Enter the competition to become a Roving Reporter at the IATEFL Annual International Conference, Brighton 15 – 19 April 2011

The British Council and IATEFL will send four Roving Reporters to the IATEFL Conference in Brighton, UK in April 2011. The deadline for competition entries is Thursday 16th December, 2010. The four Roving Reporters will report on the major debates, news and ‘coffee bar gossip‘ at IATEFL Brighton Conference as it happens. They will use laptops to produce quick-fire reports, mini-interviews and personal impressions. These will be published on the Brighton Online website for the duration of the conference.

The Roving Reporters should be able to communicate the excitement of the IATEFL conference, as well as the key points of the debates happening in Brighton, to practitioners worldwide, whether the latter are teachers and trainers in the state or the private sector. You can apply for selection as one of this year’s Roving Reporters by completing their Writing Challenge below. Applications will be judged by British Council and IATEFL colleagues.

More details at the competition website.

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Middle East & United Kingdom: Aspiring creative writers in the Middle East are being given the opportunity to make their first break into the English language publishing industry (the poor Buggers don’t know what they’re getting in to) through a new award: the British Council’s ‘prestigious’ ELTons Awards.

The ELTons, inconceivably now in their eighth year, are a celebration of excellence in English Language Teaching, apparently recognising significant and innovative advances in the theory of ELT learning, teaching and research. This new ELTons award category joins the long-established group of British Council Innovation Awards. You can tell how excited I am, can’t you?

Read more…

Any ELT professional can apply for consideration for one of the categories and the call for entries is now open and an application pack can be downloaded here. The deadline for entries is September 30th, 2009, so I suggest inundating them with crap, banal ideas that you heard in a conference five years ago.

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This wouldn’t exactly be newsworthy in most cases but given that it’s taking place in the Hell on Earth known commonly as Saudi Arabia I guess it’s worth mentioning. The Arab News is to sponsor* four of 15 women students taking a Ramadan-long English course organised by the ever lovely British Council in Jeddah. The 15 students were given the opportunity to undertake the language course as a ‘charitable gesture’ by the council at the beginning of Ramadan. The four successful candidates will now be offered the chance to take a month-long continuation course to develop further and reinforce their newly acquired learning.

Read more here…

* bring back the infinitive to refer to the future, that’s what I say.

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Moscow’s City Duma has suggested an amendment to a new law that would require all teachers to apply for work permits… in addition to the work visas which currently allow them to teach here. Also, according to the amendment’s author, Tatyana Potyayeva, the deputy head of the City Duma’s Science and Education committee, the move is necessary after some foreign teachers were responsible for “inciting ethnic and religious strife” in educational centres.

In practical terms, notes NM Weekly, the proposal means that schools and colleges have to spend up to three months processing the paperwork for new recruits, compared with about one month at present. English language schools, which have enjoyed years of growth, often recruit staff with either the Cambridge Certificate in English Language Teaching to Adults (CELTA) or the Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) certificate, which might now become insufficient for would-be teachers in Russia.

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A school where more than 40 different languages are spoken by pupils has just been commended by the ever reliable Ofsted for its ‘outstanding’ English teaching. At Challney Boys School nearly all of the pupils are from ethnic minorities and 86 percent don’t have English as their first language.

Read on…

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United Kingdom: Academia’s leading language exam has won favour among immigration authorities, but that could be about to change if calls for more diversity in assessment gain a hearing, reports Max de Lotbinière at the Guardian. With international student mobility has booming in recent years, so has the number of candidates taking the Ielts test of English. According to i-graduate, an international higher education research group, more than half of the 40,000 students it surveyed last year used an Ielts test certificate to display their English language proficiency when they were applying to English-medium universities.

Read more…

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United Kingdom & China: UK publishing group Pearson is buying Wall Street English, one of China’s top English language-training companies, for $145 million (in cash) to cement its position in a critical growth market, according to Reuters. Pearson, the world’s biggest educational publisher, will combine Wall Street English’s training centres for adults in seven Chinese cities with its Longman Schools business, which it said would give it a leading position in China’s ELT market.

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United Kingdom and UAE: Those loveable rogues the British Council, the world’s infamously largest English language teaching organisation, has launched a range of new global English teaching and learning services, debuting the new services in the UAE, at the TESOL Arabia 15th annual International Conference which concluded on 14 March.

These new services, most of which are free to users, aim to create very broad access to high quality teaching and learning materials through highly interactive Web 2.0 style online services for teachers, learners and parents.

Read the TESOLtastic story…

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Tunisia: Middle East Online reports that the Tunisian Ministry of Education and Training signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the British Council in London Tuesday, to prepare for a huge project aimed at English language teaching reform in all state primary and secondary schools in Tunisia.

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Custom Search for TEFL Africa

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United Arab Emirates & United Kingdom: The British Council has been present and active in Sharjah for 10 years, and has significantly increased the size of its teaching and support staff over this time, to meet local demand from an increasing number of students for English language courses, which is one of the main areas of focus.

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