I was in Malaysia last week. I had a talk at MICELT 2010 which is organized every two years and known as one of the world’s best ELT conferences.

Before going to Malaysia, I was a bit nervous because I hadn’t travelled that far before. After nine hours of a very comfortable journey by Malaysian Airlines, I arrived at the Kuala Lumpur International Airport. From the moment I stepped in the country, I felt home because everyone I met was so nice and friendly.

It was 5 am when I arrived in KL and took a taxi to Malacca where the conference took place. I arrived in Malacca at around 7. Instead of waiting for the check-in time at the lobby, I decided to take a city tour. I joined a lovely group of people who came from Canada and who started school together 64 years ago after the World War II! We had the most wonderful tour guide, Kumar who told us everything about Malacca.

Before the conference started, I met the conference organizers, Dr Jaya and Dr Roselan, and Alan Maley who has been to all the MICELT conferences so far. Alan is the person who recommended me for the plenary about technology. I met him in Cardiff last year. He is a person to admire. I love to listen to him talking about his experiences and memories from the world of ELT. I wish he had a blog but he says “I’m still on e-mail.”:-) (He said this when we were talking about Twitter.) I found out that he wrote a guest blog on British Council’s web site last year. If you haven’t read Alan’s guest blog, here is the link: http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/blogs/alan-maley

The conference was full of great sessions.  There were two plenaries, eight split plenaries and almost one hundred parallel sessions. I don’t know the exact number of participants but I guess there were about six hundred teachers. To be honest, the first two days I couldn’t adjust the new time zone and missed some sessions. Alan Maley did the opening plenary and, with his unique style, gave us some tips to teach literature creatively. The closing plenary was by Brian Tomlinson. He talked about being an empathetic teacher and emphasized that one of the best ways of facilitating language learning is teaching learners what they actually need when they need it. It was a thought provoking session because we, as teachers, sometimes stick to the course books too much and cannot respond to our students’ communicative needs.

There were some good technology related talks. In one of the sessions I attended, the presenter, Ain Nadzimah, who works at UPM (Universiti Putra Malaysia) shared a research project implemented at UPM which will be taken to the national level next year. They are aiming to find out the attitude of Malaysian teachers towards the use of technology in the classroom. I don’t know when they can complete this national level research. I hope they publish the findings online.

My session was a split plenary. Hitomi Masuhara did a session about making ELT materials more engaging at the same time with me. Split plenaries is a good idea but I had difficulty in choosing which ones to go since there were very good speakers.

I would like to thank Dr Roselan Baki, Dr Jayakaran Mukundan and the conference team for their warmness and hospitality. MICELT 2010 was an excellent opportunity for me to share ideas with Malaysian teachers and learn about Asian hospitality.

I enjoyed every minute of the MICELT conference and my Malaysia trip!

Some other pictures from MICELT 2010 and Malaysia:

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