Over recent years, the global ELT industry has faced unprecedented challenges in responding effectively to rapidly changing and difficult circumstances. As educational leaders and managers, we have found ourselves facing a constant barrage of issues requiring us to adapt our approaches to an increasingly fluid workplace, often working remotely with geographically distant teams delivering online, virtual and hybrid learning. At the same time, we have had to reflect deeply on how we can build resilience and maintain a future-ready strategic approach in the face of great uncertainty, and how we can continue to motivate our teachers and staff in these challenging times. This presentation will consider models of leadership that have proved effective in remotely leading and managing teams, including Servant Leadership (Greenleaf), Scouller’s Four Dimensions of Leadership, and Appreciative Inquiry (Hammond). We will also consider the critical importance that relationships play in building and supporting teamwork, and how we can sustain the motivation and wellbeing of our teachers and staff as we face an unpredictable future. Finally, time allowing, the presentation will offer some thoughts on how we as leaders and managers can create the time to lead.

Graham has over 37 years’ experience as a leader, manager, teacher trainer, teacher and consultant in the ELT, international education and educational publishing industries in Asia, Europe and the UK. Before joining ACE Cambodia as Director of Studies in May 2019, Graham was Director of English with IDP in Thailand, Regional Manager SE Asia with Macmillan Education, Director of English Language Services with British Council Malaysia and Director of Operations for The Bell Education Trust in Asia. Graham has an MA in TEFL from the University of Reading as well as the Cambridge Diploma in TEFLA and the Trinity Diploma in TESOL.

Emotions are at the heart of teaching. Although teacher enjoyment has been linked to teacher well-being and performance, little is known about that of language teachers. In this presentation, I discuss the findings of my study on the enjoyment experienced by tertiary-level English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers. Using Q methodology (Q), this study sought explanations of the subjectivity of enjoyment specific to EFL teachers and how it can be fostered. That is, the participants (n = 40) were divided into three cohorts based on their shared views and experiences. While the first group enjoyed teaching and working in the classroom, the second and third groups viewed career value and social interaction as sources of enjoyment, respectively. The findings lend themselves to a variety of suggestions. To boost or regain enjoyment in the profession, EFL teachers are encouraged to be explicit about their expectations for student behavior, provide positive reinforcement during instruction, explore opportunities for professional development, clearly define their professional goals, and embrace opportunities for collaboration.

Athip Thumvichit is an Assistant Professor of Education at the Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia, Mahidol University, where he teaches graduate courses in language teaching. He also serves as Secretary of Thailand TESOL. He earned his PhD in English language teaching from the Language Institute, Thammasat University. His teaching and research focus on psychology for language teachers and learners, English for specific purposes, language teaching methods, and Q methodology. His recent work appears in Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, Applied Linguistics Review, International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching, and Teaching English with Technology.

The session will show how the EPG is used to assess a teacher’s competency across a range of language teaching skills. It will highlight how the EPG self-assessment can provide insight into professional development needs, and identify gaps in teacher knowledge, in order to create clear pathways for continuous professional development (CPD). The presentation will also discuss the development of a range of online self-access teacher training material created to help support teachers from inexperienced to expert level in their personal CPD. Next, an introduction to how our teachers record their PD involvement to help reflect and apply their learning to the classroom and an insight into the opportunities to share their knowledge with their colleagues. Our internal PD app will also be discussed in order to outline how we collate our teacher’s self-assessments to create a clear picture of individual and collective competencies across the business. It will also reflect on how we can use these reports to identify skill sets for our internal projects, and to help pinpoint professional development needs across the business, in order to support our ability to develop internal teacher training programs that are tailored to our teacher’s needs.

NICHOLSON Paul is the Assistant Director of Studies for ACE in Cambodia. I have worked for ACE for the past ten years and I am responsible for the professional development of all our teachers in all ACE programs. I am also the Main Course Tutor for our CELTA courses in Cambodia. I am qualified in the following areas: • M.A Applied Linguistics and TESOL • London Trinity Dip-TESOL • Cambridge CELTA • Cambridge CELTA: Young Learner Extension • CELTA Trainer • DELTA Local Tutor • Bachelor's Degree in Psychology & Counseling

Professional development is significant and vital for the education sector as it is the organized methods to catalyst change in teacher practices, attitudes, beliefs and student outcomes. There have been various means of teacher professional development (TPD) throughout the years with one upcoming trend in the 21st century is the emergence of educational non-governmental organizations (NGO) which provide avenues outside their working environment for teachers to professionally develop their skills. Besides, the platform contributes to teaching style development beyond the initial teacher training. This presentation explores the differences in teachers’ 21st century teaching styles and perceptions between the teacher-members of non-governmental organization and the non-members of the non-governmental organization. The study presents the impact of the non-governmental organization on teachers’ styles in classroom teaching in the 21st century teaching classroom. The study concludes that teachers who are NGO members have more inclination towards the 21st century teaching styles and they show positive teacher professional development towards the inclusion of 21st century teaching criteria in comparison to the non-members.

