Pro Vice-Chancellor Professor Susan Bassnett presented this year’s ELTONs (the British Council’s English language teaching awards) at the Delfina Studio on 1 March 2007.

The ELTONs ceremony is the only ELT event to bring a cross-section of industry professionals together to celebrate the innovation, creativity and impact of UK ELT products. The 2007 awards were offered to outstanding language learning resources and initiatives using innovative ideas to help learners of English to achieve their goals.

Amongst the nominees for this year’s ELTONs was Tim Kelly from Warwick’s Centre for English Language Teacher Education (CELTE), unfortunately Tim did not however repeat his 2003 success.

Tim’s entry "Seminar Skills 2: Discussions" was an interactive CD-ROM designed to help international students improve their academic discussion skills.

The material is based around high-quality digital video recordings of university seminar discussions from a variety of university departments. There are extracts from lively discussions and debates in the humanities and social sciences, as well as from problem solving seminars in the sciences. This is the ideal resource to help students build their confidence and prepare themselves for the realities of academic seminars.

Navigating through the material has been made as easy as possible, and the CD contains hundreds of varied exercises to help students learn and practise the kinds of language functions, vocabulary and communicative skills they will need. We have also made sure to provide students with transcripts of all the clips, as well as a cross-referencing dictionary and plenty of useful and informative feedback on the listening tasks.

A recent report commissioned by the British Council has shown that despite increasing competition from other countries, the UK is still seen as the leading destination for learning English and the centre of innovative product development for the industry.

Neil Kinnock, Chair of the British Council, said:

“As highlighted in our recent report on the ‘Global Market for English Language Courses’ by JWT Education, the UK remains the leading destination for learning English. There is of course, increasing competition in the market place but one of the reasons that the UK maintains its position is because it’s known as the home of English language teaching and the centre of innovative product and materials development. The ELTONS, now in its 5th year, celebrates this fact and tonight’s winners are perfect examples of why we are the world’s number one for innovation in the industry.”

For more information on the ELTONs see http://www.britishcouncil.org/learning-innovation-awards-2007.htm