IATEFL 2015: a busy conference season

So the ELT conference season is upon us and I've just spent the Easter weekend at my desk finalizing three conference sessions I'm going to be presenting in the next couple of weeks; two at IATEFL in Manchester, and one the following weekend at the BALEAP conference in Leicester. 

I've been colour-coding my sessions to try and keep them separate in my own head, so here's what's coming up:

Date: 10 April
Event: MaWSIG PCE, IATEFL Manchester
Room: Exchange 11
Time: 15.00 - 15.30
Colour coding: orange (to be publisher-neutral!)

Outline: With a background in lexicography, I’m very familiar with corpus tools and find them invaluable when I’m writing all kinds of ELT materials. This session will focus on practical ways in which corpus tools can be useful to an ELT materials writer. It will look at things like finding authentic examples, finding answers to tricky language problems, checking collocations, complementation patterns etc. and just looking for inspiration. It will also take a brief look at different types of corpora (those owned by publishers, publicly available, specialist and build-your- own) and how writers can access them.

Date: 11 April
Event: IATEFL Manchester
Room: Charter 1
Time: 15.05 - 15.35
Colour coding: red (for Collins) and turquoise (for the COBUILD dictionary)


    

Outline: As modern learner's dictionaries continue to evolve, we need to keep our referencing skills up-to-date. This session provides practical ideas for learners and teachers to fully exploit the latest COBUILD Advanced Learner's Dictionary, online and digital dictionaries to aid vocabulary learning and introduces the new Collins Corpus, a unique reference tool for teachers and source of authetic examples.

Looking forward to catching up with lots of folks in Manchester!

I'll post details of my BALEAP session (green and pink!) next week ...