I participated in the 21^st Century Academic Forum Conference which was held at Harvard on 27-29 September 2016 and I gave a presentation entitled, “A Study of Vietnamese International Undergraduate Students’ Psychological, Sociocultural and Academic Adjustment at a Thai university”.

On the first day of the conference, I also attended a workshop on the topic, “Social Innovation based on Collective Intelligence Workshop” led by Professor Hideyuki Horii of the University of Tokyo. The goal of this workshop was to create ideas of social innovation based on collective intelligence. It seemed that the workshop was run to break the ice because all the attendees were required to join and complete the task in groups. The activities were great and because all the attendees started to talk, introduced themselves and helped each other to complete the assign tasks. It was fun and a great start.

On the second day, I presented my work. There were several benefits in presenting my work at this international conference.

Firstly, presenting my work at a conference gave me an opportunity to practice my presentation skills. It helped me develop the expertise needed to discuss my research in a clear and meaningful way. I learnt to answer questions raised by the audiences (who may or may not be familiar with my field of research) which would help me in other endeavours such as the dissertation defence (just be prepared!).

Secondly, at the conference, I had an opportunity to meet researchers with similar interests, giving me the opportunity to discuss my research and learnt valuable information from people working with similar techniques, populations, or statistics. Comments from other researchers provided new insight and perspectives about my work.

Thirdly, since it was an international conference, I had an opportunity to meet researchers and educators from over the world, which was a great opportunity to make connections.

Last but not least, I also learnt things outside my field since this international conference supports the expansion of research exploring interrelationships among the disciplines.

By Nattaya Srisakda, Year4 IphD student

On 16 July 2016 I attended the annual InForm conference, which took place at Durham University. InForm is a publication edited by staff from the University of Reading that provides a research forum for HE professionals working on international foundation programmes.

The conference presentations were very relevant to my EdD research project and dissertation as they all focused on the application of learning and teaching strategies in the foundation course sector. Of particular interest was the first key note speech by Prof. Michael McCarthy as he talked about the use of corpora to inform learning and teaching. In this context he reported how teachers react when confronted with their own language use in the classroom. This was particularly insightful as some of the teachers’ sentiments he described mirror the teachers’ comments in my data. Furthermore, the presentation by Aaron Woodcock from Reading University was very interesting for my dissertation topic as he outlined how he, too, takes a content and language integrated learning approach to his teaching practice, although he does not formally use the “CLIL” framework.

My own presentation on “Raising linguistic awareness through CLIL: A reflective practice approach for subject teachers” was well received. It was the last presentation of the day, but still attracted an audience of about twenty people. The presentation sparked some good discussions regarding the “authenticity” of the higher education experience of international students as well as the need for teacher development for academic subject staff. Overall, the feedback was very positive and some of the attending teachers commented that they felt my research topic was of great relevance to the sector.
On a personal level, it was good to catch up with former colleagues from INTO Newcastle University and from Northumbria University’s foundation programme. Also, I used the event for networking and had some interesting discussions with colleagues from Glasgow, Southampton and Durham Universities. Furthermore, I shared experiences with another EdD student from Durham University discussing our research projects, respective methodologies and general progress.

Overall, it was a really worthwhile conference and I enjoyed both attending as well as presenting a session and am grateful for the funding received from ECLS.

Written by Sandra Strigel, currently studying her Doctorate of Education (EdD)