Linking, Developing and Supporting Early Years, Primary and Secondary ELT Professionals Worldwide
Linking, Developing and Supporting Early Years, Primary and Secondary ELT Professionals Worldwide
Our mission is to lead, drive change and set standards in Teaching English to Young Learners and Teenagers (2 – 17 years old) for training and development, classroom practice and assessment. We aim to provide practical advice regarding different models of YL ELT (e.g. EFL, EMI, CLIL), age-appropriate pedagogy, child-safe recruitment as well as suitable ELT qualifications for young learner teachers. Our members include classroom practitioners, teacher trainers, researchers, academic managers and materials / content developers working in both state and private sectors worldwide.
We source inspiration and guidance from UNESCO and other global organisations which focus on education. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child defines a ‘child’ as a person below the age of 18, unless the laws of a particular country set the legal age for adulthood younger. 18 and 19 year-olds therefore have different rights and each age range under 18 have specific requirements regarding methodology, course structures, materials, learning environment and appropriately qualified teachers as well as those related to duty of care, child protection and safeguarding.
As David Graddol in English Next (2006) states, ‘The age at which children start learning English has been lowering across the world. English has moved from the traditional ‘foreign languages’ slot in lower secondary school to primary school – even pre-school’. We therefore acknowledge that ‘Young Learners’ is an umbrella term encompassing all these age ranges and that there are differences in our members’ national educational systems and transition stages. We advocate use of the International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED) mapping criteria which helps us to refer to these differences http://www.uis.unesco.org/Education/Documents/isced-2011-en.pdf and provides a common terminology for clarity, consistency and knowledge sharing:
Do you teach English in Africa? Then have a look at this competition and see if you can enter some of your learners’ work.
GISIG, together with YLTSIG, are running this competition as a follow-up to their joint Pre-Conference Event in Dakar before the AfricaTESOL conference in May 2018. We want to encourage teachers to get learners to work with the UN Sustainable Development Goals in class and produce work – writing, poetry, raps or even simple labelled pictures – to reflect their learning.
We will be giving prizes of £200 to buy books, and will be publishing the winning entries after the competition.
You have until 30th June to send in your learners’ work – as photos, pdfs or attachments, together with a form which we would like you to complete, to tell us about the context of your school and teaching.
Details: http://gisig.iatefl.org/competitions/voices-from-africa-competition
We are collaborating with GISIG to jointly deliver Africa TESOL’s inaugural PCE in Dakar on 4 May 2018, the theme is Africa in the World, the World in Africa: Quality secondary English language education for local and global understanding.
We would like to thank our delivery partner ELT Consultants for sponsoring the YLTSIG talks and workshops (find out more about ELT Consultants in this video)
We are also thrilled to announce that we have been awarded an EVE shield for near gender parity in the speaker line up! To learn more about EVE, please see https://evecalendar.wordpress.com/
Make sure you follow YLTSIG through our social media accounts to share resources and ideas, and connect with other YL teachers around the globe!
Join our Facebook Group
Follow us on Twitter and use the #iateflylt hashtag!
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Linking, Developing and Supporting Early Years, Primary and Secondary ELT Professionals Worldwide
