing connection among these perspectives lies in Didagogy—the study of teaching teachers. Drawing on research into teacher learning and a framework of mediational episodes, the session explores how teacher education can become the mechanism through which quality standards are transformed into quality teaching and meaningful learning and assessment that informs management.
Empowered, Supported and Skilled: Rethinking Leadership Sustainability
Eleanor Roosevelt said “Good leaders inspire people to have confidence in their leader. Great leaders inspire people to have confidence in themselves.” Despite today’s volatile environment, educational institutions can survive and thrive if guided by empowered, supported and highly-skilled great leadership teams that create a culture of confidence and self-belief, which is key to successful change management and quality assurance. Thus, the sustainability of effective leadership should be a strategic priority. But how do we encourage a diverse range of people to enter leadership roles in this challenging environment? How do we maximize the chances of success of those chosen to lead? How do we support and develop our leadership team? In this session, Özlem and Mike invite participants to examine the key principles of sustainable leadership to maintain quality. Based on Hargreaves and Fink’s (2006) principles, drawing on findings from their own research and case studies in various contexts, they will explore sustainable leadership practices, with a particular focus on strategies for effectiveness in selection, ways of empowering and supporting leadership teams, and ongoing investment in development. The participants will leave with a framework allowing them to reflect on their own institutional practices to achieve sustainability in leadership.
Why connecting personally matters professionally.
In educational settings driven more and more by timetables, systems and accountability measures, it’s easy for human connection to be overshadowed and relationships to become purely transactional.
Yet work is better, smoother and far more fulfilling when we connect as people, not just roles. This session explores why personal connection is a core leadership capability, reducing friction, strengthening trust and improving collaboration. Through practical examples and small relational shifts, we’ll look at how managers can build stronger partnerships with their teams, create psychological safety and enable people to do their best work.
Reading with a Writer’s Eye: How Literary Devices Enrich Language Learning
When EFL learners encounter a metaphor, a startling juxtaposition, or an unexpected hyperbole, something shifts — language stops being a code to decode and becomes a craft to notice. This session argues that literary devices are not the exclusive territory of literature classes but powerful resources for deepening vocabulary, building stylistic awareness, and developing the nuanced reading that academic life demands.
Drawing on classroom practice from a university English preparatory programme, this session presents a practical framework for teaching six core devices :metaphor, simile, personification, oxymoron, hyperbole, and juxtapositio as language enrichment activities rather than literary analysis tasks. Each device becomes a lens: not “what does this mean?” but “what does this language do, and how does it do it?”
The approach is adaptable from B1 upwards and requires no specialist literature background. Participants will leave with a ready-to-use activity sequence and a set of principles for bringing literary language into any EFL or EAP classroom.
There’s always one! Dealing with difficult people in the workplace.
Is there a jerk at your work? Is there a fool in your school? Is someone a downright pain in the class? Whatever role we have, chances are there’s always at least one difficult person we have to deal with and if you don’t know any difficult people in your school, well, you know what they say…
In this session, we’ll be looking at some practical strategies for interacting with difficult people, whether they be teachers, trainees, students, parents of students, colleagues, or bosses. We’ll explore some of the reasons behind the challenging behaviour and you’ll hopefully leave the session feeling better equipped for dealing with difficult people.
Le voyage IA : du brouillon au quiz, jusqu'au feedback instantané
S’inscrivant dans le thème des pratiques innovantes, La présentatrice de cette session présente une étude de cas réelle sur l’intégration de l’intelligence artificielle (IA) pour soutenir des apprenants diversifiés dans le secteur de l’éducation internationale. La présentation expose un cadre pratique, étape par étape, qui transforme l’apprentissage linguistique à travers trois phases distinctes : l’IA comme assistant à la rédaction, comme générateur de quiz dynamiques, et comme outil de feedback autonome et instantané.
D’abord, l’IA sert d’assistant à la rédaction, aidant les étudiants internationaux à combler leurs lacunes linguistiques et à structurer leurs idées. Ensuite, elle génère des quiz dynamiques pour une participation flexible en classe ou une étude autonome. Enfin, un modèle d’IA personnalisé fournit un feedback instantané et ciblé, permettant aux étudiants de corriger leurs erreurs de manière autonome, sans l’intervention constante de l’enseignant. Crucialement, ce cadre piloté par l’IA est indépendant de la langue enseignée et hautement adaptable à divers contextes éducatifs, allant des départements universitaires aux instituts de langues spécialisés, et s’applique à n’importe quelle langue cible.
