אורנים דוט קום – מגזין האינטרנט של מכללת אורנים

By Effrat Sabo

To promote professional excellence in English teaching, ETAI launched a new initiative three years ago, asking students to organize a conference for students to share their teaching experiences. This year, the third annual ETAI Student Conference in the North, hosted by Sha'anan College, featured "The Road I'm Taking" as a leading theme. Presentations ranged from teaching vocabulary using songs in the elementary school and using puppets as a tool in the classroom (presented by students from Ohallo and Sha'anan Colleges) to technology in the classroom, introducing a Web 2.0 tool called "Glogster EDU" (Gordon College). Since the conference offered a variety of parallel sessions, I will comment on those presentations that I attended and provide the insights I gained from them.

Hadar Yashar from Oranim presented her research results on the topic of "Motivation: How Do You Motivate the Uninterested Student?" With a well-informed presentation, Hadar differentiated between motivated and uninterested learners. She highlighted the "Six Beliefs of Motivation" along with feasible and practical tips for use in the classroom to motivate students to learn, and more specifically to shift them from extrinsic motivation to intrinsic motivation. Hadar's shared experience proves that care and empathy enable teachers to reach students and motivate them.

Amneh Khatib, another Oranim student, presented her final assignment in a socio-linguistic course on "Language and Gender," for which she investigated the socio-linguistic agenda of the animated film "AntZ."  Amneh analyzed the discourse of the characters in the movie to show that gender does not necessarily influence a speaker's idiosyncrasy (i.e the use of hedges and talkativeness) but personality traits do. Her presentation served as an eye-opener for the boundless options available for us future teachers to employ in the classroom.  Amneh offered the medium – an animated film – as a platform to introduce issues for discussion, such as perpetuating gender stereotypes, language usage (formal and informal) and more. Moreover, a movie in the classroom can promote tasks, such as writing a movie review (much as a book review), writing a letter to one of the characters, writing a different ending to the movie, and more.

The thought-provoking sessions that I attended this year amazed me and others for their relevance to our classroom experience. Other participants reported on sessions they attended as equally contributing to our future experience.

The conference opened with a recitation of Robert Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken" by Tamar Friedman and closed with the poem "Ithaca" by Cavalfy recited by Prof. Penny Ur to mark the "Road [ ] Taken" in line with the conference theme of "Teaching as an Adventurous Journey." Prof. Ur shared her remarkable journey of 45 years as a teacher in an enchanting "Traveller's Tale" presentation; we all benefited from hearing about the insights she gained throughout the years from colleagues, conferences, feedback from students and encounters with professionals in the field. Needless to say Prof. Ur engaged the appreciative audience with the information she shared.

As the ETAI student conferences provide a great opportunity to enrich yourself professionally, to share your work, ideas and experiences, I could not urge my fellow students more than by encouraging them to partake in the future initiatives of ETAI, and most of all, to come and seek inspiration from the superb performance of their peers.