Written by: Zhivka Ilieva, Dobrich College of Shumen University, Bulgaria
Many years ago, at IATEFL East in 2001 in Plovdiv, I received an invitation from the President of LATEUM (Linguistic Association of the Teachers of English at the University of Moscow) to present at their conference. This year I was invited again to participate in their 10th conference. As a member of BETA I applied for and received a partial bursary from our association to attend the conference and to present there my paper entitled “The Modern Technologies and their Contribution to Tourism College Students’ Foreign Language Development”.
I would like to express my gratitude to LATEUM for inviting me to this event and to BETA for supporting my participation at the Conference in Russia.
From 28 to 30 September 2011, the 10th Jubilee LATEUM Conference “Linguistics and ELT Today: Tradition and Innovation” was held at Lomonosov Moscow State University. It marked the 20-year anniversary of LATEUM. It is the oldest Russian association of teachers of English founded at the Department of English Linguistics, Philology Faculty, Moscow State University (MSU). MSU is the oldest Russian university with over 250 years of history and LATEUM is an affiliate of IATEFL and a member of the World Federation of Modern Language Associations accredited by UNESCO.
The venue was Moscow State University, Humanities Building 1. The working languages were English and Russian. The organizing committee consisted of young and enthusiastic people working in the field of Linguistics, Literature, Culture and ELT. There were about 100 presentations: plenary sessions, talks, workshops.
The talks and workshops were divided under the headings of the following SIGs:
- Discourse Analysis and Pragmatics
- Business English
- Modern Technologies in ELT and Teacher Development
- Global English
- Phonetics and Phonology
- Semantics and Cognitive Studies
- Literature Studies
- Translation and Contrastive Studies
- Media, Communication and Culture
- Lexico-Grammar and ESP.
The plenaries were delivered by scientists from MSU and other institutions: Prof. Natalia Gvishiani, Prof. Ronald Carter, Prof. Svetlanna Ter-Minasova, Christian Duncumb, Thomas Santos, Toni Hull, Gavin Dudeney, Prof. Marklin Konurbaev, Prof. Tamara Nazarova, Prof. Vera Zabotkina, Prof. Olga Aleksandrova and covered topics like Corpus Linguistics, Global English, IT in Language Education, eLearning, Teacher Autonomy, etc.
There were more than 200 participants, representatives of about 40 institutions from all over Russia and from different countries in the world.
There was a Book Exhibition and Fair and a rich social programme: a welcoming wine reception, an evening for visiting theatres, concerts, exhibitions, or just walking around Moscow, a conference dinner. All these events together with the very well organized coffee breaks provided opportunities for professional and friendly conversations with colleagues from various universities and ELT associations in Russia and around the world, for exchanging information and invitations for the events we organize.
Overall, the event was impressive! The organization was perfect and the guests received a warm welcome!