Cette session explore une tendance éducative actuelle et majeure, offrant des solutions pratiques et évolutives que les participants pourront immédiatement implémenter au sein de leurs propres institutions. Les participants repartiront avec des stratégies transférables et exploitables pour concevoir des parcours d’apprentissage personnalisés pour des étudiants de divers horizons, transformant le rôle de l’enseignant de correcteur traditionnel à facilitateur stratégique
Making the CEFR Visible: European Language Portfolio with Young Learners
This presentation reports on a 2025 action research investigation exploring the use of the European Language Portfolio (ELP) as a CEFR-aligned assessment tool with Young Learners (ages 9–11).
Developed by the Council of Europe, the ELP promotes learner autonomy through self-assessment, reflection, and evidence-based learning. Despite its strong theoretical foundations and alignment with the CEFR, it remains underused in many Young Learner contexts.
Moving beyond theory, the session highlights classroom applications and key recommendations to strengthen the implementation of the ELP.
Key takeaways include:
- Practical, robust strategies to support Young Learners in self-assessment activities.
- How AI tools can support alignment between syllabus objectives and CEFR “can do” descriptors, enhancing reflective practice.
- Recommendations for adapting descriptors to better reflect Young Learners’ developmental and linguistic needs.
Overall, the presentation offers evidence-informed guidance for teachers, academic managers, and curriculum leaders seeking to implement portfolio assessment effectively in Young Learner classrooms.
Beyond Borders: Practical Leadership in Multi-Country Academic Management
Working in international contexts often pushes academic managers beyond familiar ways of operating, as approaches that feel straightforward in more homogeneous settings can become complex across multiple countries, cultures, and institutional environments. Differences in expectations, communication styles, and operational realities can make established systems feel less predictable in practice.
In this context, academic managers are increasingly responsible for leading teams across diverse settings. While institutional standards remain essential for ensuring coherence and quality, their implementation is often shaped by local interpretation and adaptation. This can create a gap between intended procedures and how they are understood and enacted in different contexts.
This presentation draws on experience leading adult education teams across Black Sea Wider Europe region. It explores how academic management decisions are influenced by contextual variation, and how leaders work with both structure and flexibility when implementing systems and supporting teams in practice.
The session shares practical examples and explore approaches to:
• coordinating academic systems across diverse contexts
• supporting alignment in distributed teams
• fostering inclusive and culturally responsive team cultures
• making context-sensitive leadership decisions in practice
These examples are intended as illustrative rather than prescriptive, recognising that effective academic management depends on situated professional judgement rather than uniform solutions.
Developing Critical Thinking through Integrated Classroom Activities
Critical thinking has increasingly been recognized as a key component of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) contexts. Despite being central in academic success, it is often implicitly expected rather than explicitly taught, creating a gap between curricular aims and classroom practice. This becomes particularly evident in university preparatory programs, where learners are required to move beyond comprehension and demonstrate evaluative and analytical engagement with academic content. Teachers may also find it challenging to move beyond comprehension-based classroom practices and to incorporate activities that genuinely promote higher-order thinking skills.
This session explores practical ways of integrating critical thinking into language teaching through interactive classroom activities. Utilizing examples from an EFL university preparatory context, it illustrates how speaking, reading, writing, and collaborative tasks can be designed to foster analysis, interpretation, and evaluation rather than surface-level understanding. It also presents how such practices can be connected to CEFR-informed learning outcomes and formative assessment principles, ensuring that critical thinking is not an add-on but embedded within course goals and objectives.
Overall, participants will leave with adaptable activity ideas and practical strategies that can be implemented across different teaching contexts and proficiency levels.
Linking CPD, TBLT, CEFR and Assessment
Many teacher development sessions introduce methodology, but teachers may still find it difficult to connect new ideas with CEFR outcomes, classroom teaching, and assessment. This session presents a practical CPD model in which teachers use one authentic material, such as a university event schedule or festival poster, to design a task-based lesson.
The talk shows how academic managers and trainers can guide teachers from task design to language focus, CEFR-related speaking outcomes, and assessment evidence. It also explores how a CPD session itself can model task-based principles, making professional development more experiential and classroom-focused.
Participants will see a sample workshop sequence, a task-design outline, and a simple CEFR-informed assessment checklist. The aim is to demonstrate how teacher development can move beyond theory and become a practical bridge between institutional goals, classroom teaching, and learner performance.
10th Saturday Programme
Managing The TikTok Generation (Without Losing Your Mind!)
