INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF TEACHERS OF ENGLISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE

A Salute to Ukraine

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The poetry reading 'The Pity of War', a solidarity event for Ukraine, took place on 11 April 2022.
The recording of this event is now available at: https://vimeo.com/698668066 .
The poems read at this event, and many more, are collected in the e-book The Pity of War, available at https://payhip.com/b/uPZO4.

GISIG & LitSIG Pre Conference Event 2021

The 54th IATEFL Conference, Exhibition and Careers Fair went virtual in June 2021, and so did our Pre-Conference Event! Delegates from both the IATEFL Literature and Global Issues SIGs, logged on for a whole day of online CPD on the theme of ‘migrant narratives’.
The issue of migration is a pressing phenomenon in our contemporary world. The reasons why people migrate are many and varied, and the shared stories of these experiences are ever-more socio-politically significant.


For the actual recordings of the talks and material used, as well as a practical bibliography, please visit the LitSIG members' area.

Coming Events
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​LitSIG Pre-Conference Event (PCE) 16 May 2022

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Literature and the Arts in Northern Ireland
Our day will be structured to privilege both input and interaction: four experts in their various fields will give talks, each followed by workshops – ideal moments for discussion among the participants – guided and commented on by our speakers. 

Let’s now introduce our four expert speakers: Frank Ferguson of Ulster University and John Gray of University College London will be our literary experts; Hania Bociek from the University of Zurich will explore the visual arts, and, Michelle Zirkel of the University of Bamberg will guide us through traditional and contemporary songs. 

  • Frank Ferguson will focus on three writers. After an evaluation of how much Seamus Heaney’s poetry is affected by his roots in the North, he will move on to Anna Burns’s novel Milkman (2018), which captures the experience of living through The Troubles. Frank will then introduce us to Dara McAnulty’s Diary of A Young Naturalist (2020), a memoir of the author’s fascination with nature and the difficulties of growing up as a young autistic man, and show how it ‘speaks back to’ Heaney’s collection of poems Death of a Naturalist. 

  • John Gray will explore the queer gaze of three contemporary Northern writers: Cherry Smyth on the events of The Famine in her collection of poems Famished (2019); Paul McVeigh in his novel The Good Son (2015), an account of growing up queer in a working-class republican area of Belfast in the early days of The Troubles; Jarlath Gregory in What Love Looks Like (2021), a happy-ending novel for young adults set in Dublin in the aftermath of the same-sex marriage referendum of 2015. 

  • Hania Bociek will take us on an exploration of the work of several artists from Northern Ireland, both those working today and those from the past. Taking us from landscapes and nature to politics and protest, Hania will show us how pictures paint a thousand words about Northern Ireland.
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  • Michelle Zirkel will provide an overview of both contemporary and traditional songs about the history and culture of Northern Ireland as well as popular songs by Northern Irish singers, songwriters and bands such as Van Morrison, Two Door Cinema Club, Ash, Jun Tzu, and Phil Coulter, to name just a few. She will give several concrete examples of how to exploit Northern Irish songs in the EFL classroom.

We are sure that our PCE will introduce you to a variety of ‘texts’ which – be they literary, visual or in the form of song – deal with the burning issues of place, identity and conflict, and which will be relevant to us wherever we come from. We hope you will join us!
​For more details of the day’s programme and the presenters, and for how to register at the special Earlybird rate, go to this IATEFL page

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