KARACHI: When teachers of English expand their horizons, they really make a difference.

The two-day Society of Pakistan English Language Teachers` (Spelt) 32nd International ELT Conference 2016, which kicked off at Habib University here on Saturday morning, had many examples of this.

During his keynote address at the inaugural session, Dr Dudley Reynolds of Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar, who is also president of TESOL, USA, said since language was somethingthat was often learned without formal instruction, too many people thought of language teachers either as unnecessary or as practice coaches. But professional English language teachers were not your common teachers. They thought and solved problems.

They learned and innovated as they taught.

By creating different scenarios for the teachers present during the plenary session, Dr Reynolds discussedstrategies thatcould be used in planning assessment of a student`s level and design a curriculum and promote active learning in the classroom. He shared a horribly written Englishessay by a student who had completed high school. `Normally, a teacher who doesn`t teach the English language will just see the student as hopeless and move on.

But a teacher of English will get into the thinking mode. He would be thinking teaching skills, learner-focused teaching, specialised cognitive skills, language proficiency, content knowledge and contextual knowledge,` he said while demonstaring how theory turned into practice.

The same student`s writing submitted only seven weeks later showed a world of improvement.

Not only had she learnt better English and expressed herselfbetter, she had also put in proper punctuation marks and broken her piece into paragraphs. It was all done through patience and practice.

Day one of the conference included other sessions, including paper presentations, lectures, workshops, panel discussions and webinars.

Dr Naziha Ali Jafri, the first Pakistani to become president of TESOL Arabia in the UAE, presented her paper`For the love of reading` in which she introduced the concept of extensive reading and why it was seen as critical in development of English language sl(ills.During her workshop on writing for social media, Farah S. Kamal, executive director of iEARN Pakistan, pointed out that `social media has now become an inevitable part of our lives. The interactive nature of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, blogs and many other social networking avenues allow like-minde d people to interact and connect,` she said. Her workshop was aimed at enabling teachers to understand strategies for writing meaningful social media content.

Director of the State Bank Museum & Art Gallery Dr Asma Ibrahim`s workshop, meanwhile, was aimed at how that museums could play a vital role in educa-tion. She said museums were generally taken as reservoirs of objects which no longer existed in our lives and were no more linked to the people in the present. `We need to establish this link and use the museum to connect with people of today,` she said.

Veteran educationist Prof Zakia Sarwar and Dr Christine Ludwig and writers Tehmina Ahmed and Mohsin Tejani highlighted the mismatch between the wide range of available writing genres and the kind of writing teachers taught in classrooms during a panel discussion.

The conference will conclude on Sunday evening.