You can’t lead people the way you were lead. In this practical session, I explore how to manage staff members shaped by short attention spans, strong boundaries and shifting values. Walk away with practical ideas to strengthen team culture, enhance psychological safety, and foster engagement in fast-paced ELT environments.
Practical Ways to Energize Online Language Learning
Online language lessons can easily become passive, tiring, or teacher-centered, especially when learners are expected to stay engaged through a screen. This practical session focuses on simple ways to make online language learning more active, interactive, and enjoyable for learners.
Drawing on classroom experience in online English language teaching, the talk will share practical strategies for energizing virtual lessons without relying on complex tools.
Participants will explore techniques such as engaging warm-ups, collaborative tasks, digital interaction tools and reflection activities. These strategies are designed to increase learner participation, support communicative competence, encourage autonomy, and create a stronger sense of connection in online classes.
Although the examples will mainly come from English language teaching, the ideas can be adapted to different languages, CEFR levels, and educational contexts, including higher education, and language schools. By the end of the session, participants will leave with practical, transferable ideas that they can use to make their own online language lessons more effective, engaging, and enjoyable.
Teaching Interaction Through CEFR-Informed Speaking Assessment
Speaking lessons often focus on fluency, grammar, and vocabulary, while interactional skills such as responding, turn-taking, agreeing, disagreeing, and softening opinions may receive less explicit attention. However, these features are central to successful spoken communication and are reflected in CEFR-related speaking performance.
This session shows how teachers can turn CEFR speaking descriptors into practical classroom targets. Using examples from B1/B2 speaking lessons, the talk demonstrates how learners can notice, practise, and receive feedback on interactional language. The session focuses especially on functional language for agreeing and disagreeing, hedging, responding appropriately, and building on another speaker’s ideas.
Participants will leave with a sample lesson sequence, classroom activities, and a simple CEFR-informed feedback checklist. The aim is to show how speaking assessment can become more closely connected to what is actually taught in class, helping learners understand not only how to speak more fluently, but also how to interact more effectively.
Beyond awareness: inclusive academic management for neurodivergent staff
Neurodiversity is increasingly recognised within educational settings, yet many institutions are still developing practical approaches to supporting neurodivergent colleagues. While awareness has grown, there is often less guidance on how inclusive values can be translated into day-to-day management approaches that are both supportive and operationally sustainable.
This presentation shares a reflective, practice-informed case study from the development of a neurodiversity awareness and support guide within the British Council Spain context. Designed for all staff, the guide aims to support constructive conversations about neurodiversity across the workplace and enable informed support decisions for both employees and managers. It provides practical tools and guidance to support conversations from both perspectives, helping managers and colleagues explore support needs collaboratively.
The presentation will explore how the project moved beyond awareness-raising to focus on inclusive academic management practices, including communication strategies, support conversations, reasonable adjustments, confidentiality, and ongoing review processes. It will also reflect on implementation challenges, including balancing consistency with flexibility, supporting staff without overgeneralising experiences, and aligning inclusion with operational realities.
Participants will leave with practical strategies, reflective insights, and adaptable tools to support neurodivergent staff more effectively within their own educational contexts.
Intelligent AI? Using source-grounded AI to better align Teaching and Assessment with the CEFR, Institutional Policies and Data Protection
How can language institutions bridge the gap between management policies, CEFR standards, classroom delivery, and assessment? The answer may lie in source-grounded AI. This practical session demonstrates how NotebookLM can act as an intelligent facilitator in raising academic standards and utilizing AI tools more effectively, all while safely avoiding their most common pitfalls.
By securely uploading an institution’s specific curricula, CEFR descriptors, and assessment rubrics into a single unified digital notebook, educators and managers can instantly generate aligned lesson plans, automated student study guides, and standardized assessment criteria. Crucially, this closed-loop ecosystem guarantees robust data protection and institutional data ownership, bypassing the inherent privacy dangers and risks of general, open-ended AI models. Through the demonstration of examples, attendees will learn how to successfully utilize this emergent technology to support alignment between teaching, assessment, and the CEFR, and start using this technology.
Because this session is aimed specifically at professionals who are less confident in using such tools, it requires no previous experience with artificial intelligence. Participants will leave with a clear, step-by-step process for setting up their own secure, effective resources using files they already own.
Alliée des apprenants mais ennemie de l'enseignant : la traduction dans l'enseignement du FLE.
La traduction dans l’enseignement du FLE est-elle une condition à la compréhension de la langue ?
Faut-il (savoir) traduire pour s’exprimer avec justesse ?
