English for Academic Purposes, Saturday, 5th April 2014
On April 5, 2014, the PUT Centre of Languages and Communication along with SERMO (Association of Academic Foreign Language Teaching Centres) and Cambridge University Press organized a mini-conference entitled "English for Academic Purposes”. The conference held at the PUT Lecture Centre was divided into two parts. The guest speaker in the first half was Professor Martin Hewings, Senior Lecturer at the University of Birmingham, where he is involved in teaching English for Academic Purposes and in research on ESP teaching. Professor Hewings delivered two lectures:
Using online resources for EAP materials development: the importance of teacher expertise;
What makes the grammar of academic English different? From research to classroom practice.
After the lunch break, the next guest speaker was Professor Krystyna Droździał-Szelest from Adam Mickiewicz University. Her lecture was on: "English as an International Language/ Lingua Franca: some implications for teaching”.
More than 230 participants were not only able to listen to interesting and inspiring lectures, which undoubtedly contributed greatly to the art of learning and teaching, but could also ask questions concerning various issues of foreign language teaching. The participants were mostly academic teachers from all over Poland.
Helena Paczuska, ELT Sales Manager, Cambridge University Press, spoke at the beginning of the conference, briefly presenting the publisher and its latest publications.
The Omnibus Bookshop ran a stall with the latest language teaching publications offered at reduced prices. The conference ended with a prize draw funded by Cambridge University Press awarding five books to participants who had submitted completed questionnaires.
These short questionnaires clearly showed that the conference was a great success and the subject matter as well as the high professional qualifications of the speakers were duly appreciated. Therefore, it was decided that such mini-conferences should become a permanent fixture in the calendar - a decision which was enthusiastically acknowledged by all the participants.