Pre-Conference Events (PCEs), organised by the Special Interest Groups (SIGs) of IATEFL, are held on the day before the main conference every year. Each PCE runs for the full day and all PCE delegates will receive a certificate of attendance. These events allow you to explore a particular subject area in more depth, network with colleagues from around the world and continue your professional development.
IATEFL 2026 PCE:
Teaching the Teachers: Innovation and Challenges in ESOL Pedagogy and Teacher Development:
This joint pre-conference event, organised by the IATEFL ESOL Special Interest Group and the Teacher Development (TD) Special Interest Group, addresses current innovations and challenges in ESOL pedagogy and teacher development. Bringing together teacher educators, researchers, and practitioners, the event provides a forum for exploring how teacher development can respond to shifting learner needs, evolving pedagogical approaches, and wider social and institutional demands. Through a series of presentations and interactive sessions, participants will critically engage with emerging practices in ESOL teaching and teacher learning, reflecting on both opportunities and constraints. The day aims to foster dialogue across professional contexts and to generate insights that inform more effective, sustainable approaches to supporting teachers and teacher educators in diverse settings.
Registration: Log in to the main IATEFL website (or create a free account if you don’t have one) and then find the TDSIG PCE in the table of PCEs (third from the bottom) on the IATEFL events page. Click the in-person booking link to register.
TALK 1: Preparing teachers for multilingual classrooms: What can we learn from students? by Harry Kuchah Kuchah
In this presentation, I examine the ideological complexities around language education in multilingual Global South contexts where the promotion of English (or other foreign languages) at the expense of local languages has led to a sharp rise in the number of students learning English and/or through English. I highlight how colonial legacies have normalised deficit perceptions of local linguistic resources, and how teachers’ attitudes towards English education are entangled with coloniality. Drawing on classroom observations and recordings of student interaction during unsupervised tasks, I show how learners mobilise their linguistic repertoires to routinely transgress monolingual norms in their learning. This is followed by examples of how insights from multilingual students’ pragmatic bi/multilingual approaches to learning have shaped the beliefs and practices of teachers I have mentored over the last few years. The session concludes by reflecting on how insights into students’ multilingual activity can (and should) inform English language policy, teacher preparation, and pedagogic design in English language and English- medium educational contexts.
Harry Kuchah Kuchah is Associate Professor of Language, Social Justice and Education at the University of Birmingham, UK. His research interests include multilingual Education, Language education and epistemic justice, Language Teacher education and context appropriate pedagogies, and he has published widely in these areas. He is co-editor of International Perspectives on Teaching English in Difficult Circumstances (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), Ethical and methodological issues in researching young language learners in school contexts (Multilingual Matters, 2021) and Teachers researching their classroom questions: Reports from Africa (IATEFL, 2022).
TALK 2: Talk Title coming soon from Lesley Painter-Farrell
Lesley’s Abstract coming soon
Lesley Painter-Farrell has worked as a teacher of English as a Foreign Language in Portugal, Poland, and several countries across Asia. She began her teacher training career in Poland with the Soros Foundation and Longman Publications. Currently based in New York, she has taught on graduate and certificate programs, including the CELTA, as well as a range of professional development courses. Her published materials for English Language Teaching include Homework (Oxford University Press), Lessons Learned: First Steps Towards Reflective Teaching in ELT (Richmond), All Sorts (McGraw Hill), and Happy Campers (Macmillan). Lesley is presently the Coordinator of TESOL at Westchester Community College, a State University of New York.
TALK 3: Social Justice, ELT Methodology, and Pedagogies of Resistance by Dr Steve Brown
As it becomes increasingly important for education programmes to develop critical consciousness and capacities to challenge and resist oppression, it is interesting that many English language teachers still view the idea of implementing critical or social justice-oriented pedagogies with some scepticism. While ideological beliefs about “neutrality” and anxieties about “controversial topics” contribute significantly to this scepticism, concerns about methodology may also be a factor. TESOL training courses tend to encourage the execution of tightly-planned lessons that impose a learning agenda on students rather than identifying and reacting to their needs.
