LTV Conference Program 2025

How can insights from neuroscience enhance our teaching practices and deepen student engagement in the language classroom? This presentation explores neuro pedagogy - the intersection of cognitive science and education - offering practical, research-based strategies to align teaching with how the brain learns best.

We'll examine key concepts such as neuroplasticity, cognitive load, working memory, metacognition, and emotional regulation, and how they apply to second language acquisition. These insights support the creation of learning experiences that boost retention, motivation, and critical thinking.

We will explore scientifically supported techniques tailored to language learning, including: 

• Multi-sensory learning - combining visual, auditory, and kinesthetic elements to reinforce vocabulary and grammar
• Retrieval practice - using low-stakes quizzes and speaking drills to strengthen memory pathways
• Spaced repetition - revisiting material over time to support long-term retention.
• Interleaving - mixing grammar, listening, and vocabulary tasks to deepen understanding.
• Dual coding - pairing visuals and text or gestures and speech to enhance recall.
• Embodied cognition - using movement-based learning such as gestures, physical games, or role-play to anchor meaning.
• Mindfulness strategies - helping students regulate stress and improve focus before tasks or assessments.
• Scaffolded challenges - designing effortful yet achievable tasks to promote deeper processing.
• Storytelling - using narrative to engage emotions, build empathy, and enhance cultural understanding.
• Checking for understanding - eliciting evidence of learning in real time.
• Attention - helping students concentrate on relevant information while ignoring distractions. 
• Explicit instruction - showing and telling students what and how to learn.
• Working memory - helping students understand this limited-capacity system needed for learning, reasoning and comprehension.
• Schema and mind map - having a clear mental framework that helps organise and interpret information.
• Cognitive load - helping students be aware of the total amount of mental effort being used in the working memory.

By integrating these strategies, language teachers can create engaging lessons that support deeper learning and student connection. This session will offer practical, classroom-ready ideas to make language learning more effective, memorable, and meaningful.

As language teachers, we are aware of the impact of learning a new language in shaping identities, and its implications when it comes to set, reinforce or resist gender norms. In our role, we can promote a use of language that is respectful and inclusive of all our diverse students. However, when teaching gendered languages – such as French, Italian or Spanish - it can become challenging to open up opportunities for inclusive and gender-just linguistic practices in languages that are linguistically marked with binary systems.

In this interactive workshop, we will launch and explore a new Open Educational Resource (e-book). Together with participants, we will share and discuss views, experiences, and strategies for expanding the linguistic options available to acknowledge and value all gender identities in the teaching of gendered languages.

The e-book is divided into three sections:

• Section I introduces key terminology and connects theory with the structure of the Australian Curriculum.
• Section II explores why gender-just language matters and offers foundational frameworks for making inclusive decisions in the classroom.
• Section III provides examples, activities, and discussion prompts organised around real questions teachers may face in the classroom.

During the workshop, participants will be invited to engage with selected activities from the e-book, exchange ideas with colleagues, and reflect on how these strategies can be adapted to their own classroom context. The workshop will serve both as a launch of this project and as a collaborative space for teachers to experiment with and adapt gender-expansive approaches.

In today’s classrooms, keeping young learners engaged in a second language requires more than just flashy activities or a well written curriculum. No matter how professional the curriculum or how exciting the lesson, if students don’t feel connected to their teacher, and if we overlook their short attention spans, genuine learning won’t happen.

Relationships first: In my session, I will discuss how teachers must first build strong, trusting connections with students. This means showing authentic care, not just for their academic success, but for them as human beings. 

Belief in the students’ abilities: Educators need to deeply believe in the importance of learning a second language, as it has a direct impact on student engagement. They should also believe wholeheartedly in their students' ability to learn and grow. Most importantly, teachers should mirror that belief back to their students, helping each child develop confidence in their own capabilities.

Teaching with relevance and joy: Once those personal connections are made, language lessons can be designed around topics students care about and that relate to their real-life experiences. Teaching through stories, songs, and role-play makes learning memorable and emotionally engaging.

Even though digital tools like iPads and online games have flooded the educational space, students - especially primary students - still crave hands-on play. Traditional classroom games and movement-based activities remain powerful tools for language learning and social-emotional development. In my presentation I will show examples of some games, activities and resources.

This presentation focuses on the students in front of us and the growing mismatch between their communication preferences and how we’ve traditionally taught languages. It will explore why many students are disconnecting from Languages and why, despite our best efforts, doing more of the same isn’t working. Instead, teachers will be invited to innovate: stop doing what no longer works, and start building classrooms that are more emotionally safe, relevant, genuinely engaging, and deeply relational.

Attendees will walk away inspired to rethink what it truly means to teach Languages today. You will gain clarity on why students are opting out, how current practices often miss the mark, and what small but powerful shifts can help us reconnect with learners who are quietly overwhelmed but full of potential.

I would like to present the benefits of developing and using a systematic approach to gestures in a CLIL or Languages setting. This includes the incorporation of gestures into a whole-school scope and sequence that sits with a Speaking and Listening model. The model would include a triple mode of delivery including oral, visual and kinetic prompts to embed core language in students.

In a world where we live constantly bombarded by images, visual literacy is an increasing need for the 21st Century learner, as well as a Languages’ curriculum requirement through the viewing macro-skill. This presentation will share strategies for the development of visual literacy in the Languages classroom as well as practical examples which can be applicable to participants’ educational contexts.

Imitate or create? Which would you choose? 

Are we teaching Languages so that young people learn how to put it together to say what they want to say? Or are we teaching them to parrot teacher led scripts, with minor variations? This workshop explores a technique for really enabling novel creative language use. It is swift, fun and clear.

