Making a proposal for the BRAZ-TESOL International Conference, 2014

These notes are intended to help you to ensure that your proposal has as good a chance of being accepted as possible, and also to ensure that your proposal meets the technical criteria for the BRAZ-TESOL conference. BRAZ-TESOL always wants to offer people a chance to present their work and share their ideas and to offer this chance to as many people as possible. If you make more than one proposal, please understand that it might not be possible to accept both/all of them, since space in the convention programme is limited. Please do NOT enter a proposal for a session that you have already given at a previous BRAZTESOL National Convention. Please note, in order to submit a presentation proposal you need to register first. No payment is needed at this time, but once you have registered, please save/record your registration number and type it out in order to submit a proposal. Please pay attention to the following points. 1. Your details Please complete the form with information about yourself and about anyone who is making the proposal with you (co-presenters). Please remember: - all correspondence about your proposal will be done via the email address you give, so make sure it is correct and active (i.e. an email address that you use and check regularly). - all correspondence about your proposal will be with the main proposer only. The main proposer is required to pass on any information from BRAZ-TESOL about the proposal or session to any co-presenters. (However, the names and biodata of any co-presenters will of course go into the convention programme.) - professional affiliation i.e. the place / company that you (mainly) work for. This information will go on your conference badge. 2. Biodata Not more than 50 words. Give basic details about yourself in professional terms, for example Fernanda Santos is a teacher at the XXX school of English in Campo Grande. She has been teaching for eight years. 3. Your session title. This must not be more than 10 words. Its useful if you write a title that tells convention participants what your session is essentially about, for example: Why do my advanced learners speak like beginners? or Helping intermediate students become better listeners. 4. Session summary This must be not be more than 60 words. This summary will go in the convention programme if your proposal is accepted (the description will not), so you must make sure that it tells participants what they can expect to see if they go to your session. You will want an interested audience, so write this carefully. 5. Session description very important! The session description is what the proposal readers will use to decide whether or not to accept your proposal, so it is very important. The following are things you must be aware of. 1

a) Do not include your name, or the names of any co-presenters, in your description. Your session description must be completely anonymous. This is to ensure that proposals are considered on their merit, and not on who is making the proposal. b) Write between 250 and 300 words. c) Proposal readers will also see your session summary (above), so you do not need to repeat what that says. d) In the description, you will need to tell the readers about the content of your session and how you intend to structure it. The readers will be interested, of course, in the ideas and theories underlying your presentation, but do not just write about theory. Begin with the overall theme and main content, and then describe the session as you see it in your head (or as you have already delivered it at another, non-BT event). Include timing i.e. how much time for introductions / theory / examples / group work / closing questions etc. Please see the example below of a session description from a previous convention, which was accepted. We hope this will be helpful, but it is not intended as a model to be followed slavishly. 6. Commercial content We ask you to be honest here. If your session is intended, even partly, to sell a book / books you have written, please enter it as a commercial session. At many conventions in the past, participants have complained that a session was commercial when it was not offered as such. You can, of course, use examples from published materials in your talk, including your own materials, but with a pedagogical aim, not a commercial one. Example: This session description is from a previous BRAZ-TESOL convention. The proposal was accepted. The presenter refers to how texts and dialogues in coursebooks are usually processed for overall meaning but then put aside. A lot of language content is not exploited. So a case will be made for revisiting texts in order to increase the language benefits. The key is to offer tasks which are different from those used originally when the text or dialogue was first dealt with. (5-10 minutes) Then the demonstration of four activities, each done in a shortened way with the participants, with materials taken from materials written by the presenter, and with reflection after each on the theory behind them and on the classroom procedures. (8-10 minutes per activity for each, some time is needed for participants to become familiar with a short classroom text.) 1. Correct the teacher: learners are given 1 minute to remember as much of a dialogue or text as possible. The teacher reads aloud a version in which some words have been changed. When learners hear something different from the original, they shout out the correction. 2. Ordering phrases: learners are given a set of lexical items extracted from a text they have read. The task is to say in which order they occur in the text. Learners then re-read the text to check answers. 3. Finding collocations: learners go back to a text and complete a table of verb-noun collocations found in it. 4. Dictogloss learners listen to a pre-read text, take notes and reconstruct collaboratively. The session will end with summing up and questions. [254 words]