BESIG Annual Conference 2008 This year's annual conference took place in Bonn St. Augustin, Germany 21 - 23 November 2008. There were more than 450 attendees this year with the choice of over a hundred presentations. Mike McCarthy started off proceedings with a plenary on Doing Business with a Spoken Corpus. Mike helped make what is sometimes a rather complex subject very enticing indeed, and we all left with new ideas of why the corpus is important and its applications to business English vocabulary and how this might alter teaching in the future. One of the points of interest that was brought up at the conference was the growing importance is ELF (English as a Lingua Franca), which refers to the English that is used as a contact language amongst speakers of other languages rather than as for transactions with native speakers. This has obviously become more common over recent years as English has widely become considered to be a global language and the movement away from the native speaker model and some of the norms of native language could have long term implications for teachers, students and publishers. Another point of much interest was the future of blended learning, this has increasingly become a buzzword in EFL, and in this respect we are starting to see ESP and Business English catch up with some of the developments that have occurred in the YL classroom, so it was interesting to see what developments had been made in this field. It is also important to note the resourcefulness that people have shown in making blended learning a reality for their students despite more financial constraints of late. Bron: Cambridge English Language Teaching