THURAIRAJA SUNMOKASUDRAM is an EL Master Teacher in Perak, Malaysia. He has a B. Ed in TESL from University of Portsmouth, UK and a M.A in Educational Leadership & Management (ELM) from the University of Nottingham. He is active in MELTA since 2014. Mr. Thurai has presented papers and showcased classroom innovations in competitions, in addition to conducting workshops and becoming forum panelists. He has also served as the leader of MELTA SIG’s for Beginning English Teacher. Prior to becoming MELTA’s Director of Chapters, Mr. Thurai served as the association’s Deputy Director for SIG and Deputy Director for Technologies.

Language teaching can be very challenging when instructors struggle with finding the right techniques to inspire active communication among learners. Furthermore, classroom communicative tasks are not often easy to build if language learners are conformed to the old conservative classroom system. Therefore, modern teachers should be able to produce effective classroom techniques by applying a communicative language teaching approach. In general, an effectively communicative classroom depends on the successful roles of the instructor and learners and how they are perceived to perform those roles well based on the communicative language teaching approach. This workshop will discuss the roles of teachers and learners in the communicative approach to language teaching and some practical classroom techniques to encourage communication in young and adult learners’ classroom.

SINKETH Raninn has experience working in both face-to-face and virtual classrooms of beginner to intermediate level learners for over 8 years. She has been involved in a professional development program for the ELT team at Australian Centre for Education (ACE) in Cambodia. In her experience, she has conducted some teaching observations to assess and give constructive feedback to EFL teachers in her team and contributed to the development of self-assessment process in the professional development program. She is interested and has been studying different classroom management approaches to promote learner autonomy, communicative and collaborative learning and improve language learning performance.

We live in a rapidly changing world, one that is increasingly interconnected. More than ever before, our students will need to use English to communicate and collaborate across borders and cultures of the inner and outer circles. This means that teaching English is no longer just about focusing on the language. Learners need to be exposed to a variety of cultures and global topics from the inner and outer circles so that they see a real need and motivation to use the language. We also need to develop our learners’ Critical thinking skills, Creative thinking, the ability to Communicate with speakers around the world, and the ability to work Collaboratively, which are often referred to as “the Four Cs of the 21st-century skills”. In this workshop, we are going to look at how English teachers can start preparing teenagers to become global learners and build their 21st-century skills.

HOU X Leang has been working as a YCP/CP/YL academic coordinator at the Australian Centre for Education (ACE) for over 3 years. He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Education from the Royal University of Phnom Penh, Cambodia and a Master's Degree in TESOL from the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He also has a certificate in Teaching Young Learners from Norwich Institute for Language Education (NILE). His areas of professional interest include curriculum development, teacher training, and project management.

It has been noted by many teachers in Cambodia that low Vocabulary range is one of the main weaknesses of Cambodian students. This lack of lexical resource stretches right the way from pre-intermediate students to students on IELTS preparation courses and EAP. A further problem for students is the lack of interest in learning new vocabulary brought on by the same old vocabulary drills. Being presented with a 'match the word to the definition, followed by a choral drill of pronunciation' activity, followed by the new lexis never being looked at again. This doesn't really inspire students to become interested enough in new items to learn them. In addition, this kind of exercise does not allow students sufficient cognitive processing time to use and manipulate new lexis. This presentation will look at ways to try and generate student interest in new vocabulary introduced in the classroom.

MCLEAN Jonathan is an academic coordinator at the Australian Centre for Education in Phnom Penh. He has been working in Cambodia for eleven years and has previously worked as an English teacher in Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur. He holds an MA in Applied Linguistics and TESOL from the University of Leicester, and module one of the DELTA. His main areas of professional interest are teacher training and teaching with technology.

Motivation is essential for all forms of learning. The biggest challenge that teachers and other educational staffs encounter is probably a lack of motivation among learners. It appears that behavioral issues in the classroom are frequently or always related to a lack of motivation. Academic success is more a product of effective priority setting and responsible behavior than it is of intelligence as it can be seen that less gifted learners with high motivation frequently outperform intelligent students in academics. A youngster may complete learning on any scale if they are driven enough. This session will discuss the factors influencing motivation and participants will have a chance to consider both students’ and teachers’ roles in influencing Motivation in EFL context, and some of the ways in which teachers can help to motivate students.