Furthermore, many teaching contexts – including those that cater for learners who clearly suffer from structural injustices – can involve the delivery of a prescriptive curriculum that often prioritises the attainment of qualifications over any wider societal betterment. These prevailing factors can often lead English teachers to believe that social justice issues do not belong in their classroom, and that critical pedagogy is incongruent with acceptable methodology for English language teaching. However, the opposite is in fact the case: the most widely respected methods in ELT are entirely conducive to a social justice-oriented approach, but are being stifled by this dominant, prescriptive model.
This presentation has two main aims. First, it explores the development of “strong” and “weak” versions of communicative language teaching (CLT) to expose the limitations of weak, prescriptive language teaching methods and syllabus design. It then examines strong versions of CLT to illustrate how these are not only congruent with current theories of language acquisition, but also with the principles of social justice language education. I will provide examples of how strong CLT methodologies can easily be applied in the development of a social justice language curriculum, to illustrate that pedagogies of resistance can be applied through the application of methods and techniques that are already familiar to most English language teaching professionals.
Steve Brown started his career in 1993 as a volunteer English teacher in Mongolia. He then moved to the private ELT sector and spent several years in various teaching, teacher training and management roles in Central/Eastern Europe and South Africa. In 2001 he returned to the UK to complete an MSc in applied linguistics before spending more than 15 years in the Scottish Further Education sector, interrupted by a short spell as a CELTA trainer in Malaysia. In 2018 Steve completed a Doctorate in Education at the University of Glasgow and moved to the higher education sector. He currently works as a lecturer in TESOL at the University of Glasgow. His main interests lie in TESOL methodology, language curriculum development and the potential role of English as a source of emancipation.
TALK 4: Teaching in low resource contexts: opportunity, innovation and teacher learning by Naeema Hann
As you read this, English is being used by millions of people of all ages, all over the world. A shared language, English is being used at work, in educational contexts, for family conversations, social contexts and for teacher development. Some users will have picked it up along with other languages as they were growing up and others will have learnt it in classrooms. These classrooms could be ‘rooms’ or outdoor spaces with little or no resources apart from the teacher. With decreasing populations and a shortage of skilled workers in Europe, there is a growing focus on work related English. Alongside this, people are increasingly being displaced due to natural disasters or human conflict, with the need to continue education for the displaced. In this talk I will share two case studies, an English at Work course for immigrants in an English Speaking country and classes for internally displaced refugees in South East Asia. You will be invited to explore the challenges faced by the teachers and learners, their motivation to continue, access to training, CPD needs and their innovative responses to challenges. The talk will conclude with recommendations for teacher development in low resource contexts.
Naeema Hann is a language teacher educator and trainer in migrant and higher education contexts, Urdu literacy in diaspora contexts and Urdu as a foreign language. Naeema led the EAP modules on the International Foundation Year for over ten years and was Course Leader for the MA English Language Teaching. She also led modules on Course Design, Assessment and Materials Development. Naeema’s research and publications draw on these areas, focusing on learner insights into strategies, motivation and identity positions. Currently Naeema is Co-Chair for the National Association for Teaching English and other Community Languages to Adults (NATECLA).
PCE Schedule coming soon!
Visit memory lane to see our past PCE pages:
2025 – Looking Back, Looking Forward: Celebrating 40 years of Teacher Development
2024 – Teacher Change Over Time
2023 – Feel the fear and teach it anyway! (with PronSIG)
2021 – Alternative forms of TD
2019 – Are you a social justice warrior? (with GISIG)
2018 – Personalised teacher development (with LAMSIG)
2017 – Unlimited PD with technology (with LTSIG)
2016 – The teacher’s voice
2015 – Exploratory practice
2014 – Opening space for critical pedagogy