ECIS MLIE Conference

A trilingual program with three script & writing systems in a Southeast Asia school (Sally Wen) - 40 minutes
Concordian International School, offering a trilingual program in Thailand Asia, is one school responding to the need of ‘learning, learning through and learning about more than one language’. Concordian offers students both Mandarin Chinese and English as the languages of instruction and Thai as a language subject in K-G4 from the beginning when it's founded. Starting G5 English becomes the language of instruction while Chinese & Thai are offered as language subjects. This unique trilingual program creates a learning environment with three different language script & writing systems for students. With the student majority having a rich Chinese heritage background, the trilingual program also facilitates the cultural and self-identity development of students. Teachers of all language backgrounds at Concordian are responsible and contribute to the language development of all students. The application of translanguaging is organically derived from all challenges teachers have faced.

Bookfête (Debora Vonlanthen-Venturi, Aleksandra Trotsenko) - 20 minutes
Bookfête, the first Le Rosey International Book Festival, has been launched 2 years ago. It’s at the end of September and involves everyone from Juniors to Class t, and all teachers. After a late breakfast, the event occupies the whole of the Academic Block from 9h until about 15h45; there are therefore no lessons at all that day. It mainly takes place in and around the Carnal Hall, our concert hall, but other areas – the auditoire, the Salles Werner and Kerrich, several classrooms – are also used. Several published writers have accepted our invitations to attend, and have been at the centre of the events.There have been three Plenary sessions, all in the Concert Hall, and about thirty so-called Chapters, running over three sessions. These are presentations, discussions, debates and other activities arranged and run by students, teachers and writers, each of which lasted about 30 minutes. Many languages were represented and included.
The starting point of our reflection was: How can we encourage reading?  We would like to show what we have done to increase the presence of mother tongue, as the main risk was to have an English literature festival (with a little bit of French here and there, as we are a bilingual school), too tightly linked to academic programs. Bookfête's aim is reading for pleasure.

Promoting a culture of teacher agency and efficacy through an unconventional model of professional development. Supporting English Language Learners in mainstream classrooms. (Deborah Aldred) - 30 minutes
Last year a different model of professional development (PD) was co-constructed with High School Leadership whereby classroom teachers who were passionate about advocating for ELL students got the opportunity to participate in multiple ELL focused PD workshops. At the center of this was the Teaching ESL Students in the Mainstream Classroom (TESMC) – Teacher Training Course led by John Polias. Drawing upon theory and strategies from this course as well as from a workshop run by Virginia Rojas and under the guidance of the Head of ELL, the teacher group collaborated to develop PD specifically tailored to meet the needs of the high school community. With a range of subject areas being represented, the teacher group has been able to develop and model strategies that are highly relevant and practical to meet both student and teacher needs. I would like to present this model as well as give specific examples of some of the most impactful strategies we have delivered within the workshops.