International Linguistics Expert Dr Gianfranco Conti Inspires Colleagues at President Kennedy School

Last month President Kennedy Teaching School Alliance was extremely privileged to host Dr Gianfranco Conti for a National MFL Conference for over 30 delegates.  An Applied Linguistics MA and PhD graduate Gianfranco Conti has been teaching MFL for over 25 years at primary, secondary and university levels. He has researched the impact of metacognitive strategies training and error correction on essay writing and currently has lexicogrammar acquisition, listening instruction, metacognition, error correction and learner autonomy as main research interests.   Dr Conti delivered whole day of interactive workshops, designed to assist teachers to meet the demands of the new GCSE.   These included; Maximising and optimising the use of curriculum time by working with human forgetting rates; Developing fluent writing in novice-to- intermediate students; Metacognition in the MFL classroom. The conference was extremely well-received, with one delegate stating in feedback that "this was the most amazing day: content, delivery and venue were outstanding".  Dr Conti will be returning in the Spring to deliver a whole-school CPDL session on memory retrieval and metacognitive strategies.