On June 27-28, 2013, CLERA and InterLanD will be hosting a two-day conference titled ‘How does language work?’.
The variation between the language of the home and community and the language of school is at the heart of a great deal of the underachievement of identifiable groups of learners in Britain. These learners may speak English either as a first or second language. 
They draw on the language of home and community to make meanings within school. School subjects draw on different kinds of language. These variations in language do not match.
The conference aims to:
- Make the workings of the language system explicit in order to appreciate the role language plays, in constructing knowledge across all learning areas.
- Build understandings about the patterned ways meanings are made within and across genres so that educators are able to develop students’ language resources to understand and produce those genres.
- Enable participants to understand and use the differences between spoken and written language, both as a teaching and a learning tool.
This conference is a groundbreaking two-day vent and features a rare UK keynote from Professor James Martin of the University of Sydney, an architect of “genre based pedagogy” in the early 1980s.
It is aimed at both teachers and educators, across phases, who are concerned with the role language plays in learning.
For more information, please go to the conference website.
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