The Hungarian Sun Likes its English Teachers

or the 20th Annual IATEFL Hungary Conference

The biggest EFL teachers’ event in Hungary took place at the Children and Youth Centre at Zánka, on Lake Balaton, over the weekend of October 8th to 10th this year. About 250 English teaching professionals from all over Hungary, representatives of partner teachers’ associations from Austria, Slovakia, Slovenia, the Czech Republic and, of course, people from the UK, along with major EFL literature publishing houses, spent these three very busy days exploring new normalities in the classroom, as invited by the by-line of this year’s conference motto, “Standing out or being Outstanding”.

The opening plenary talk was delivered by a guru of English teachers, and not only Hungarian ones, Professor Peter Medgyes, a man of many professions; apart from the obvious teaching and teacher training one, he is a successful writer of EFL books, but also deputy state secretary and a diplomat. He was talking about classroom discipline, or rather the lack of it, in Hungarian schools and reminded many of us of Ed McBain’s (alias Even Hunter) Blackboard Jungle, which has arrived in our part of the world with a delay of more than some fifty years. (Peter Medgyes’s books are The Non-Native Teacher, Hueber Macmillan Prentice Hall, 1998 and Laughing Matters: Humour in the Language Classroom, CUP, 2002).

The rest of the Friday afternoon was reserved for the SIG programme and covered Culture and Literature, ICT, Young Learners Technologies and Special Needs Education. At 8 p.m. everybody was more than ready for a glass of nice Hungarian wine at the buffet reception and a friendly talk. Those who were still full of beans enjoyed the Jazzy Night with Chaz Pugliese, which was not jazzy but bluesy actually, but nobody minded.

The other two conference days offered three more plenary speakers. Sally Farley (Pilgrims, Canterbury, UK) dealt with specific learning difficulties and inclusive education in EFL, Nik Peachey, (freelance educational specialist, UK, now Morocco) whose main area of interest lies in the new web-based learning technologies and online and blended learning courses and, last but not least, David A. Hill (free-lance ELT consultant, UK, living in Budapest), whose thought-provoking talk addressed the issue of creativity in both learning and teaching a foreign language. In his talk he guided the audience through 12 techniques and approaches, originally aimed at academia and at industry, and demonstrated how easily they can be applied to foreign language learning while preserving their validity. The very first of them is the need to establish purpose and intention. When stretched to EFL, we often have to admit that we teach and have been teaching what David calls ENPP – English for No Particular Purpose. The same applies for the learner – he/she learns the language without knowing what for or why; it is simply there on their timetable. What changes the situation is CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning), which provides everybody with a very clear purpose and, according to David, the future of EFL lies in it. If you want to learn more about the strategies mentioned, go to R.J. Sternberg and his Handbook of Creativity (CUP, 1999). However, what you will not find there is David’s way of presenting and commenting on them, which was very witty and interesting. On top of that, I somehow doubt that many plenary talks start with the presenter singing to their audience for well over 3 minutes. It is a pity that nobody videoed it, so you will probably have to wait for another conference where David Hill will be presenting and maybe singing, too . (The nearest one you can try is TESOL France in Paris in late November).

Besides the SIGs and plenary talks, the conference provided space for as many as 58 more shorter talks and workshops, organized in sessions of approx. 8 at a time. The ones I went to were all very rewarding, offering new and practical ideas for how to refresh your lessons, and were all delivered in impressively nice English, no matter if the speaker was a native speaker or not.

There was no worry about ending up with an oxygen deficit or your muscles having stiffened from sitting only, as the sessions took place in several buildings strewn all over a 209-hectare park. Luckily, as the title suggests, the weather was fabulous; it was sunny and very warm for the time of year, and the walks between the buildings were most enjoyable (until the moment you literally bumped into a wild boar, like me, but that is another story and luckily the pig was only a teenager, not the full-size version, but it scared me anyway).

Even if you ended up spending the day in just one building, you could get moving and hopping and dancing at the Scottish evening on Saturday night or jumping with joy over a nice prize in the two raffles which, among many other goodies, included a one-week methodology course in the UK.

All in all, I was very glad, when offered the opportunity to be the official MSATE representative, that I decided to go, even if the journey to Balaton, if taken by public transport, is more of a crusade than a business or pleasure trip (12 hours on trains from Olomouc, each way, if everything is on time), as I was not disappointed.

The 20th IATEFL Hungary conference had everything you expect a good conference to have: interesting speakers, motivating and challenging topics, a friendly atmosphere, nice colleagues, and food for thought, and it was all perfectly organized.

Besides, personally, I must admit that I would much rather go to an IATEFL conference anywhere than to one for academics only, as those tend to be extra-dry and theoretical and no Martini is served to make them more digestible…

Nora Gill, Department of English, Faculty of Education, Palacky University, Olomouc