Asia TEFL

Last few days, I attended the 6th Asia TEFL Conference in Bali. This is my first time to attend this conference and I saw a lot of scholars and teachers coming from various countries such as Japan, Korea, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, India, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Argentina, Australia, New Zealand, Pakistan, Laos, Thailand...

This conference is like a party and it's so much fun to know what is happening in various teaching contexts. For instance, on Day 3, there is a series of featured speakers sessions in which several experienced teacher educators talked about teacher education in their own countries such as Korea, Japan, Pakistan, Philippines, Thailand and Malaysian. In addition, there are tons of concurrent sessions in this three-day conference. In order to make sure I spent my time wisely, I was very selective and focused when I chose the talks I intended to attend. For instance, I chose those seminars which are relevant to ESL and EFL writing. In Korea and Taiwan, a number of sessions talked about students' responses in direct and indirect feedback given by their teachers. These are mainly quantitative studies. Some scholars from Thailand and Malaysia talked about portfolio-based assessment which is also my area and the application of teaching portfolio in the field of teacher education. In China and Japan, some scholars talked about how to digitalize writing in the EFL contexts such as using weblogs and wiki.

At the same time, several scholars coming from Hong Kong also presented their papers on this occasion. For instance, David Li and David Nunan on Day 1, Tony Hung on Day 2, David Carless, David Coniam and Andrew Tse on Day 3 plus some doctoral students from HKU and CU.

It's so much fun! But the schedule of Asia TEFL conference is a bit crowded and packed. Well, it's a social gathering for scholars to meet each other yearly.