Keynote Speakers

Nicos Sifakis

Department of English Language and Literature
National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (Greece)

Title of Talk:

“ELF, ELF awareness and the three major shifts in teaching and teacher education”

Abstract:

Over the years, ELF research has offered some unique insights to our understanding of interactions between (non-native and native) users of English in a multitude of communicative settings around the world. It has gone a long way to establishing the essential ingredients of the accommodation strategies at play during these interactions. Such research has been immensely helpful in potentially enriching English language teaching and teacher education curricula. The integration of ELF within English language teaching and teacher education contexts has been accelerated by the development of the ELF awareness orientation, which has provided teachers and teacher educators with a detailed and comprehensive metatheoretical framework that enables such an integration. In this presentation, I discuss what in my view constitute the three major shifts that ELF, and specifically the ELF awareness principles that are targeted at teaching and teacher education, bring about in teaching and learning English, as well as in educating teachers of English in formal instructional and training settings. These shifts are related to communication, instructional pedagogy and reflective teaching and, in my view, are essential in making the best of what ELF research has to offer English language teachers and teacher educators as a whole.

Brief Bio:

Nicos Sifakis is a professor of English for specific purposes in the Department of English Language and Literature of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. He is also director of the Master’s in Education (M.Ed.) in TESOL Programme of the Hellenic Open University (Greece). He has published extensively on teaching and researching English as an international lingua franca (with a focus on the concept of ELF awareness), intercultural communication and pedagogy, language teaching methodology, distance education, adult education and teacher education.

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