(Barbora Budíková and Alena Šteflová, Masaryk University Brno)
In a paper entitled "The story of ESP TT in the Czech Republic" we presented AMATE At the Second ESP Mediterranean Conference Marrakech, Morocco25-28 March 2002.
The conference was organized by the MATE (Moroccan Association of Teachers of English) and its main theme was ESP for Sustainable Development
We gave our presentation in a plenary session and we outlined the way in which ESP teacher training in the Czech Republic developed throughout the last seven years: the initial phase of building a team of ESP teacher trainers organised and supported by the British Council, the present state - the formation of an independent teacher trainer body AMATE, and also the outlook to the future - how to ensure the sustainability of the ESP teacher training without the support of the British Council.
The emphasis was put on defining the role of the new Association of Teacher Trainers in the Czech Republic (AMATE), a professional body which should guarantee expertise and quality of courses offered by its members, and which should be a partner to official state bodies like the Ministry of Education.
A discussion followed and other ESP practitioners as well as teacher trainers shared the experience promoting sustainability of ESP teacher training.
At the end of our presentation we asked
our audience to fill in a questionnaire. Its purpose was to carry out a survey of important activities aimed at sustainability of ESP teaching and teacher training in other countries, find out if they have professional bodies similar to AMATE and possibilities of future networking and co-operation between AMATE and other professional bodies of teacher trainers
We had 29 replies, out of these 26 by Moroccan, 2 British and 1 Slovenian participant. Our respondents had between 5 and 34 years of teaching experience. All of them take part in further teacher development courses, mostly voluntarily.
Moroccan participants stated that they are being trained by both native speaker and Moroccan trainers. 12 respondents indicated that they are teacher trainers themselves. As for their own training, apart from one who was trained in Edinburgh, non of them had any formal trainer training. Professional bodies involved in teacher training in Morocco are MATE (Moroccan Association of Teachers of English), Faculty of Education in Rabat and ENS - Ecole National Superieure, US Information Service and the British Council.
The Slovenian respondent received official teacher trainer training in the area of business English which was paid for by the BC. She feels to be a lucky one because even though there is an institution within the Ministry of Education called the National Board of Education which oversees such events, it does not organise any trainer training at all. Generally speaking, Slovenian teachers of English are supposed to be able to train other teachers although their own training is entirely up to them.
The British respondents are both teacher trainers, they both have continuous in-house teacher training sessions and they frequently attend international conferences. As far as institutionalized training is concerned, one of them lists MA level + European INSETT and Dip TEFL, MA TEFL, the other stated that his own training was „by trial + error". They mentioned the following organizations: British Association of Lectures in EAP (+ESP), British Association of Applied Linguists and ESP IATEFL SIG.
What might be interesting for us as AMATE members is Rod Bolitho's comment at the bottom of his questionnaire which reads: „Just a question. Why a separate association? Won't it be seen as elitist? Couldn't it exist within the national association for teachers, as a kind of SIG?"
In a discussion we explained the reasons but it is definitely something that we should be aware of for the future.
Conclusion:
Despite the word "sustainability" in the title of the conference, we discovered that our ESP/TT needs differ considerably from those of other conference participants. The burning issues were those connected with the national curriculum, motivation of students and ESP textbooks. Teacher training, on the other hand, is according to the Moroccan participants' view, provided in a satisfactory way.