La traduction a-t-elle (toujours) de l’intérêt ?
La place de la traduction dans l’enseignement du FLE diffère selon les principes pédagogiques appliqués dans les établissements.
Certains l’utilisent pour sécuriser les étudiants, d’autres l’évitent pour les conduire vers une immersion linguistique.
Parlons des techniques d’enseignement efficaces au service de la réussite sans passer par la case traduction.
Leading and Learning: Sustaining CPD in Academic Leadership
Academic managers are often responsible for supporting the development of others while struggling to sustain their own professional learning alongside increasing operational demands. In a rapidly changing educational landscape shaped by evolving frameworks, technologies, assessment practices, and changing teacher needs, maintaining meaningful CPD as a leader can become difficult to sustain in a coherent and intentional way.
This session shares ideas and reflections drawn from ongoing experience in academic leadership and teacher development. It explores practical and sustainable approaches to continuing professional growth as an academic manager, including reflective practice, professional networks, conferences, collaboration, using current technologies, and maintaining connections to classroom realities.
Rather than presenting a formal research project or institutional model, the session invites participants to reflect on the challenges and possibilities of remaining engaged as learners themselves while balancing leadership responsibilities.
Participants will leave with practical ideas for approaching CPD in realistic and sustainable ways, as well as opportunities to reflect on their own professional development within academic management roles.
Next Gen Language Assessment in the classroom: LAPP English v.2,
The Language Assessment Professionalisation Programme (LAPP) an ALTE – Eaquals joint initiative for assessment literacy
How can we disseminate language assessment knowledge and applicable skills to the next generation of practitioners and educators, or to those who currently do not possess such skills? Or who are simply unaware of them? Who might believe that any test is good enough? How can we help language educators upskill?
Eaquals and ALTE set out to answer these strategically fundamental questions and to provide an effective on-line practical course to fill these gaps in assessment literacy.
This presentation will illustrate LAPP: the vision, results, enhancements, new features, currency & recognition, and demonstrate practical applications together with their support materials.
“Practice without theory has no head; theory without practice has no feet”.
LAPP English v.2 is an on-line course and resource pack in Language Assessment Skills offered free-of-charge to all language teachers, trainee or pre-service teachers, teacher trainers, academic managers, and everyone who would like to develop their skills in assessing students’ language proficiency.
Focusing on the basic principles of assessment, LAPP English v.2 offers an introduction to best practice and builds on key competences drawn from the Assessment Competency levels of the European Profiling Grid (EPG) and the ALTE Principles of Good Practice (2020).
It provides participants with the skills needed to design and deliver a test, taking them step-by-step to the intermediate level 2.1 of assessment skills described in the EPG.
As a valuable resource, it also supports independent teachers and assists academic managers in integrating language assessment into their professional development programmes.
It has been fully revised and up-dated by an international panel of experts drawn from Eaquals and ALTE in partnership with mint-digital from Germany.
It is currently available in English for application in any language. LAPP Français is under development.
LAPP is available from the Council of Europe’s ECML in Graz, Eaquals or ALTE, or directly from https://lapp.education/en
Addressing Inherent Needs: Teaching Pronunciation in Multicultural Classrooms
Teaching pronunciation in multilingual classrooms can be challenging. While teachers often adapt grammar, vocabulary, and skills work to suit learners’ levels and needs, pronunciation difficulties are usually influenced by learners’ first languages and personal language backgrounds. In multicultural classes, this means learners may face very different pronunciation challenges, even when they are studying at the same level.
The presentation is based on classroom research carried out as part of a DipTESOL programme and combines current ideas in pronunciation teaching with real classroom experience in communicative English language classrooms, and learner feedback.
The talk will share activities and techniques that have been used successfully with multilingual groups. It will focus on ways to:
- help learners notice important pronunciation differences,
- improve intelligibility and listening skills,
- build learner confidence,
- encourage collaboration between students,
- integrate pronunciation naturally into everyday classroom activities,
- and offer avenues for continuous pronunciation development outside the classroom via digital tools.
This presentation will consider pronunciation teaching from both the teacher’s and learners’ perspectives and will reflect on what learners themselves found useful, engaging, and motivating.
Participants will ideally leave the session with practical ideas, adaptable activities, and greater confidence in approaching pronunciation work in diverse multilingual classrooms.
Managing The TikTok Generation (Without Losing Your Mind!)
