The idea of complexity theory and it’s relationship to language and language learning is something that I’ve been starting to read into a bit more deeply recently. There’s something about it that seems intuitively right, which usually means that I don’t understand it enough.
I was, therefore, very excited to catch Achilleas Kostoulas’ post of an event happening in Manchester around the time of the upcoming IATEFL conference. And then equally depressed to realised that I had booked my flight home for the day before the event.
For more information on dates and times etc, take a look at his original blog post.
Hopefully a lot of the ideas and talks will be shared online somewhere!
teflgeek 
Sunday 1 March 2015 at 00:39
I tend to agree with this review, and not only because I edited it…
http://edition.tefl.net/reviews/linguistics/complex-systems-and-applied-linguistics/
Of course, things could well have moved on since then. We can only hope!
Monday 2 March 2015 at 10:03
Excellent! Thanks Alex – this one duly added to the wishlist!
Wednesday 22 April 2015 at 18:02
Thanks so much for blogging about this, David! Shame that we couldn’t have you with us – I think we could perhaps have done a better job publicising this event earlier.
Anyway, I just wanted to let you know that we put up the presentation slides here: http://complexityandelt.wix.com/manchesterroundtable#!abstracts/cee5 I am not sure whether they make much sense on their own, i.e. without the accompanying text, but perhaps they have some value as prompts for thinking.
Thanks again, and looking forward to seeing you around on some future event 🙂
Wednesday 22 April 2015 at 18:13
Thanks for sharing the slides and for commenting – I don’t know if I would have been able to get the additional time off anyway. Have you thought about running an online version of the conference? Either as an alternative to or in tandem with a face to face version?
Wednesday 22 April 2015 at 18:33
Actually, we did think of videotaping the whole thing (“videoTAPING?” That’s how old I am!), but we felt that it might make some participants apprehensive, and discourage discussion. As a matter of fact, I think that some of the most useful moments of the day were prompted by those “this-is-going-to-sound-stupid-but…” kind of questions, if you know what I mean. Still, it’s a great idea for a possible future event!