Bloomsbury Institute’s Dr Sebastian Lesniewski speaks at the UK’s biggest international conference in language education

Dr Sebastian Lesniewski, Bloomsbury’s Senior Lecturer for Foundation Year (and Academic Lead for Research) has returned from Belfast where he recently spoke at the International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language (IATEFL).

Sebastian’s talk on the Impact of direct and indirect written corrective feedback was addressed to language teachers in all contexts (but particularly English for Academic Purposes). It challenged the common belief about direct corrective feedback (involving teacher correcting the student’s error) being less beneficial for the learner than indirect corrective feedback (consisting in calling the student’s attention to the error and getting them to self-correct). “This assumption” remarked Sebastian “turns out to be completely unsupported by research, which suggests that the opposite is more likely to be true! Direct corrective feedback has been shown to have a clear advantage over the indirect approach.”

Sebastian’s presentation was attended by around 150 delegates, and was very well received.

Bloomsbury Institute staff engage in major international events, and IATEFL is one of the UK’s biggest international conferences in the language education industry calendar, held in a different city each year. It has historically welcomed over 3,000 delegates from all around the world, and features around 500 talks, workshops and forums on a variety of topics within language education, including English for Academic Purposes, Business English, Teacher Training, Learning Technologies, Research, and Testing, Evaluation and Assessment. This was Sebastian’s 9th time attending the IATEFL conference and 8th time delivering a talk.