BC TEAL 2025 Annual Conference

English language teaching has long been dominated by normative assumptions surrounding which varieties of English and which groups of English users are more legitimate than others. It has also been driven by the expectation that acquiring the majoritarian ways of communicating promises social and economic success. These assumptions and expectations have forced racialized English users of non-standardized varieties to culturally and linguistically assimilate. Furthermore, the same assimilationist ideology has caused longstanding colonial oppression of Indigenous people. However, since the 1980s, these beliefs have been challenged by anti-normative paradigms, such as world Englishes, English as a lingua franca, translanguaging, advocacy for nonnative speakers, antiracism, and decolonization. While these frameworks disrupt normative ideologies, transforming the status quo in the real world requires enactment of criticality in everyday practices. This is not easy to do, since critical actions for change require (1) overcoming entrenched neoliberal systems of competition, accountability, and complicity; (2) negotiating diverse cultural, political, and ideological positions in situated ways, and (3) disrupting the siloed nature of academic work through knowledge mobilization in broader terrains. This presentation will outline critical approaches to affirming linguistic and human diversity, examine the challenges delineated above, and offer ideas for knowledge mobilization with critical engagement by sharing some examples from the documentary film, World Englishes: Voices in Canada, which addresses the global diversity of English and English users.

*Additional Ticket Registration Required*
Event registration site: https://www.zeffy.com/en-CA/ticketing/2025-tcf-fundraising-gala

Join the TEAL Charitable Foundation in celebrating EAL educators and students. The wine and appetizer event will begin with honouring the 2024-25 educator and student award winners. The awards ceremony will be followed by a talk from Raymonde Tickner, one of the editors, and several authors of "Geographies of the Heart: Stories from Newcomers to Canada". This book was published last year by UBC Press and contains inspiring stories of resilience from newcomers to Canada. According to BC Bookworld: "[The] accounts [of Geographies of the Heart] belie the many misconceptions about immigration and immigrants by revealing that the paths into Canada are as diverse as the people who journeyed them."  

What: TCF Awards & Fundraising Gala
When: Friday, May 2nd
Time: 4:30pm - 8:00pm
Place: VCC Downtown Campus, 250 West Pender Street
Cost: $50 or $75 (includes a copy of "Geographies of the Heart")
Details: The event will include the presentation of TCF awards, as well as a talk by an editor and authors of "Geographies of the Heart: Stories from Newcomers to Canada". The ticket price includes wine, beer, and non-alcoholic beverages, as well as appetizers.
https://www.ubcpress.ca/geographies-of-the-heart

Plagiarism is “the act of presenting the words, ideas, or images of another as your own” (American Psychological Association, 2020, p. 256). As suggested by Eaton and Christensen Hughes (2022), plagiarism is a growing and complex concern across Canada. Assisted by artificial intelligence (AI), this widespread offence has become more serious, resulting in AIgiarism or AI-generated plagiarism (Tang 2024). One study found that while 27% undergraduate education students have positive attitudes toward plagiarism, 57% have such attitudes toward Aigiarism (Khalaf, 2024). To tackle the situation, universities have developed guidelines, which, however, fail to offer practical strategies to prevent plagiarism and AIgiarism. Hence, teachers feel baffled and yearn for effective strategies. Unfortunately, research in this direction has been limited (Eaton et al, 2023; Hu & Yu, 2023). Indeed, Gustilo et al. (2024) call for “more research on the strategies that can mitigate the threats of AI invasion in the human world” (p. 36). Hence, our research question is: What strategies do teachers adopt to prevent student plagiarism and aigiarism?
The study reports on Partnership on University Plagiarism Prevention, a SSHRC project, which recently conducted one-hour semi-structured individual qualitative English interviews with 69 university instructors in North America and Europe on how the latter teach informational, writing, and referencing skills to undergraduate students. The study uses NVivo 15 to help discover themes in search for teacher strategies to prevent plagiarism and AIgiarism. Preliminary analysis indicates that teachers use a variety of traditional and innovative strategies such as collecting diagnostic student-writing samples, having students sign declarations, assigning reflective journals, designing multi-layered assignments involving peer- and teacher-feedback, recommending student self-detection software, and detecting AI hallucinations by validating citations and references.
Session participants raise questions, exchange views, share experiences, and leave empowered by strategies to prevent plagiarism and AIgiarism.