AALL Conference 2007

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

John Grierson Keynote Speaker

Alex Barthel, our John Grierson Keynote Speaker for AALL 2007, has been anchor and mainstay to the Academic Language and Learning community over many years. It is Alex who collects information from around Australia that enables us to describe ourselves to ourselves and to others; Alex who stimulates so many of our professional communications on the Unilearn discussion list; Alex who lobbied relentlessly for a formal Association for our community and undertook the lengthy and (to anyone less intrepid) baffling bureaucratic processes necessary to make it happen; Alex who sustains morale with his Friday funnies – in short, Alex was the community’s obvious choice to be founding President of the Association for Academic Language and Learning, and the obvious choice of the 2007 Conference to deliver the John Grierson Address. We are delighted that he has accepted our invitation, and look forward to hearing his address.

Alex is well-placed both to tell us about the changing shape of ALL over the past decade, during which he has monitored our numbers, our structures, and our roles, and to talk about leadership in our area of work. He is Director of the ELSSA Centre, which provides academic and professional English support to students and staff at the University of Technology Sydney, where his team of 26 staff last year recorded over 11,000 enrolments. The team supports students’ academic development mainly through programs collaboratively developed with discipline staff and integrated in faculties, and also through a rich and varied range of credit subjects, faculty drop-in workshops, semester workshops, intensive vacation programs and individual tuition.

With a B.Ed and an MA in Applied Linguistics from the Université de Caen in France and a DipTEFL from LANCO in Paris, Alex lists his research interests as;

• “cross-cultural communication“
• academic language and learning, critical discourse analysis, plagiarism (policies and educational strategies)
• acquisition of paralinguistic and suprasegmental features by adult second language learners
• teaching of remedial and preventative pronunciation skills to adult second language learners, with a particular interest in speakers of Asian languages”

Alex’s publications and conference presentations reflect both the interests above and the considerable energies and thought which he devotes to improving the experience of learners in Australian universities and the professional lives of us who support their efforts.

• Powerpoint file [PPT 277 KB]
• Transcript [PDF 28 KB]