Computational thinking and coding have become part of the educational curriculum in many schools. But what about learning to code in English? Definitely possible! In this session I will be discussing the difference between computational thinking and coding and their place in the language classroom, in line with problem-based methodologies. The session will continue with basic concepts that can be introduced with young learners (8 year-olds onwards), and practical examples of playful and game-like tasks that learners can carry out using the free online coding programme 'Scratch' and the 'Micro:bit' programmable card. The features of these programming options will be shown, and the tasks showcased will be sequenced in order of complexity, according to the coding concepts involved.

The initial tasks on 'Scratch' will include animating text and characters, in order to create simple visuals and then stories, and coding simple games and musical sequences. As the learners gradually acquire coding skills, the next set of tasks will be using the Micro:bit card to code objects for application projects, like a dice, a sound warning, a poll and a moisture sensor. As we showcase each task, we will dive into the code itself as much as possible.

By the end of the session, participants will have become familiar with coding options that can easily be used in the classroom, ways of making coding relevant for language learning, and meaningful task ideas and samples of students’ work.

With classes now switching between online environments and face-to-face settings, teachers need a variety of activities that work in both situations. This presentation will show how to create interactive listening activities that can be used as paper and digital activities and can be used online or in class. Attendees will get a hands on approach on how to create their own activities and also access 100s of free audio materials online. Attendees can also learn how to adapt materials to fit their teaching needs. The presentation will focus on using Google Slides, Google Forms, and Microsoft PowerPoint for creating engaging listening tasks and puzzles that can work on a variety of listening skills. Teachers will also learn how to create task templates that make creating new activities easy and efficient. Some emphasis will also be given to creating listening activities for mobile devices. Finally, the presentation will give some insight to successful task design, and how to make tasks fun and intuitive.

This workshop will provide you with a variety of research approaches, methodologies and instruments to help you understand the effect that your teaching with games is having on your students and their learning. Together, first, we’ll look at some typical (now stale) game-based language teaching projects and pull out and examine the thermometer(s) that were used. We’ll scowl angrily and “tut-tut” condescendingly at all the vocabulary tests and surveys about motivation or opinions from students and teachers. Next, we’ll gleefully break out the really cool research projects and research thermometers that we will borrow from the Ludic Language Pedagogy community kitchen. We’ll all “ooo and aah” at the mounds of shiny stuff: concept maps, gameplay transcriptions, debriefing sequences, stimulated recall protocols, student-created “best play” videos, evidence-driven reflections, textual and media analysis, ethnographic gameplay fieldnotes, transfer tasks, carefully chosen/created tests, open-ended interviews, and whatever else we can grab before the conference. You’ll receive on-the-spot training about how each gadget works (what questions it can answer and how best to use it) and learn how to stick a bunch of these things all over and in your Ludic Language Pedagogy (before, during, after, post) in order to clearly and comfortably get a hi-definition image of what effect your methods, materials and mediation (MMM!) have on your students and their learning. You’ll leave the talk/workshop with as many thermometers as you can cram into your inventory, and be ready to go back to your classroom. You will be able to use these tools to evaluate how well your own LLP is cooking and to make minor tweaks to it (iterate! try your recipe again!) the next time around (ala “good teaching” or action research) and you’ll be able to use the information and skills to more formally research your teaching and submit your projects to conferences and journals interested in teaching with games (*cough* https://llpjournal.org/ *cough*).

This workshop will explore potential uses of Twine, an open-source platform for creating non-linear stories, in the foreign language classroom. Non-linear storytelling and interactive fiction can help teachers to create a playful and immersive learning environment, which allows learners to gain the same benefits as reading traditional narratives, but with added agency over the direction of the story and interaction with the narrative. These additional elements have been shown to increase the motivation of students to read, and can be used to facilitate discussion, critical thinking, and decision making that is not easily accommodated through the passive reading of traditional narratives. Learning how to create non-linear stories with a platform such as Twine can therefore provide educationalists with a new, easy to use, and effective tool to create immersive exercises for their classes.

Participants in this workshop will gain a basic knowledge of Twine, its limitations, the possibilities it offers, and some of its potential uses in the classroom. They will be guided through the basics of creating non-stories with Twine and will start to create their own simple non-linear story using the platform. Following completion of the workshop participants will have acquired the skills to begin developing new resources for their own classes with Twine and the knowledge to guide students through the use of the platform.

Participants do not require a knowledge of Twine or its markup language (Harlowe) since the workshop is aimed at those with little to no knowledge of the platform and limited knowledge of digital methodologies and paedologies more generally. Those wishing to attend will need access to a computer during the workshop and should have either downloaded Twine beforehand (https://twinery.org/) or be able to access the online version during the workshop.

Transcription and translation: two tools that help foster a more inclusive classroom experience for different types of learners but more importantly create a more effective and engaging classroom environment. The presenter discusses he setups, maintains and conducts an English language class using speech-to-text technology and real-time translation in both online and face-to-face settings. We will also cover the reasoning, strengths & limitations of this technology and have a refresher on speaking best practices. Participants are asked to install PowerPoint and Google Translate, have a Bluetooth or regular microphone ready as they will be trying it themselves.

Both learners and educators are increasingly looking to technology to enrich the learning process. In this session, we will see how extra online practice activities can be used to increase exposure to English and learner agency, as well as introducing the benefits of a flipped classroom approach. We will also look at teacher tools, such as learning management systems and classroom presentation software, which allow educators to plan, teach, assign, track and assess their learners and are now accessible in one place through the Oxford English Hub.

Lexical diversity (LD) has been shown to correlate strongly with the scores learners received on their L2 written compositions (e.g., Crossley & McNamara, 2011; Monteiro, Crossley, & Kyle, 2020; Henriksen & Danelund, 2016) as well as with their spoken proficiency (Clenton, et al. 2020; De Jong, Groenhout, Schoonen, & Hulstijn, 2013). For this reason, measures of lexical diversity are often used as a general-purpose measure of learners' spoken and written language (Malvern et al. 2004) or as tools for measuring the complexity of learner-produced texts at the lexical level (Housen et al. 2012).

However, despite the usefulness of lexical diversity, there are several issues related to the use of lexical diversity in language research, including what measures of lexical diversity to use (Jarvis, 2013), the relationship between lexical diversity and text length (Treffers-Daller et al., 2018), and the differences that may exist when measuring lexical diversity from learners of different language backgrounds or levels of linguistic proficiency (Zenkera & Kyle, 2021). Furthermore, the online tools available for measuring lexical diversity (for example, Text Inspector), while useful, can be difficult to use when trying to compare different measures of lexical diversity across multiple texts.

This workshop is aimed to help researchers address this problem by introducing participants to the theoretical foundations behind the different measures of lexical diversity and having them begin to measure lexical diversity themselves using both R and Python. Participants will first learn how to import, clean, and measure texts for lexical diversity using R and RStudio. This includes learning how to: import and prepare the texts, analyze texts using different measures of lexical diversity, and export the results of these measures for use in subsequent statistical analysis. The presentation will finish with a brief introduction as to how a similar analysis can be done using Python, and the packages that exist in this language to prepare and process texts for lexical diversity. It is hoped that at the end of the workshop, participants will have a basic understanding of how these tools can be used in their own research contexts.

Participants will learn how to: Install and load a library into RStudio, Open and read a text file in R, Lemmatize the text, Write a simple script to count the types and tokens in the lemmatized text and calculate the Lexical diversity using TTR and Guiraud's Index, Write a simple script to calculate the lexical diversity of the file using MTLD, Use a for-loop to repeat the process over multiple files, Export the results to a csv file