News from the IATEFL

I’ve just come back to work after my first IATEFL (International Association of Teachers as a Foreign Language) conference in Brighton, UK, and I can barely wait for Glasgow next year.

In many ways, the IATEFL is like any other teaching conference. Tiring, long, too much too see in too little time, lots of workshops that aim (and succeed) at, first and foremost, selling you stuff (namely books), and lots and lots of teachers. In just as many – or more – ways, nevertheless, I found the IATEFL truly unique. The first thing that made this an absolutely unforgettable experience to me is the obvious fact that there are teachers from absolutely everywhere in the conference! In any one of the 20+ workshops and talks and more taking place at any one time, one would be hard-pressed not to find representatives from all the continents, tens of countries (hundreds?), scores of native languages, thousands of different teaching experiences. It is virtually impossible to think of another place within ELT that week (or this year, or ever) where there’s more concentrated knowledge per square meter than in the adorable coastal city of Brighton. Brighton is, simply put, any English student’s paradise this week.

Apart from that, where else can you see, in the same week, ELT icons such as Jeremy Harmer, Adrian Underhill, Scott Thornbury, JJ Wilson, David Crystal, Jim Scrivener, Michal Swan (who was equal parts brilliant and poorly prepared), Luke Meddings, Nicky Hockly, Gavin Dudeney and a great many others? And they’re here not only as lecturers, but as teachers. Several times I was lucky enough to notice I was in the same room as many of them attending workshops, not giving them! I left a room at one point at the same time Adrian Underhill left a room right next to mine after a talk. How cool is that? They were there to learn as well, and that’s both humbling and stimulating.

Speaking of content, I have to say some of my favorite workshops were those given by the just-like-me teachers, not by the ‘bigwigs’. Ian Rogers, for instance, managed to pack so much information into a 30-minute presentation about the use of subtitles in video activities to improve reading that he may well have changed the way I’ll look at one of my favorite areas in ELT from now on. And, again, he did so in 30 minutes! (you can see his great presentation by visiting https://readingenglishsubtitles.pbworks.com/). Nonetheless, the workshop I think is going to make the biggest difference in my teaching life was JJ Wilson’s presentation on Listening. JJ is the author of How to Teach Listening as well as one of the authors in the Total English series, one of my favorites. Not only is he a hypnotic (and wildly entertaining) speaker, but he was the one who managed to provide participants – in my opinion – with the most practical ideas for immediate classroom use out of all the presentations I attended in the conference. It’s no surprise that he got a standing ovation and saw people queue simply to congratulate and thank him. Really, really good stuff!

Highly informative and entertaining as well were Adrian Underhill’s (on the use of our ‘inner-workbench’ in the classroom), Jim Scrivener’s (on how the Internet has affected the way we read) and Scott Thornbury’s presentations. The latter – a symposium on Dogme – was a great chance to see Scott, Luke Meddings (his co-author for Teaching Unplugged) and a few other teachers talk about different facets of Dogme in areas such as teacher training, business English and the use (or lack thereof) of technology in the Dogme classroom. Much as many questions remain unanswered, and much as I still think Dogme should be just another tool and another line of thought to be considered when preparing lessons and courses – and not a dogma for teaching –, it certainly is a very interesting idea.

All in all, this has been a thoroughly enjoyable and profitable experience for me as an ELT professional, and I hope to find a great deal more teachers from Brazil there in the UK (Glasgow, Scotland) in March 2012 for the next IATEFL conference, as well as in the TESOL conference the week after in Philadelphia! I hope to meet you all there! For such an enormous country with such great ELT practitioners, I ran into very few teachers from Brazil in the IATEFL.

Higor Cavalcante is a teacher, exams teacher and teacher trainer at International House Sao Paulo. The opinions here expressed above are his and his alone, and not necessarily shared by International House Sao Paulo or DISAL. His email address is teacher.higor@yahoo.com.br