Before Fulbright, I didn't have a lot of experience speaking at conferences. It was actually something that I thought was a big weakness in my application for the Distinguished Teacher Award, because they wanted a list of your previous presentations. But in the last two months, I have made formal presentations at four professional meetings in two different countries, and I think they went well. I was comfortable doing them, at least. The first was at a symposium for doctoral students from all over Morocco at a university in the coastal city of El Jadida. I was actually the keynote speaker on Friday! I shared my observations regarding the speaking ability in foreign languages of Moroccan students compared to American students, and I got a lot of valuable feedback from the attendees about the differences here of public and private schools, rural and city schools, and written and spoken language skills. This really helped me focus my further research, and a couple of the doctoral students from the conference, who are teachers by day, invited me to come to their schools and learn more.
The second conference was in Konin, Poland in the first week of May. It was entitled: Speaking in a Foreign Language: from Controlled Production to Spontaneous Conversation. As you can tell probably from that title, it was right up my alley, though I think I was the only public school teacher in attendance, and one of two Americans (three if you count the husband of one the plenary speakers). It mostly for university linguists-- and boy did I love it! It was so exciting to be back in the world of research into language-learning and applied linguistics, and it was a confirmation for me that it really is time to start my own doctoral program. At that conference, I spoke about the movement in US secondary language classes to a focus on communicative competence rather than learning vocabulary and grammar as independent entities, and on student assessment via spontaneous conversation. I made some wonderful personal connections with other attendees there, and hope to keep in touch with them and their research. The third talk was at the 24th Annual Moroccan Studies Symposium. I delivered a talk entirely about the findings of my research here, and suggested some hypotheses about the reasons for the trends I was seeing. There was a "discussant" who came to the symposium to share his professional opinions about my work. This was Youssef Nait-Belaid, a high-level administrator in the Academie in Marrakech (essentially, I think, he's a superintendent of the public school system), who holds a PhD himself from the Sorbonne, and who has been studying these issues for quite a while. He was immensely helpful to me in the pursuit of my research, and I was so humbled that he came to Rabat for the symposium. I was also so grateful to hear about the work of some of the other Fulbrighters-- like Mark Dressman whom I had not really met yet-- and whose work was in some very similar fields to my own. Again, I was inspired by the opportunity to collaborate with them both now and in the future ( incha Allah!) Finally, I gave a talk to the English teachers of the Salé school district. There were about 40 of them gathered for a professional development meeting, and I talked about both my research findings-- and congratulated them as representatives of all the Moroccan teachers whom I observed--- about the great strengths that I saw in the teaching of spoken foreign languages here. I also talked about the challenges of teaching differently now, in the age of global connectedness and social media, than the ways that might have been effective in the past. I pulled on a lot of information that I had learned by attending a fifth conference ( at which I did not speak) of the Moroccan Association of Teachers of English in March, which was called "Reforming Teacher Education and Training in Times of Change". One thing that struck me at that conference was just how similar are the challenges for teachers in all countries as we deal with the intersections of the internet, technology, and global competence requirements. Again, I was gratified that the feedback that I received in Salé was positive, that some of the teachers are interested in remaining professionally connected, and that they affirmed that I was on the right track with my observations, interpretations, and hypotheses. Had time allowed, there were two other schools where I was invited to speak to students, but the school year and my grant time just ran out before we could find dates that would work. I am quite disappointed about that. But I am ready to take my Conference Presentation Skills on the road in the USA!
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Marcie StutzmanTeacher, Researcher, Adventurer, Explorer; Maybe crazy; Possibly too old for this Archives
October 2018
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