You can’t lead people the way you were lead. In this practical session, I explore how to manage staff members shaped by short attention spans, strong boundaries and shifting values. Walk away with practical ideas to strengthen team culture, enhance psychological safety, and foster engagement in fast-paced ELT environments.
Practical Ways to Energize Online Language Learning
Online language lessons can easily become passive, tiring, or teacher-centered, especially when learners are expected to stay engaged through a screen. This practical session focuses on simple ways to make online language learning more active, interactive, and enjoyable for learners.
Drawing on classroom experience in online English language teaching, the talk will share practical strategies for energizing virtual lessons without relying on complex tools.
Participants will explore techniques such as engaging warm-ups, collaborative tasks, digital interaction tools and reflection activities. These strategies are designed to increase learner participation, support communicative competence, encourage autonomy, and create a stronger sense of connection in online classes.
Although the examples will mainly come from English language teaching, the ideas can be adapted to different languages, CEFR levels, and educational contexts, including higher education, and language schools. By the end of the session, participants will leave with practical, transferable ideas that they can use to make their own online language lessons more effective, engaging, and enjoyable.
Teaching Interaction Through CEFR-Informed Speaking Assessment
Speaking lessons often focus on fluency, grammar, and vocabulary, while interactional skills such as responding, turn-taking, agreeing, disagreeing, and softening opinions may receive less explicit attention. However, these features are central to successful spoken communication and are reflected in CEFR-related speaking performance.
This session shows how teachers can turn CEFR speaking descriptors into practical classroom targets. Using examples from B1/B2 speaking lessons, the talk demonstrates how learners can notice, practise, and receive feedback on interactional language. The session focuses especially on functional language for agreeing and disagreeing, hedging, responding appropriately, and building on another speaker’s ideas.
Participants will leave with a sample lesson sequence, classroom activities, and a simple CEFR-informed feedback checklist. The aim is to show how speaking assessment can become more closely connected to what is actually taught in class, helping learners understand not only how to speak more fluently, but also how to interact more effectively.
Beyond awareness: inclusive academic management for neurodivergent staff
Neurodiversity is increasingly recognised within educational settings, yet many institutions are still developing practical approaches to supporting neurodivergent colleagues. While awareness has grown, there is often less guidance on how inclusive values can be translated into day-to-day management approaches that are both supportive and operationally sustainable.
This presentation shares a reflective, practice-informed case study from the development of a neurodiversity awareness and support guide within the British Council Spain context. Designed for all staff, the guide aims to support constructive conversations about neurodiversity across the workplace and enable informed support decisions for both employees and managers. It provides practical tools and guidance to support conversations from both perspectives, helping managers and colleagues explore support needs collaboratively.
The presentation will explore how the project moved beyond awareness-raising to focus on inclusive academic management practices, including communication strategies, support conversations, reasonable adjustments, confidentiality, and ongoing review processes. It will also reflect on implementation challenges, including balancing consistency with flexibility, supporting staff without overgeneralising experiences, and aligning inclusion with operational realities.
Participants will leave with practical strategies, reflective insights, and adaptable tools to support neurodivergent staff more effectively within their own educational contexts.
Intelligent AI? Using source-grounded AI to better align Teaching and Assessment with the CEFR, Institutional Policies and Data Protection
How can language institutions bridge the gap between management policies, CEFR standards, classroom delivery, and assessment? The answer may lie in source-grounded AI. This practical session demonstrates how NotebookLM can act as an intelligent facilitator in raising academic standards and utilizing AI tools more effectively, all while safely avoiding their most common pitfalls.
By securely uploading an institution’s specific curricula, CEFR descriptors, and assessment rubrics into a single unified digital notebook, educators and managers can instantly generate aligned lesson plans, automated student study guides, and standardized assessment criteria. Crucially, this closed-loop ecosystem guarantees robust data protection and institutional data ownership, bypassing the inherent privacy dangers and risks of general, open-ended AI models. Through the demonstration of examples, attendees will learn how to successfully utilize this emergent technology to support alignment between teaching, assessment, and the CEFR, and start using this technology.
Because this session is aimed specifically at professionals who are less confident in using such tools, it requires no previous experience with artificial intelligence. Participants will leave with a clear, step-by-step process for setting up their own secure, effective resources using files they already own.
Alliée des apprenants mais ennemie de l'enseignant : la traduction dans l'enseignement du FLE.
La traduction dans l’enseignement du FLE est-elle une condition à la compréhension de la langue ?
Faut-il (savoir) traduire pour s’exprimer avec justesse ?
La traduction a-t-elle (toujours) de l’intérêt ?
