Confirmed speakers

A full programme of workshops and presentations will be available in the next 3-4 weeks, along with an online booking form to reserve your places, but just to give you a sneak preview of some of the speakers already confirmed, have a look below. We're excited about such a great line-up and we hope you are too!

• Dave Britain (Essex University) on recent developments in variation and change
• Deborah Cameron (Rupert Murdoch Professor of Language and Communication at Worcester College, Oxford University) on "The Myth of Mars and Venus"
• Dick Hudson (UCL) on teaching grammar
• David Hyatt (Sheffield University) on critical discourse analysis
• Kerry Maxwell (lexicographer for MacMillan English Dictionaries and author of From Al Desko To Zorbing and Brave New Words) on new words
• Jane Setter (Reading University) on world Englishes
• Tony Thorne (Kings College London) on youth slang
• Graeme Trousdale (Edinburgh University) on grammatical variation and change
• Kevin Watson (Lancaster University) on accent change

We're also working on confirming a number of A Level examiners to run workshops with a focus on helping teachers cover the topics on the new A Level specifications. We'll have more details of this part of the course in weeks to come.

Welcome

This blog is designed to provide information on the English Language A Level workshops running at St Francis Xavier College, south London 16 - 19 June 2008.

The programme of workshops and presentations is aimed at A Level English Language teachers (and those who'd like to be!) and will offer a choice of 2 90 minute workshops in the morning of each day, both of which will be focussed on hands-on teaching - resources, approaches, ideas and tasks for teachers to take away - while 2 60 minute afternoon sessions will be more like research presentations from university linguists on areas of interest for A Level teachers.

The focus will be on helping English Language teachers keep up to date with recent research in the field and developing interactive and engaging teaching resources.

We've had lots of interest from a range of presenters and I will post an initial programme of workshops and presentations in the next few weeks, with a full programme to follow in late October. So far, we have topics such as youth slang, grammar teaching at A Level, grammatical change, regional variation and dialect levelling, world Englishes and others in the pipeline. It'll be good...promise.

We're hoping to keep the cost down for teachers and have secured QIA Beacon College funding to run this programme. We anticipate ticket prices to be something like £10 per delegate per day, with a cheaper ticket available if you attend all week (Monday - Thursday).

More details will follow soon.