ABSTRACTS VOLUME 4 ISSUE 3

Alexandra Green holds an MA in the Management of Language Learning; TESOL and a BA Joint Honours in French and Italian, with German as a subsidiary.
Alexandra has been involved in foreign language teaching for the past 20 years, primarily in Greece, and she is currently the Academic Director of EUROGNOSI SA, a large chain of foreign language schools operating in Greece, Cyprus and Romania. In this capacity, her primary responsibilities include teacher assessment and recruitment, teacher training, presenting at global events and evaluating and subsequently implementing new technologies in the syllabus.
Alexandra is a Speaking examiner and Team Leader for the Cambridge Assessment English examinations, a Lead Trainer at ALS Delta House and the author of a number of ELT Skills, Grammar and writing books, in cooperation with Heinle/National Geographic ELT and Hamilton House ELT. She is a member of the Cambridge English presenter team.

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SUMMARY

Despite the challenging nature of 2020 owing to the Covid-19 pandemic, the 2nd International Conference on Language Education and research went off with a bang and managed to inspire all involved in this illuminating annual conference, where delegates from over twenty different countries and five continents, comprising academics, researchers, students and educators, gather to voice their opinions, share presentations and project research findings.
Hosted and meticulously organised by the Academic Institution Applied Language Studies House, this year’s conference was held exclusively online and was aptly entitled New Challenges for the 21st century in ELT.
In order to whet participants’ appetite, the conference kicked off with a pre-conference event, opened by Dr Paschalis Chliaras, chairman of ALS House, and participants enjoyed presentations by Roxanne Holly Padley, from the University of Salerno, Italy, who discussed student motivation and performance issues in today’s classroom owing to Covid-19 and Alistair Barnes, ALS House, who focused on Discourse Management issues in learner Writing.
Dr Eleni Agathopoulou, plenary speaker and Associate Professor in Applied Linguistics at the School of English Language and Literature, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, opened the first day of the conference and engaged the audience during her presentation on Corrective feedback in the EFL classroom. Dr Agathopoulou passed the baton to Plenary Speaker Professor David Crystal, who gave an enlightening speech on New challenges: the role of Pragmatics.
An amalgamation of presentations ensued; participants relished in speeches including the role of English as a global language, Academic English, vocabulary teaching and the development of expository writing skills and then took a well-earned lunch break, after which they eagerly awaited the afternoon sessions. The latter touched on topics such as learning in the virtual classroom, language assessment, task-based grammar, inquiry-based learning, parental involvement and error analysis but to name a few, and the much-anticipated Q & A sessions provided speakers with the opportunity to delve deeper into their topics and further share their knowledge.
62 Journal of Applied Languages and Linguistics Volume 4 Issue 3 / December 2020
© Applied Language Studies House Publications 2020 – The contents of this publication may not be reproduced without the written
permission of the copyright holder
Bring on day two, was, I am sure, the thought occupying participants’ mind and so the day began with a truly remarkable and thought-provoking presentation by plenary speaker Scott Thornbury, Twenty years of ‘grammar McNuggets’. A wide array of topics was to follow, some of which are the sign of the times, namely; Education for Refugees and Migrants, the impact of immersion and non-immersion, CALL, the evaluation of mobile apps in language instruction and game-based teaching.
Yet there was far more to come. The day culminated in Plenary Speaker Professor Douglas Biber taking the floor, so to speak, in order to deliver a presentation entitled Complexity in academic writing: The development of phrasal discourse styles, and it is during this speech that everyone involved in this conference had the pleasure of indulging in a gripping interchange between two of the Keynote speakers, Scott Thornbury and Douglas Biber. Thornbury asked for an example of nominalization and after contemplating whether or not this was a trick question, Biber went on to explain that a prime example is a modifier, adding that he uses nominalization in a morphological sense. An interesting exchange of ideas ensued, ensuring maximum engagement for the audience.
Suffice it to say that after this grand finale, there is one phrase we can safely say is at the tip of our tongues; bring on the 3rd International Conference on Language Education and research.
Congratulations ALS House on organising a truly vibrant, educational conference and well done to all delegates for their truly informative presentations that afforded participants with further insights into this field.
Till we meet again!