La place de la traduction dans l’enseignement du FLE diffère selon les principes pédagogiques appliqués dans les établissements.
Certains l’utilisent pour sécuriser les étudiants, d’autres l’évitent pour les conduire vers une immersion linguistique.
Parlons des techniques d’enseignement efficaces au service de la réussite sans passer par la case traduction.
Leading and Learning: Sustaining CPD in Academic Leadership
Academic managers are often responsible for supporting the development of others while struggling to sustain their own professional learning alongside increasing operational demands. In a rapidly changing educational landscape shaped by evolving frameworks, technologies, assessment practices, and changing teacher needs, maintaining meaningful CPD as a leader can become difficult to sustain in a coherent and intentional way.
This session shares ideas and reflections drawn from ongoing experience in academic leadership and teacher development. It explores practical and sustainable approaches to continuing professional growth as an academic manager, including reflective practice, professional networks, conferences, collaboration, using current technologies, and maintaining connections to classroom realities.
Rather than presenting a formal research project or institutional model, the session invites participants to reflect on the challenges and possibilities of remaining engaged as learners themselves while balancing leadership responsibilities.
Participants will leave with practical ideas for approaching CPD in realistic and sustainable ways, as well as opportunities to reflect on their own professional development within academic management roles.
Next Gen Language Assessment in the classroom: LAPP English v.2,
The Language Assessment Professionalisation Programme (LAPP) an ALTE – Eaquals joint initiative for assessment literacy
How can we disseminate language assessment knowledge and applicable skills to the next generation of practitioners and educators, or to those who currently do not possess such skills? Or who are simply unaware of them? Who might believe that any test is good enough? How can we help language educators upskill?
Eaquals and ALTE set out to answer these strategically fundamental questions and to provide an effective on-line practical course to fill these gaps in assessment literacy.
This presentation will illustrate LAPP: the vision, results, enhancements, new features, currency & recognition, and demonstrate practical applications together with their support materials.
“Practice without theory has no head; theory without practice has no feet”.
LAPP English v.2 is an on-line course and resource pack in Language Assessment Skills offered free-of-charge to all language teachers, trainee or pre-service teachers, teacher trainers, academic managers, and everyone who would like to develop their skills in assessing students’ language proficiency.
Focusing on the basic principles of assessment, LAPP English v.2 offers an introduction to best practice and builds on key competences drawn from the Assessment Competency levels of the European Profiling Grid (EPG) and the ALTE Principles of Good Practice (2020).
It provides participants with the skills needed to design and deliver a test, taking them step-by-step to the intermediate level 2.1 of assessment skills described in the EPG.
As a valuable resource, it also supports independent teachers and assists academic managers in integrating language assessment into their professional development programmes.
It has been fully revised and up-dated by an international panel of experts drawn from Eaquals and ALTE in partnership with mint-digital from Germany.
It is currently available in English for application in any language. LAPP Français is under development.
LAPP is available from the Council of Europe’s ECML in Graz, Eaquals or ALTE, or directly from https://lapp.education/en
Addressing Inherent Needs: Teaching Pronunciation in Multicultural Classrooms
Teaching pronunciation in multilingual classrooms can be challenging. While teachers often adapt grammar, vocabulary, and skills work to suit learners’ levels and needs, pronunciation difficulties are usually influenced by learners’ first languages and personal language backgrounds. In multicultural classes, this means learners may face very different pronunciation challenges, even when they are studying at the same level.
The presentation is based on classroom research carried out as part of a DipTESOL programme and combines current ideas in pronunciation teaching with real classroom experience in communicative English language classrooms, and learner feedback.
The talk will share activities and techniques that have been used successfully with multilingual groups. It will focus on ways to:
- help learners notice important pronunciation differences,
- improve intelligibility and listening skills,
- build learner confidence,
- encourage collaboration between students,
- integrate pronunciation naturally into everyday classroom activities,
- and offer avenues for continuous pronunciation development outside the classroom via digital tools.
This presentation will consider pronunciation teaching from both the teacher’s and learners’ perspectives and will reflect on what learners themselves found useful, engaging, and motivating.
Participants will ideally leave the session with practical ideas, adaptable activities, and greater confidence in approaching pronunciation work in diverse multilingual classrooms.
11th Sunday Programme
Strategic Planning and Quality Assurance for AI-Responsive Education
The rapid integration of artificial intelligence into higher education is reshaping institutional priorities, educational practices, and quality assurance systems. This presentation explores MEF University’s AI-responsive institutional vision and how it is reflected in strategic planning, particularly within the MEF University School of Foreign Languages, as well as in quality assurance practices across the university.
