On November 26 several members of the British Council Malaysia team attended the MELTA International Research Conference in English Language Education 2016, held at the University Technology MARA in Kuala Lumpur.
This is an annual event aimed at promoting and encouraging teachers and teacher educators to do and share their research through Action Research, Masters’ dissertations and PHD research. The event brought over 200 teachers, researchers and educators together to share their findings via poster presentations, a series of feature presentations and a competition to award prizes to the best posters and oral presentations.
Lisa Walsh, teacher mentor, gave an excellent feature presentation drawing on five years of experience on the English Language Teacher Development project in Malaysia guiding teachers to do, reflect on and share their classroom-based research.
Teachers, Katie Martin and Samira Hazari gave poster presentations on research they have done, drawing lots of interest and questions from local teachers. Samira’s research focused on Developing metacognition through recognition in young learners, while Katie’s looked at Investigating the effectiveness of a form-focussed vocabulary game. Samira entered the competition and walked away with a Silver Award and you can see their full posters below.
The event provided an interesting insight into the culture of sharing research in Malaysia with very high standards of ELT research.
By: Keith O’Hare