“I choose two or three of this year’s registered bloggers and introduce them on my blog. These bloggers then in turn choose other registered bloggers and interview them… and so it goes on until you all have a good idea of who will be blogging about this years event.”  

I did my first chain reaction interview with Sandy Millin. This second one is with Mura Nava, who I discovered via my interest in and series of blog posts on wordandphrase.info (which is an interface for analysing a corpus – the COCA in this case) : Mura has a keen interest in corpus linguistics too. (For a list of the talks at IATEFL which are related to this area, see Mura’s first IATEFL 2014-related post .)

Nearly time for IATEFL, wherever you are in the world! Click this image to find out how to follow online.

Here are Mura’s answers to the questions I got from Adam and adapted for use with Mura, who isn’t attending live but will be following avidly online:

Please introduce yourself

My name in Mura, I work as an English teacher in France. I have a soon to be 2 year old son who is at that age which is really interesting if you are into language learning. His current favourite word now (after ballon) is pantalon.

Which sessions are you looking forward to watching live or online this year? 

Well only the plenaries have been revealed as being filmed so for sure has to be Michael Hoey’s session. I have also heard that Russ Mayne’s (@ebefl) talk will be taped so will watch that.

I am hoping that Simon Smith’s session on Using lecture notes to create domain corpora will be taped, if not maybe one of your Harrogate-2014-going readers will cover it 🙂

Why are you interested in the areas represented by the talks/workshops you want to see?

I have seen Michael Hoey talk before and he is both informative and entertaining, I know Russ Mayne from twitter so be great to see him chat in real life and I am very interested in corpora and language learning/teaching so the session by Simon Smith suits me great.

What do you hope to learn from the sessions you plan to watch?

From Simon Smith’s session how to get students to build their own corpora as I am part of a project that will deal with similar issues.

Do you blog? Could you tell us about your blogs (s)?

Yes I do at eflnotes.wordpress.com though I am more active on the Google+ community for corpus linguistics – https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/101266284417587206243

What other aspects of the conference are you looking forward to?

The online forum discussions sometimes throws up good stuff.

Why did you sign up as an IATEFL registered blogger?

I have been doing it last 2 years and in fact in 2012 coincided with me launching my blog (properly, as I had written first post sometime before then) so I remember how it helped me with an instant audience.

Thanks, Mura! I hope you enjoy following IATEFL online and that lots of the talks you’ve ear-marked are covered via filming or blogging!