Diving deeper, the session will focus on how AI-responsive policies and practices both shape and are shaped by student needs, curriculum design, assessment decisions, graduation requirements, and staff development initiatives. Particular attention will be given to the ways institutions can balance innovation with academic integrity and educational quality while ensuring that all stakeholders adapt to emerging challenges.
Drawing on practical examples from higher education and language learning contexts, the session will present adaptable strategies and institutional insights relevant to a wide range of educational settings. Participants will be encouraged to critically evaluate their own institutional readiness and explore actionable approaches to embedding AI-responsive practices into strategic planning and quality assurance processes.
From Alternative to Gold Standard: Online English Language Teaching Professionalised
A far cry from emergency online teaching, live online instruction has evolved into a sophisticated, pedagogically rich mode of learning. What exactly has changed? This talk will answer this question and explore the emergence of a new generation of highly skilled practitioners working in digital environments.
Drawing on contemporary research and professional practice, the talk will also examine the distinctive affordances of virtual classrooms, from real-time interaction and multimodal input to data-informed engagement. Finally, it will address how quality of online teaching can be meaningfully defined, observed, and developed, highlighting frameworks for professional growth for everyone who teaches English online or would like to start.
Breaking the Walls: A Framework for Situated Language Learning
Traditional language teaching often keeps students inside the classroom and separates language learning from the real world where language is actually used. This presentation introduces a “Situational Loop” framework that uses everyday urban spaces, such as parks, as active learning environments.
Rather than treating outdoor learning as a casual add-on, this session offers a structured way to link CEFR-aligned learning goals with real-life contexts. I will share a simple but practical toolkit built around three stages: preparing before the activity, carrying it out in the real world, and reflecting afterwards.
Attendees will see how this approach can move learners beyond textbook tasks and into more meaningful language use. We will look at how it supports vocabulary development, deduction, and reasoning at different levels from A1 to C1. By the end of the session, participants will have a framework they can use to design their own activities and bring the outside world into language learning in a purposeful way.
From Induction to Growth: Building a Sustainable Buddy System
What does it take to support a teacher not just through their first weeks, but across their entire professional journey? This session presents a buddy system designed and implemented at Istanbul Nişantaşı University’s Foreign Languages Department, a model built to address one of the most persistent challenges in academic management: how to sustain meaningful teacher support from day one through long-term professional growth.
The system is built around a deliberate choice of framing: a buddy relationship rather than a mentoring one, reflecting an institutional culture where support flows horizontally. Over one academic year, the buddy’s role evolves from guiding induction to supporting daily professional responsibilities and connecting new teachers to the wider institutional support network. The human support is complemented by a suite of AI tools, including purpose-built GPTs and avatar companions, designed with the same facilitative philosophy: accessible, non-judgmental, and available whenever teachers need them.
Participants will leave with a transferable framework covering stage-by-stage role progression and AI integration strategies, practical tools for any institution seeking to build a sustainable culture of teacher support. Although developed in a Turkish university EFL context, the model is designed to be adaptable across different languages, institutional structures, and educational settings.
See, Prompt, Align: AI and Visual Literacy for CEFR-Referenced Task Design
What happens when you combine a well-crafted AI prompt with a purposefully generated image? If you know what you are doing, you get a task that fits your learners, references a CEFR level, and opens up exactly the language you intend to teach or assess. This session is about learning to do precisely that and building the prompting habits that get you there more reliably.
Drawing on classroom-tested materials from university preparatory and in-service teacher training contexts, the presenter introduces CREATE prompting (Context, Role, Explicit Task, Audience, Tone, Examples/Extras) as a design scaffold for generating both visual stimuli and the language tasks that surround them. Together, participants explore key questions that sit at the heart of CEFR-referenced design: Which CEFR level does this image serve? How well does the task align with CEFR can-do descriptors? Does it target production, interaction, or mediation as defined in the CEFR Companion Volume? Where does the AI fall short of CEFR expectations in terms of cognitive demand and linguistic complexity, and what does a human editor need to do?
Participants leave with a CREATE prompt recipe card covering five task types, namely description, prediction, comparison, discussion, and creative writing, each with CEFR-level guidance they can experiment with independently after the session.
