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AFMLTA report from scholarship recipients MLTA NSW My Experiences at the AFMLTA Conference
by Marina Anokhina
St. Alexander Nevsky Russian School, Homebush
As a winner of the MLTA NSW grant I had an opportunity to attend the 2019 AFMLTA conference ‘Languages – Breaking through Walls’ in Hobart. In this paper I would like to provide a summary of the conference activities I participated in.
The conference started on 7th July with the conference dinner and Keith Horwood memorial lecture by Professor Jane Simpson from Australian National University. The presenter raised the importance of preserving First Nations Languages in Australia, and how outsiders can contribute to that.
The other two days of the conference were intense days in terms of interesting Keynote presentations and parallel sessions, all of which were held in Wrest Point Conference and Function Centre. The official opening of the conference on 8th July was followed by Keynote 1 that was delivered by Professor Rafael Nunez (University of California, San Diego). He demonstrated some data from his research in cognitive linguistics, and explained the phenomenon of biological enculturation based on number, time and other concepts that are perceived differently in various cultures.
The sessions that I chose to attend were about:
•online language courses in NSW School of Languages (Teresa Naso and Janelle Byrne);
•Russian language program for pre-schoolers (Anna Belousove);
•some classroom activities using authentic resources (Shunsuke Hirakawa); •Indigenous languages in school (Ailsa Purdon), and
•the importance of consistency of teacher judgements about student
achievement (Amanda Pentti).
Keynote 2 was presented by Professor Joseph Lo Bianco from the University of Melbourne who spoke about the City, the Diaspora and the Dominant Language Constellation (the DLC) as well as Complex Multilingual Education ‘New World’.
The second day of the conference ended with AFMLTA awards. The last day of the conference on 9th of July opened with a panel debate titled ‘Languages Should not be Taught in Primary School’. The presenters and the
Volume 23 Number 1 Page 5