The 22nd Thailand TESOL International Conference „Inspiring Change in ELT".
The conference took place on 17 - 19 January 2002 in Chiang Mai. There were over 900 participants mainly from Asia but also from Europe, America and Australia taking part and presenting sessions on topics concerning methodology, individual skills, grammar, vocabulary teaching, teaching young learners, drama, ESP, teacher training, computing, research, and material development in fifteen concurrent sessions every day.
The key papers were presented by David Evans, Michael McCarthy, David Nunan and Tom Scovel.
Appart from presenting a workshop on the use of authentic materials in an ESP class I presented a poster introducing AMATE, the new professional body of teacher educators.
During the three hours which i spent by my poster I addressed many teachers and tried to find out whether there are such professional bodies in other countries as well.
The teachers, however, did not mention other ways of further teacher education than seminars run by the local faculties of education or scholarships which are awarded by Australian, British or American charitable organisations to individual teachers. That is why experts that have been contacted by the Thai government to prepare projects on teacher education were really interested in the systematic teacher educators training carried out by the British Council in the Czech Republic in the past and especially in its outcome - AMATE. Some of them expressed a wish to learn from AMATE members on questions of the „Body Building". Furthermore, the Thai Ministry of Education would be interested in co-operation with AMATE, should AMATE offer scholarships in the future.
For the purpose of future networking I gave out leaflets containing the main aims of the organisation and the contact address.
Alena Šteflová
Department of Foreign Languages
Faculty of Law
Masaryk University
Brno
