Speakers

HMI Bianka Zemke
His Majesty’s Inspector, Schools National Lead – Languages, Curriculum Unit

Bianka Zemke, Ofsted Subject Lead for Languages, is a qualified teacher with extensive experience in education. Before working for Ofsted, Bianka was a senior leader in large comprehensive schools. She also has extensive experience in school improvement and ITE. Her particular areas of expertise include modern foreign languages and English as an additional language.

Title: Overview from Languages Research Review

HMI Bianka Zemke, Ofsted Subject Lead for Languages, will give an overview of the key findings from the languages research review. She will reflect on what this means for a high-quality language curriculum in England’s schools. Bianka will consider what the factors are that contribute to creating that high quality of education in languages and what are the key messages for school leaders and teaching staff. There will be an opportunity for delegates to ask questions.

Steven Fawkes
ALL Trustee

Steven Fawkes taught French and German in a Secondary school in Durham. He developed his range of languages, and awareness of policy, while working at BBC Education. He now works mostly with teachers, and still holds on to his beliefs in the importance of motivation, classroom interaction, teacher agency and creative thinking. He volunteers for ALL in a number of capacities, including as editor of Languages Today, host of webinars and author.

He has recently edited 'It's good to talk' which is sold for the benefit of Association in the ALL online shop, along with his book Encore: Still with a song in my scheme of work.

Title: The ? of teaching Languages. What is the mystery unique ingredient?

If Languages add unique ingredients to the learning experience of young people, how do they get into their diet?

Steven will explore the central role of the Languages teacher, as well as describing a vision for the future of Language learning.

Kate Borthwick
University of Southampton

Kate Borthwick is Professor of enterprise in online and digital education at the University of Southampton. She is Director of Open Online Courses for the University of Southampton (MOOCs), the Chair of the University's Digital Education Advisory group, and Chair of the university’s Generative Artificial Intelligence working group. This cross-institutional working group is developing policy and practice in relation to GenAI tools for education. She is also a lecturer in digitally-mediated teaching and learning in Modern Languages and Linguistics and a learning designer for online courses.

She is an integrated practitioner working at the interface between research, education and enterprise, and between theory and practice. She leads and develops educational enterprise activities in Languages, Cultures and Linguistics, especially related to online and digital education and works extensively with external clients. She is a linguist by background with an undergraduate degree in Russian and she worked for some years as an EFL teacher in Russia, China, and Japan. She is an award-winning teacher and online course designer, gaining both national and local (University) recognition. Her research interests are open education, MOOCs, and digitally-enabled learning and teaching. She convenes a postgraduate module on Digital Education and English language teaching and supervises research students working in the area of Digital Education and Applied Linguistics. She is elected Vice-President of the European Association for Computer Assisted Language Learning and sits on the Editorial Board of the journal ReCALL.

Title: Language education in an AI-enabled world: the challenge, the opportunity and the future

The rapid rise of Generative Artificial Intelligence tools, such as ChatGPT, forces us to pose important questions about language education at all levels – in an AI-enabled era, are our teaching and learning approaches still fit for purpose? What is language education for in an era of AI? In this talk, I intend to offer responses to these questions. I will outline some of the challenges that generative AI tools pose language educators, and I will emphasise the opportunities such tools offer language teachers and learners. I will suggest that our systems, curricula and approaches to language teaching will need to change, as we move to address and incorporate AI literacy into our classrooms. But there is good news: Language educators’ experiences in authentic materials creation and machine translation mean that we are well-placed to work through the challenges of human-AI team working..