AALL Conference 2007

Eighth Biennial National Conference of the Association for Academic Language and Learning (AALL) 29 - 30 November 2007

How Do We Communicate?

Thursday 29 & Friday 30 November, 2007

La Trobe University

Western Lecture Theatres, La Trobe University, Bundoora (Melbourne)

Conference theme: How Do We Communicate

with:

• Students
• Academic staff
• Administrative staff
• Management
• Each other
• The wider profession/(discipline?)
• Other parts of the university – disabilities, counselling, careers, international office
• Schools
• Parents
• The community
• Who else?

Types of presentations

• Papers, 20 minutes presentation plus 10 minutes discussion
• Roundtables, 1 hour

Papers

John Grierson Keynote:  Alex Barthel

The 2007 John Grierson Scholar is Chad Habel, who will lead the New Members' Roundtable Discussion.

About the conference

This is the eighth biennial conference of our professional community, formerly LAS, now AALL, held in the period 1994-2007. It is primarily an Australasian conference, bringing together academics and professionals from Australia and New Zealand, but it regularly attracts international practitioners also. The Conference is directly relevant to people researching, teaching or interested in the teaching of academic skills, language skills and learning skills at a tertiary level.

The previous Conference, held at the ANU in 2005, laid the foundations for forming a professional association, which was achieved in the following year. With its theme, 'Critiquing and Reflecting', the 2005 Conference raised many of the issues that LAS professionals face as individual practitioners, as part of a team, as a centre/unit within the academy, and/or as a profession. In 2007, we will take this discussion further, exploring how, in practice, we communicate with the students, colleagues, and managers who form our professional context – and with the wider public.

Conference Aims

We have three key conference aims:

• To exchange ideas, research and experiences as Academic Language and Learning practitioners.
• To provide a context in which the Association for Academic Language and Learning may undergo further development.
• To contribute to the growth of a network of national and international ALL advisers/lecturers.

Genesis of LAS conferences

Built on the tradition of annual Australian Study Skills Conferences, held between 1980-1985, the LAS/ALL Conferences have been held biennially since 1994. The Conference has become a hallmark of the Australasian ALL profession - an opportunity to present our work to each other and to members of the tertiary education community. Each conference attracts between 130-200 national and international delegates.

• 1994 Integrating the teaching of academic discourse into the disciplines
  La Trobe University, Bundoora.
• 1996 What do we learn from teaching one-to-one that informs our work with larger numbers?
  La Trobe University Bundoora
• 1999 Language and learning: the learning dimensions of our work
  Monash University
• 2000 Sources of confusion
  La Trobe University
• 2001 Changing identities
  University of Wollongong
• 2003 In the future…
  Flinders University
• 2005 Critiquing and reflecting: LAS profession and practice
  The Australian National University
• 2007: La Trobe University
• 2009: University of Queensland

There have been other milestones: the 1995 Bendigo WorkingConference from which emerged the 'Position Statement: academic language and learning skills advisers/lecturers in Australian universities'; the development of Unilearn - our electronic discussion list; the publication of Academic Skills Advising: Towards a Discipline (1995), edited by M. Garner, K. Chanock and R. Clerehan; and, most recently, the formation of the professional Association for Academic Language and Learning, and the foundation of its online Journal of Academic Language and Learning.

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