Sustainability in the Classroom – Projects & Practices
Conference Closing
Strategic Planning and Quality Assurance for AI-Responsive Education
The rapid integration of artificial intelligence into higher education is reshaping institutional priorities, educational practices, and quality assurance systems. This presentation explores MEF University’s AI-responsive institutional vision and how it is reflected in strategic planning, particularly within the MEF University School of Foreign Languages, as well as in quality assurance practices across the university.
Diving deeper, the session will focus on how AI-responsive policies and practices both shape and are shaped by student needs, curriculum design, assessment decisions, graduation requirements, and staff development initiatives. Particular attention will be given to the ways institutions can balance innovation with academic integrity and educational quality while ensuring that all stakeholders adapt to emerging challenges.
Drawing on practical examples from higher education and language learning contexts, the session will present adaptable strategies and institutional insights relevant to a wide range of educational settings. Participants will be encouraged to critically evaluate their own institutional readiness and explore actionable approaches to embedding AI-responsive practices into strategic planning and quality assurance processes.
From Alternative to Gold Standard: Online English Language Teaching Professionalised
A far cry from emergency online teaching, live online instruction has evolved into a sophisticated, pedagogically rich mode of learning. What exactly has changed? This talk will answer this question and explore the emergence of a new generation of highly skilled practitioners working in digital environments.
Drawing on contemporary research and professional practice, the talk will also examine the distinctive affordances of virtual classrooms, from real-time interaction and multimodal input to data-informed engagement. Finally, it will address how quality of online teaching can be meaningfully defined, observed, and developed, highlighting frameworks for professional growth for everyone who teaches English online or would like to start.
Breaking the Walls: A Framework for Situated Language Learning
Traditional language teaching often keeps students inside the classroom and separates language learning from the real world where language is actually used. This presentation introduces a “Situational Loop” framework that uses everyday urban spaces, such as parks, as active learning environments.
Rather than treating outdoor learning as a casual add-on, this session offers a structured way to link CEFR-aligned learning goals with real-life contexts. I will share a simple but practical toolkit built around three stages: preparing before the activity, carrying it out in the real world, and reflecting afterwards.
Attendees will see how this approach can move learners beyond textbook tasks and into more meaningful language use. We will look at how it supports vocabulary development, deduction, and reasoning at different levels from A1 to C1. By the end of the session, participants will have a framework they can use to design their own activities and bring the outside world into language learning in a purposeful way.
From Induction to Growth: Building a Sustainable Buddy System
What does it take to support a teacher not just through their first weeks, but across their entire professional journey? This session presents a buddy system designed and implemented at Istanbul Nişantaşı University’s Foreign Languages Department, a model built to address one of the most persistent challenges in academic management: how to sustain meaningful teacher support from day one through long-term professional growth.
The system is built around a deliberate choice of framing: a buddy relationship rather than a mentoring one, reflecting an institutional culture where support flows horizontally. Over one academic year, the buddy’s role evolves from guiding induction to supporting daily professional responsibilities and connecting new teachers to the wider institutional support network. The human support is complemented by a suite of AI tools, including purpose-built GPTs and avatar companions, designed with the same facilitative philosophy: accessible, non-judgmental, and available whenever teachers need them.
Participants will leave with a transferable framework covering stage-by-stage role progression and AI integration strategies, practical tools for any institution seeking to build a sustainable culture of teacher support. Although developed in a Turkish university EFL context, the model is designed to be adaptable across different languages, institutional structures, and educational settings.
See, Prompt, Align: AI and Visual Literacy for CEFR-Referenced Task Design
What happens when you combine a well-crafted AI prompt with a purposefully generated image? If you know what you are doing, you get a task that fits your learners, references a CEFR level, and opens up exactly the language you intend to teach or assess. This session is about learning to do precisely that and building the prompting habits that get you there more reliably.
Drawing on classroom-tested materials from university preparatory and in-service teacher training contexts, the presenter introduces CREATE prompting (Context, Role, Explicit Task, Audience, Tone, Examples/Extras) as a design scaffold for generating both visual stimuli and the language tasks that surround them. Together, participants explore key questions that sit at the heart of CEFR-referenced design: Which CEFR level does this image serve? How well does the task align with CEFR can-do descriptors? Does it target production, interaction, or mediation as defined in the CEFR Companion Volume? Where does the AI fall short of CEFR expectations in terms of cognitive demand and linguistic complexity, and what does a human editor need to do?
Participants leave with a CREATE prompt recipe card covering five task types, namely description, prediction, comparison, discussion, and creative writing, each with CEFR-level guidance they can experiment with independently after the session.
Sustainability in the Classroom – Projects & Practices
Conference Closing
