Celebrating 50 years of IATEFL

To celebrate 50 years of IATEFL, thousands of teachers and ELT professionals descended on the International Conference Centre set in the ever-evolving Birmingham city landscape. With over 600 sessions and an all-star line up of plenaries, this year’s conference was set to be its best yet. Birmingham did not disappoint!

Set over 4 days, thousands of teachers heard from the best in ELT including plenaries from David Crystal, Silvana Richardson and Scott Thornbury. All to help teachers improve their own skills, keep up-to-date with current educational developments, and discover the latest resources and technology to enable them to get the best from their students.

Cambridge English (a partnership between Cambridge University Press and Cambridge English Language Assessment) sponsored a total of 17 talks and were very excited that Jack C. Richards, author of Interchange, joined us this year for his first ever IATEFL. We were also joined by Herbert Puchta who discussed fostering responsibility in the teenage classroom; Michael McCarthy, who is also celebrating 50 years in ELT and Nicky Hockly, to name a few. To watch all of our talks from this year’s conference please visit iatefltalks.org.

We had plenty to celebrate this year! Penny Ur joined us to celebrate the launch of her new book ‘Penny Ur’s 100 Teaching Tips’, Herbert Puchta and Jeff Stranks launched their new secondary course ‘THiNK’ and Jack Richards discussed his new book ‘Key Issues in Language Teaching’. To add to the celebration we invited all attendees to share a celebratory glass of bubbly and cakes. On Wednesday we held a ‘Future of Professional Development’ event where we were joined by over 100 teachers to listen to Penny Ur, Scott Thornbury, Jack Richards, Silvana Richardson, Philip Kerr, Craig Thaine and Nicky Hockly discuss their predictions of what professional development will look like in the future. On Thursday, we held a ‘Practice makes perfect’ cocktail party where you could learn how to make an ‘Official IELTS Mojito’ or a ‘Flaming Objective’ – and taste them of course!

Overall, the entire Cambridge English team had a fantastic 4 days, and would like to say thank you to everyone who visited the stand, attended our talks and met our presenters! We’re already looking forward to IATEFL 2017 in Glasgow, and can’t wait to see you there!

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