Write up about the Conference
The UNESCO’s Millennium Goal Education for All which seeks to eradicate illiteracy, if viewed in the context of today’s Globalization and Information Communication Technology (ICT) age, point to the need for one to be multi-lingual – literate in at least three languages: his own tribal language for a sense of identity as a member of his tribe, his country’s national language for unity with his countrymen, and English, today’s global language for modernity. Moreover in the ICT age, literacy is now expanded to encompass digital literacy which calls for the use of technological tools to send and search for information in the internet and communicate with others online in cyberspace.
The 21st Century skills that schools are tasked to develop include among other things creativity, problem solving, critical thinking, decision making and learning in order to develop learner autonomy; collaboration and communication to enable one to work harmoniously with others; Information and Communication Technology to develop ICT literacy; and citizenship, life and career, personal and social responsibility to enable one to live in the present technological age.
With the Millennium Goal of Education in mind and the 21st Century skills needed to attain that goal, the Philippine Association of Language Teaching (PALT) Inc. sees the need to examine the innovative means taken to meet the demands of those thrusts.
As such it has chosen Tradition and Innovation in Language Education as its theme for the 2013 Pan-Asian Conference.
Conference Topics
- Mother tongue-based multi-lingual education (MTB-MLE) in the K-12 curriculum
- World Englishes
- Translation
- Use of multi-media, multi-level and multi-text types to develop functional literacy
- Multi-tasks and strategy training for learner autonomy
- Interactive and collaborative tasks to develop oral communication skills
- Face-to-face and online computer-assisted language learning
- Extrospective and introspective measures to evaluate language proficiency
- Top-down discourse approach to develop reading and writing skills
- Shifting from the traditional goal-centered input-based education (IBE) approach to the learner-centered outcome-based education (OBE) in designing language plans and programs
- Language education policies in multi-lingual societies
- Classroom and action research
- Innovative language teacher education programs