The idea uses stacker cups as a visual manipulative to demonstrate the interplay between independence, variety and complexity as language use develops. It is highly motivating for all levels of students. It drives students toward their personal next step learning, and can be applied to any content thereby freeing language learning from textbook sequences and opening it to the interests in the room. 

Explicit teaching of knowledge interacts with effective application, supporting our learners to say what they want to say, work out where they are up to and choose their next steps. It is not just building knowledge in vocabulary and grammar, but “how to apply it effectively”. (Victorian Teaching and Learning Model 2.0)

This approach orientates a response to the Victorian Curriculum 2.0 for Languages; “to build communication skills”; to initiate and use strategies to maintain interactions (yr 6);  to interact and collaborate with others (yr 8); to initiate and sustain Japanese to exchange and compare ideas and experiences (yr 10). 

If the goal is to use language to communicate, let’s teach students to say what they choose to say, and to assess it?

This practical workshop focuses on a bank of adaptable, high-impact activities inspired by the Conti method that language teachers can use immediately to boost student engagement and fluency. All activities are built on the principles of Extensive Processing Instruction (EPI) and reflect the MARSEARS sequence - ensuring that students interact with language in meaningful, varied, and memorable ways.

Participants will experience six core activities and each task supports repetition, retrieval, and attention to form while keeping students active and motivated. All are low-prep and versatile: ideal for warm-ups, fast finishers, extension work, or full lesson routines.

This workshop will not delve into the theory of EPI but instead model what practical EPI looks like in action. Teachers will leave with a ready-to-use repertoire of go-to tasks that can be tailored to any sentence builder or curriculum focus. The session aims to build confidence, reduce planning load, and create classrooms where language is practised meaningfully and frequently - without relying on traditional worksheets or high-stakes output too early.

From the premises that both the Australian and Victorian curriculums are structured on the basis of the Taxonomy of Knowledge Utilisation (Marzan & Kendall, 2012) participants will be guided to use the taxonomic cognitive increment established in the TKU to determine the cognitive load demanded in curriculum verbs. We will unpack a set of achievement standards and corresponding content descriptions, for both primary and secondary levels, to support participants to visualise the cognitive learning progression that would enable learning for all students. Participants will leave with a reflection of how their learning tasks can be interleaved and take the content of the session as a prompt to strengthen their units of work as well as their lesson-based learning goals and success criteria.

This workshop will be a live demonstration of how artificial intelligence can transform the way teachers plan, design, and deliver language learning. The session offers practical solutions for creating curriculum-aligned units of work that are engaging, differentiated, and responsive to student needs, and is suitable for school-wide implementation.

Participants will be guided through the process of using AI as a collaborative planning tool, from generating initial unit overviews to developing lesson sequences, assessments, and differentiated activities. During the session I will showcase effective prompts and frameworks tailored specifically for language education, ensuring that teachers can maintain curriculum integrity while implementing AI as an enhancement to their planning and teaching practice.

The session will include a live unit-building activity, guiding participants from defining learning objectives to designing learning outputs and assessments. Teachers will explore strategies for each phase of planning: compiling clear and measurable learning objectives, constructing engaging and scaffolded unit content, and aligning all elements with the Victorian Curriculum standards.

Through hands-on activities, participants will see how AI can support the development of scaffolded resources for diverse learners, provide vocabulary and grammar practice tasks, and even suggest culturally authentic content to enrich units. The session will also highlight the limitations of AI, emphasising the need for professional judgement, critical evaluation, and ethical use of technology in the classroom.

Participants will leave the workshop with practical frameworks, ready-to-use strategies, and confidence to integrate AI effectively into their language education planning.

This workshop equips participants with tools and strategies to motivate students in producing both oral and written output. Through activities such as manipulation, visual thinking, role plays, and the use of three-dimensional objects and realia, participants will learn to convey cultural elements effectively.

Participants will explore methods to use objects to capture students' attention, assign clear educational value, and enhance classroom engagement. They will also collaborate in small groups to design their own activities incorporating objects.

Within the Australian educational context, all teachers including Languages teachers must engage with numeracy content through the Numeracy General Capability (Australian Curriculum), a state-based equivalent such as Numeracy Foundational skill (Victorian Curriculum v2.0) and/or the AITSL professional standard 2.5 (Literacy and numeracy strategies). This workshop aims to familiarise teachers with the expected numeracy content and to provide an opportunity for them to identify topics and skills they may already be addressing in their Languages programs. 

We will be looking at how to align current practices with the numeracy curriculum expectations and also ways to add intellectual challenge to what might be considered important but mundane content. Significantly in this session, we will examine particular linguistic, cognitive and intercultural affordances offered by engaging with numeracy content plurilingually. 

The argument will be put forward that the 4Cs CLIL framework (Doyle et al, 2010) can be usefully deployed to plan and evaluate numeracy learning activities, though other evidence-informed practices are also referenced (e.g. HITS). This theoretical framing will not be the focus, rather it is the backdrop to a hands-on, practical session, where teachers will experience and reflect on a series of worthwhile numeracy-based learning activities such as games, inquiry tasks, puzzles and numeracy-related texts that they can use in their own classrooms.

Yvette will facilitate a Q and A session with our keynote speaker, Danping Wang. This will be an opportunity to explore and discuss a range of trends emerging in Languages education. 

An opportunity to be supported to start creating your own Languages unit aligned to VC2.0 using resources developed by LTV.  This will be an interactive workshop-style session where you can clarify any queries relating to VC2.0 and VTLM2.0 with Kylie and Ross as you work on your unit development.

BYO laptop