Day 6, ALAA conference. Black Hitler, positive psychology, and Melbourne is a Welsh ghetto didn't you know?

When I got to the ALAA conference this morning there was a largish group of school children - 5 and 6 year olds, I think - on the lawn out the front, singing what I eventually worked out was the Circle of Life from the Lion King. There is nothing I like more than people doing something earnestly and badly. (Obviously my own life is a endless source of entertainment.)

Interesting plenary from Rod Gardner and Ilana Muskin about using Conversational Analysis (CA) to research classroom interaction in early primary school-aged children. The essence of CA seems to be to ask “why that now?” - why that repair, that change of speaker, that laughter - and the result is an amazingly rich source of data.

(I think children are fascinating because they’re just like tiny adults, with the same motivations and desires and weaknesses, but without the slightest capacity to hide those things.)

Five three-minute “lightning” presentations today - or as one presenter put it yesterday, “lightning and thunder” presentations. Was particularly taken by Carolyn Pogson’s (Uni of Woollongong) project to create a syllabus for supporting Indigenous kids to develop their articulation/phonological skills within an Indigenous curriculum framework, and without bulldozing their own Aboriginal English speech.

I’ve become a bit cynical about university-level education - the new academia, the business models, etc. etc. - so it was refreshing to listen to Antonia Rubino from the uni of Sydney present on her group’s work to combine language learning activities with positive psychology, to improve the students’ motivation for language learning but also to support the students’ resilience and well-being. I mean we all sort of talk about language learning as being “hard”, but that doesn’t mean it should make you miserable; and to actually be concerned with the wellbeing of students is kind of radical, in my opinion. A really lovely pedagogical approach.

Now I have to admit I didn’t understand too much of the second plenary keynote of the day, from Howard Nicholas, except in a very gestalt way. I think part of his point is that communication is multi-faceted and complex - “speaking ain’t speaking, writing ain’t writing” - and how we interpret meaning involves an understanding of our entire selves, which he demonstrated brilliantly with a clip from Trevor Noah’s “Schwarze Hitler” sketch. I’m not sure where we go from there to integrate these complex communicative repertoires into curricula, though - any thoughts?

Came home from day 2 of the ALAA conference to find the house had gone from predominantly English-speaking to predominantly Cymraeg (Welsh) speaking. I had been forewarned of this sudden language shift  by the friend I’m staying with, but had not truly appreciated the number of siaradwyr (speakers - Welsh speakers, in this context) that could converge on one suburban home in Australia on a summer’s night. Did you know there is actually a Welsh ghetto in Melbourne? And everyone’s Cymraeg was of such high-quality, second-language speakers included. Someone ought to do an ethnographic study of second-language Welsh-speakers outside of Wales. Really nos da, it was.