KHLAING Reaksmeypich completed her MA of Art in TESOL in mid-2021 and is working as an Academic Coordinator at Australian Centre for Education, IDP. After graduating from Institute of Foreign Languages (IFL, RUPP) in 2013 and University of Cambodia (UC) in 2012, she completed a pedagogical training at National Institute of Education (NIE) in 2014. She's presented at international conferences such as CamTESOL and TEFLIN about assessment, teaching reading, teaching speaking and so on. She has been teaching English for over ten years and her passion has been heavily centered around teacher education, motivation and curriculum development.

Language acquisition is facilitated by engaging the learner cognitively in activities that encourage language application and is made even more effective by lowering affective barriers using familiar or interesting multimodal texts and activities. With technology and increasing interconnectivity, multimodal texts now offer a rich and readily available teaching resource as they are visually appealing and can be adapted for a range of student-centred learning activities. Furthermore, student engagement is enhanced by lowering affective barriers using multimodal texts and designing tasks that encourage the constructive application of language schemas.

This presentation will share how leveraging on multimodal texts facilitates language learning and retention by tapping on the learners’ existing schema of parts of speech to extend vocabulary as well as improve the fluency of word and sentence stress. The presenter will then share principles in the pedagogical design and approach for practitioners to apply a range of multimodal texts for schema building and to help reduce learners’ affective barriers to using spoken and written English.

Claudine ANG is a Lecturer with the Training, Research, Assessment and Consultancy Department at SEAMEO-RELC, Singapore. She teaches a range of courses on the use of English in professional contexts to participants from Asia. Prior to joining RELC, she was a senior curriculum planning officer for six years at the Ministry of Education (Singapore), before her appointment as a deputy head of the English department in a top junior college in Singapore.

During her time with the Ministry of Education as a senior curriculum officer, she led the national curriculum reviews for the subjects of English Literature as well as Knowledge and Inquiry. She also designed professional training programmes for the teaching fraternity and worked with Cambridge International Examinations (CIE) on training workshops to support teachers from English departments in adapting to the revised national syllabus. Over the past 20 years, she has taught General Paper and English Literature in junior colleges in Singapore. She has designed and conducted both support and stretch programmes for a range of high and lower ability students, as well as planned and conducted professional development training for teachers in the English department. Her current areas of interest are Methodologies using Multimodal texts, Teacher Professional Development, and integrating Metacognition for Language Learning.

The Covid-19 pandemic has had varying impacts on nations all over the world. Although every field has been affected, it can be argued that the effects on education have been some of the most jarring. Millions of students and teachers were forced to adapt to virtual teaching and learning, and many more were left deprived of formal schooling altogether. As we are striving towards getting back to the pre-pandemic state, we often find ourselves focusing mostly on the technical aspects, but not necessarily on the well-being aspect of the students and teachers. As a result, a survey was conducted on a number of teachers in a private EFL institution in Cambodia, focusing on seeking and understanding their stories regarding working during the pandemic, and how they have been coping with going back to face-to-face delivery.

SUON Tepy is a Cambodian national who currently serves as a Lead Teacher at the Australian Centre for Education (ACE) in Cambodia. With over 8 years of experience in the field, she has spent a large amount of her tenure teaching English as a foreign language to students from various age groups. Prior to her current role, she obtained her M.A. in Educational Leadership and Management from Nottingham University, U.K. Her areas of interest lie in professional development, school leadership, and educational technology. Notably, her current role has inspired her to actively support students with their academic performance and well-being.

Vocabulary is one of the major components of learning a foreign language. It is an essential part of learning a language either for language fluency development or university preparation for language learners, particularly in such high-staking writing and assessment (Coxhead, 2012). Classroom tasks can provide students with the support for vocabulary learning if they are designed appropriately. In particular, cooperative speaking tasks can offer students the chance to learn vocabulary from the tasks themselves. When teachers put careful thought and effort into planning, cooperative speaking tasks can be an important mean of vocabulary growth (Nation, 2001). This presentation will discuss why we look at vocabulary in cooperative speaking tasks and offer some recommended speaking activities that can maximise students’ vocabulary growth. The session will also investigate features to improve vocabulary learning from speaking tasks. Bibliography: Coxhead, A. (2012). Academic vocabulary, writing and English for academic purposes: Perspectives from second language learners. RELC Journal, 43(1), 137-145. Nation, I. (2001). Vocabulary and listening and speaking. In Learning Vocabulary in Another Language (Cambridge Applied Linguistics, pp. 114-143). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139524759.006

CHUM Sokuntharoath is currently a Lead Teacher at Australian Centre for Education (ACE). She has had five years of teaching experience in Cambodia and one year experience of working as an early childhood relief teacher in New Zealand. Besides teaching, she has been involved in various academic projects including material developments, test development and reviews, quality assurance, and teacher training. In 2019, she received a scholarship to pursue a Master of Arts in TESOL in New Zealand. Her professional interests are educational technology, teaching and learning vocabulary, and teaching young learners. Sokuntharoath is also a regular presenter at CamTESOL conference.

