IATEFL 2011 conference in Poland

IATEFL 2011 conference in Poland

• 
• Marek Doskocz / City & Guilds
  Country Representative - Poland
  http://www.cityandguilds.pl/index.php?cat=12-16-1
• September 22 2011

IATEFL 2011 conference in Poland

This year's annual IATEFL Poland conference took place at the Warsaw University of Technology, the internationally highest-ranked Polish technical college. As always, the event attracted numerous household names in ELT, among them professor Michael McCarthy, Michael Swan, Catherine Walter, Paul Seligson, Hugh Dellar, Jamie Keddie, Grzegorz Śpiewak, JJ Wilson, Pete Sharma, to name only some, who shared  inspiring and practical ideas with hundreds of the conference participants.

City & Guilds was represented by Marek Doskocz, the trainer and representative in Poland, who gave a talk whose aim was to encourage teachers to consider creating their own supplementary listening activities in order to meet the requirements of the students planning to sit a City & Guilds International ESOL Communicator B2 - or higher - particularly the students who cannot afford their money or time to attend a special tailor-made exam preparation course.

In his presentation, Marek pointed at the disturbing phenomenon that many teachers, pampered by the huge amount of course material available from ELT publishers,  have adopted a somewhat passive role of instructors who chiefly deliver ready made course content without supplementing it with the product of their own design which their professional teaching skills should enable them to put together. The presentation scheduled to last 40 minutes took almost an hour without a single member of the audience objecting to the delay. To the teachers present in the hall, it surely carried the powerful message City & Guilds have recently been attempting to put across both to the candidates and their teachers: 'Believe you can'.