ACAMIS English Language Learners (ELL) Conference
Saturday & Sunday, April 13-14, 2024
Utahloy International School, Guangzhou
Theme: “Cultures of Belonging: Inclusive, Sustainable, Connected”

The theme of this conference focuses on developing sustainable cultures of belonging in schools. Attendees can expect to take away strategies for inclusive instruction that values and supports the diverse backgrounds of ELLs as well as tools for creating sustainable systems to enhance the ELL support and instruction. With these tools, we aim to build stronger connected communities within our schools, fostering a culture where every ELL student feels valued, respected, and empowered.



Those of you who are planning your travel will be interested in knowing at the end of the conf, buses will depart from Utahloy International School, Guangzhou for the Guangzhou Baiyun International Airport and Guangzhou South Railway Station after 3 pm.
Work is on the way on the full conf schedule which will be available after the Chinese New Year Holiday.


Keynote Speakers

Name

Ceci Gomez-Galvez

Learn More About Ceci

cgomez.mystrikingly.com

Career

Leader of a Language Development Program, Collaborator, Coach, Innovator

 

Ceci is a collaborator, coach and advocate who empowers educators to create equitable learning opportunities for all language learners. Born and raised in Guatemala City, Ceci grew up in a unique bilingual household nurtured by her family who valued languages equally. Inspired by her own upbringing and her extensive experience in international schools, Ceci now leads a support program for multilingual learners based on practices which ensure culturally responsive teaching and equitable access. You can connect with Ceci through her professional portfolio cgomez.mystrikingly.com and follow her on Twitter @cecigomez_g.

Building and Sustaining Linguistic Equity in Multilingual Communities

This keynote will highlight the importance of language equity beyond the classroom. It will showcase ways to involve the entire school community, including administrators, staff, families, and community members, in supporting multilingual learners and creating equitable opportunities for them to thrive. Attendees will learn how to establish a school-wide culture that celebrates multilingualism, language diversity, and equal opportunities for language development.

Creating Equitable Access for Multilingual Learners

This session aims to equip participants with a comprehensive linguistic equity toolkit to use in their classrooms. This toolkit will include various translanguaging approaches, ways to promote language equity in multilingual classrooms, and centering collaboration as the key element in creating equitable learning spaces. The objective is to provide teachers, leaders, and coaches attending the conference with practical strategies and resources that can be implemented to create inclusive and culturally responsive learning spaces.
Main Audience:
  • Classroom teachers (of any age group)
  • School Leaders
  • Learning Specialists

Language Empowerment: Harnessing Generative AI to Support Emergent BMLs (Bilingual & Multilingual Learners)

Unlock the potential of generative AI to support emergent bilingual and multilingual learners. This session will showcase AI-driven tools and techniques that can help students develop language skills and bridge linguistic gaps, while fostering cross-cultural understanding and appreciation.
Main Audience:
  • Classroom teachers (of any age group) with a high level of emergent bilinguals in their classrooms
  • EdTech Coaches & Leaders
  • Anyone interested in leveraging GenAI to support BMLs

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Name

Tan Huynh

Learn More About Tan Huynh

tankhuynh.com

Career

Secondary Teacher, Author, Podcaster, Consultant

 

Tan Huynh (@TanKHuynh) is a secondary school teacher specializing in English language acquisition, an author, podcaster, and consultant. He has taught students from 5th to 10th grade in domestic public, private, and charter, but the bulk of his experience has been in international schools. He also taught social studies and spends much of his days co-planning and co-teaching. Tan is trained in sheltered instruction, WIDA, culturally-responsive instruction, International Baccalaureate Middle Years Program, and the Collaborative Instructional Cycle. Tan shares his application of research-based strategies on his blog, podcast, and online courses with the hopes of celebrating teachers who answer the calling to serve multilingual learners. He holds a master’s degree in curriculum and instruction specializing in language acquisition. You can learn more about his work by going to TanKHuynh.com.

Creating the conditions for success for experienced MLs

Let's shift beyond the limits of the long-term English learner (LTEL) label to embrace a new way of honoring secondary multilinguals’ valuable life experiences and academic potential. By focusing on experienced multilinguals’ strengths and what teachers can do, we will create the conditions for long-term success. In this keynote, Tan will share the conditions where experienced multilinguals can thrive. While the examples will be from secondary schools, these conditions are applicable to elementary school MLs as well. The goal of this keynote is to affirm what participants are already doing to serve their MLs and to offer additional approaches.

Establishing Comprehensible Input

One condition for academic success is when instructions are accessible to students. When instruction, text, videos, and other forms of content delivery are inaccessible to MLs, they experience significant barriers. Fortunately, there are strategies and approaches to make instruction more comprehensible. After attending this interactive session, participants will leave with additional methods to establish comprehensible input. Though the examples will mainly be from Grades 5-12, the principles can be applicable to elementary as well.

Structuring Academic Output

Social and academic language are equally important. However, MLs often use social language when the task requires academic language. Therefore, it rests upon educators to explicitly teach and structure academic language output if MLs are to communicate proficiently like scientists, historians, musicians, engineers, and business people. By the end of this interactive session, participants will learn approaches so that MLs can effectively communicate in an academic register at the word, sentence, organization, and context level. While the examples come from Grades 5 - 12, these approaches can be modified for the elementary school.

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Host School

Utahloy International School Guangzhou (UISG) established in 1998, is an IB Continuum day school. UISG is a reputable IB international school in Guangzhou and fully committed in developing IB international education, including Primary Years Programme (PYP), Middle Years Programme (MYP), and Diploma Programme (DP). The PYP and MYP provide a framework for inquiry-based learning and critical thinking, while the DP is an unrivalled and internationally recognized standard of post-Secondary preparation. Our students have achieved outstanding results in the IB Diploma Programme and been accepted into world class universities around the world. Our examinations results speak for themselves.
UISG aims to motivate and nurture students from 2 to 19 years old in order to be active learners and inquirers, addition using English as the medium of instruction. The following languages are available within its extensive mother tongue language programme: Chinese, Japanese, Korean, German, French, and Spanish. UISG has over 45 nationalities of students; all teachers are fully qualified and internationally trained from UK, USA, Australia, New Zealand, Europe, etc.
广州誉德莱外籍人员子女学校(UISG)始建于1998年。是一所提供IB国际文凭走读的学校,多年来一直致力于发展IB国际化教育,包含小学课程 (PYP)、中学课程 (MYP) 和文凭课程 (DP),旨在激发求知欲并培养学生主动学习探索的能力。PYP 和 MYP 为探究式学习和批判性思维提供了一个框架,而 DP 是一项无与伦比的国际公认标准课程,用于中学后准备——学生在IB DP文凭考试中取得优异成绩, 得以进入全球各地知名大学院校继续深造。
我们的学生年龄介乎2到19岁,来自全球45个国家及中港、澳、台地区。学校主要以英文为教学话言,并提供多种母语课程,包括中文、韩文、日文、德文、法文和西班牙文。我们的老师主要来自英国·加拿大·美国·澳洲等国家,均获国际文凭教学资历。

Mr. Dean Croy

Head of School

Utahloy International School, Guangzhou

800 Sha Tai Bei Road, Bai Yun District, 510515 Guangzhou, PR China

+86 (20) 8720 2019 / +86 (20) 8720 0517



 

Conference Planning Committee