Member Event Fund Report – Association of language schools of the Czech Republic

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“As Association of language schools of the Czech Republic we are pleased to be associated member of Eaquals and its support for our conference gave us the chance to prepare the programme and the organisation to the very needs of language teachers. It is an honour to use Eaquals brand together with our and also to promote it further in the Czech language market.”

Vitezslav Bican, Chair

Association of language schools of the Czech Republic organises the conference Modern approaches in language learning and teaching in Prague annually and this year’s conference was already 7th in a row.

This year’s programme ran from 9am to 5:20pm in 4 language strands and in 9 rooms simultaneously. The English strand ran in 6 rooms, German, Russian and French/Spanish in one room each. There was an official opening for all participants and an opening plenary session in the English section. The closing plenary was common for all participants from all language sections.

This year we had 534 registered participants, two thirds of whom came from private language schools and one third from state schools (elementary and secondary schools). The conference obtained the accreditation from the Czech Ministry of Education and thus is officially recognized as a CPD programme for language teachers.

There were 44 sessions held by 34 speakers, including the plenaries, major talks and smaller workshops. 23 conference partners covered whole range of language institutions from AJS member schools, service providers and exam providers to large publishing houses such as OUP, Klett, Fraus and Pearson.

There was no main theme of the conference and the topics of the sessions reached from language competences (How to get your students speaking), using technology (Wired on students), teaching grammar (Erzählen im Präteritum – oder im Perfekt?) and young learners (English from the very first word) to general topics (Why should we never stop learning) and self-management (Get rid of stress). Our keynote speakers were Hugh Dellar (National Geographic Learning) and Martin Jelinek (Macmillan).

From the participants’ feedback we collected after the conference we have received very positive responses, but also a couple of ideas for the next conference in 2019. The overall impression of the conference was 1.7 on the 1-5 sale, with 1 being the best impression. From evaluations of the particular sessions we have seen how individual speakers were received from the participants.