This year our TDSIG scholarship winner is Gerhard Erasmus. We’ll be hearing more from Gerhard soon on the TDSIG blog, but for now here is a brief introduction.

Gerhard lives and works in Taiwan, where he has been Academic Manager and Director of Studies for a language school in the capital Taipei. In 2016, he joined the British Council and is currently the Young Learner Coordinator, where he is actively involved in rolling out the new global product for young learners called Primary Plus.

He is actively involved in teacher training and is currently a tutor on the Trinity Young Learners Extension Course (TYLEC) and a Regional Tutor for the Cambridge Delta Module 2. He has designed various training courses for teachers in Taiwan and China and is currently working on establishing the Trinity Certificate in Taiwan.

One of his main areas of interest at the moment is developing the language ability and awareness of teachers with a lower proficiency in English and researching better methods to do this that avoids unnecessary language proficiency testing.

As well as attending the IATEFL conference next April, Gerhard is currently doing some exciting work helping teachers in Taiwan with accessing development opportunities. You can find out more about this very soon on the TDSIG blog.