Foreign/second language reading offers opportunities for incidental language acquisition. While this benefit has been well-researched and relatively well-established in the context of vocabulary learning, this is not the case for its grammar counterpart. Neither has any research examined the roles of both construction encounters and text comprehension in this learning. This study filled these gaps. Using a between-group pretest-posttest-delayed-posttest research design, it examined to what extent four groups of EFL university students in Vietnam (N = 132) picked up the knowledge of two grammar constructions through reading two sets of ten short paragraphs for the purpose of topic generation in which each construction above occurred four, six, eight or ten times. Their gain of grammatical knowledge was measured by a form recognition and a meaning recognition test, while their content comprehension was gauged by a topic matching one. A control group who merely took the pretest, posttest and delayed posttest were also included in this experiment to gauge the possible test-and-retest effects. The results showed that incidental grammar learning only consistently occurred after six encounters with the above constructions. This learning was also moderated by content comprehension. The findings altogether provide useful implications for our focus on form instruction.

After completing his BA Honour program in TESOL at Vietnam National University, Vietnam, Chi Duc did an MA in TESOL and a PhD in Applied Linguistics at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Prior to joining SEAMEO RELC in 2022, he worked as an EFL teacher educator for more than 15 years in Vietnam. Chi Duc conducts research on second language acquisition, particularly incidental learning of new vocabulary and grammar knowledge through meaning-focused input and output activities. His work has appeared in journals such as TESOL Quarterly, Language Teaching Research and RELC.

PHAM Xuan Tho is a lecturer at Faculty of Linguistics and Cultures of English-Speaking countries, University of Languages and International Studies, Vietnam National University, Hanoi where he has been teaching English Linguistics for nearly 30 years. He holds and M.A. in Applied Linguistics from La Trobe University, Australia. He has a lot of experience teaching Linguistics to both English and non-English majors. His areas of interest includes language acquisition, interlanguage grammar, phonology and pragmatics.

Using games in the classroom can keep students engaged and motivated. By competing as a team or working individually, students get to improve a variety of skills while developing good rapport with friends and teachers. This workshop will focus on three different types of fun activities in an ESL classroom. The participants will be better able to categorize the activities and adjust them to suit different groups of learners.

TEP Kanha is working as a lead teacher at Australian Centre for Education (ACE) based at Samdech Pan campus in Cambodia. In addition to teaching, she conducts professional development workshops for teachers as well as recruits and trains new staff members. She earned her Master’s degree in Education at the Royal University of Phnom Penh in 2022. In the future, she looks forward to going further in the education field in terms of education development and curriculum design.

Classroom Action Research (CAR) became a hot topic in ELT at turn of the present century, then it sorts of vanished for over a decade... in recent years governments across Southeast Asia have been strongly encouraging classroom teachers to engage in research, and suggesting action research. While there are numerous scholarly discussions of what CAR should be, few journals have accepted the teacher-friendly style academic report. This session presents the standards of the new ELT Classroom Research Journal: (1) a research question based on a classroom experience and a scholarly theory/approach; (2) a planned and organized study, even if only for one day; (3) data collection and analysis; (4) interpretation of data/conclusions based on experience, scholarly theory, and personal reflection; and (5) applying the findings in your own classroom (note the "research cycle") and sharing the findings with other teachers in a scholarly (if brief) written format. More than a poster or coffee-time chatter, not just a diary/journal entry. On the other hand, busy teachers in library-poor settings aren't ready to write for Studies in Second Language Acquisition! There is a professional middle-ground, and places to publish for academic credit.

DICKEY Robert has served as president of Korea TESOL, an officer for several teacher societies, and editor of several scholarly journals, now as Editor-in-Chief for the ELT Classroom Research Journal. He has been a teacher trainer and active with continuing professional development for over 15 years. He has been doing content-based language instruction at university in Korea for over 25 years, currently at Keimyung University in Daegu, South Korea. Prof Dickey has presented at more than 60 conferences across 12 countries and 3 continents.