The award consists of registration and attendance at IATEFL 2016 including travel and accommodation, a year’s IATEFL membership and registration for the TEASIG’s pre-IATEFL conference event.
The deadline for application is 24 July 2015. Full details on how to submit your application can be found here.
Cristina Peralejo, the Scholarship winner in 2015, conference reflections are below:
Although I had attended my local TESL organization’s conferences before, nothing could quite prepare me for the experience of attending the 2015 IATEFL in Manchester. Without a doubt, the conference marked a pivotal stage in my journey as an educator—a stage where I understand that I have the power to question and redefine who I am as an educator.
Particularly striking to me about the conference was the staggering array of talks, workshops and forums that were being offered. Anything I could imagine related to English language teaching, from methods on how to diversify team planning to sharing tips on how to better teach IELTS’ Academic Writing Task 2, was available to me to explore. Being confronted by such breadth of topic had the effect of forcing me out of my own narrow teaching sphere in order to view the larger picture of my profession as a whole.
In turn, being exposed to such a wide range of ideas, methodologies and theories enabled me to discover diverse areas that interest me in this particular stage in my career. After attending a session on action research, I intend to employ some of these methods of inquiry into my classroom in order to add a deeper level of self-reflection to my teaching. Most inspiring to me, however, were the sessions I attended on fostering inclusivity towards students with special learning differences in the classroom. This has prompted me to sign up for a course in the fall which documents the phenomenon and how teachers in general might offer support to these students. In line with this, in the future, I plan to create a professional development session for other instructors at my institution on this subject.
I am very honoured to have been granted this award in Morgan Terry’s name after meeting her husband and learning about her significant contributions to the field of assessment; and I want to thank IELTS for the chance to attend this year’s IATEFL Conference. I believe that if all educators were offered the same opportunity that I was, students, schools and communities around the world would benefit greatly.
Recalling IATEFL in Liverpool 2013, Alison Featherstone the inaugural winner of the scholarship commented ‘… nothing had prepared me for the fabulous multiculturalism, breathtaking volume of choice, sheer speed, bazaar atmosphere of the book fair and technical wizardry of my first IATEFL conference... I met passionate teachers from all over the world all only too glad to share ideas and experience.‘
Here’s Cristina Peralejo during the award presentation on the IELTS booth at IATEFL Manchester 2015:
From left are: Steve Terry, Morgan’s husband; Mark Walker from British Council; Cristina Paralejo; Saul Nassé and Nick Saville from Cambridge Assessment English.
The previous winners of the award are:
2014 - Aysegul Liman Kaban
2013 - Alison Featherstone
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