IATEFL 2025 - My review
Contents
- What is IATEFL?
- How was my conference talk?
- How were the plenary sessions?
- Catherine Walter – 50 years on: what has changed?
- Carolina Kuepper-Tetzel – Lessons Learned: using the science of learning to inform teaching
- Daniel Xerri – Teachers and Classroom research: ownership, relevance and conceptualisations
- Neil McMillan – Big asks and uphill tasks: making a case for TBLT
- Alicia Waters Galan and Harry Waters – Five burning questions to education from a young changemaker
- What talks did I attend?
- Were there any talks I would have liked to attend?
- What about the rest of the conference?
- IATEFL 2026
I am typing this sat on a 5 hour train from Edinburgh to Peterborough having just spent a week at the world’s biggest gathering of English language teachers, teacher trainers, academic managers, examiners, publishers and authors. IATEFL 2025 is my third time at the conference, although only my second time speaking, and my second time in person.
What follows are some of my reflections on the conference based on a combination of my notes and memories. If any speaker feels I have misrepresented their session or points that they made please do let me know and I will be happy to make changes.
What is IATEFL?
If you’re not yet familiar with IATEFL, it is a membership organisation for anyone involved with teaching English around the world. Although there is more to IATEFL, it is best known for the annual conference which takes place in a different city in the UK each year. The conference hosts hundreds of talks which are attended by thousands of conference delegates who come from all over the world.
2025 marked the 58th year of the IATEFL conference and took place in Edinburgh. You can find out more about the conference here.
How was my conference talk?
This year my talk was titled “Designing authentic receptive skills tasks.” I was very happy that my talk was selected for the first day of the conference and took place before lunchtime. Not that you are given any choice, but this is generally considered to be one of the best slots to have your talk, for at least two reasons:
- Any pre-talk anxiety you might have is limited to the first morning of the conference. After you have spoken, you are able to enjoy the rest of the conference.
- The conference delegates tend to be alert and eager at this point in the conference.
I turned up to the room where I had my talk about 10 minutes before it was due to start, expecting that I might get a handful of people who hadn’t been drawn to the other talks at that time. To my surprise, the room was packed and I had to ask people to move to allow me to get in the room. A steward was already outside the room asking people to consider going to a different session.
I had been worried about the length of my talk, as I had revised a talk I have given elsewhere and reduced the number of slides. Nevertheless, I started early and still finished exactly on time.
In my talk, I presented four ideas for more authentic receptive skills tasks along with a principle that I thought they demonstrated. There were plenty of opportunities for the delegates to take part in the session.
At the end of the session, a number of delegates approached me to ask for a copy of my slides, and I was asked if I would like to participate in a conference in Austria.
Unfortunately there is not a recording of my talk, but I do plan to make it a video on my YouTube channel in the near future.
How were the plenary sessions?
At IATEFL there were five plenary sessions – one at the start of each day and a final plenary session on the last day to wind the conference up. I managed to attend three of the five plenary sessions.
Catherine Walter - 50 years on: what has changed?
The first plenary was by Catherine Walter who has been involved in English teaching for over 50 years and was sharing her perspective of what has changed in that time. In short, the answer is a lot including what we know about language, the demands of students and parents, the needs to teach to assessment and of course the technology. Powerfully though she concluded with what remains constant, that teachers and students work together to achieve outcomes, and long may that continue.
Carolina Kuepper-Tetzel - Lessons Learned: using the science of learning to inform teaching
I found Carolina Kuepper-Tetzel’s session on using science to inform learning quite interesting. In particular she spoke about the power of repetition and retrieval practice. If you have heard of spaced repetition before you will know that it concerns the idea of re-encountering new information at increasing intervals of time. Retrieval practice is the idea that learning something, doing a test and then learning again tends to be more effective than simply studying it multiple times. The talk finished with a demonstration of how adding our own context can help us improve our ability to remember new information.
Daniel Xerri - Teachers and Classroom research: ownership, relevance and conceptualisations
Daniel Xerri’s plenary was the third and final one that I attended and dealt with the gulf between research and teaching encouraging teachers to play the role of researcher in their classrooms. There is certainly a disconnect between the research that takes place in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) and the methodology of ELT classrooms. A cynic would say that this is in no small part due to the commercial reality of coursebook-driven ELT. Daniel suggested that more classroom research may help to narrow this chasm as teachers find the word research less intimidating and understand the process. What was perhaps missing from the talk was the practical steps to conduct such research.
Neil McMillan - Big asks and uphill tasks: making a case for TBLT
I arrived a bit late on the final day for Neil McMillan’s plenary, although having spoke to several delegates who attended, it seems it was very interesting. Although it was on task based learning, he pointed out that since 2015 only one plenary at IATEFL has been on methodology, as the conference has been dominated by talks on social justice and EDI. This echoed conversations that I’d had the previous day and even that morning about the lack of methodology talks within the conference on the whole, and had led me to wondering whether my own talk had actually been a good fit for the conference. That is somewhat tangential to the main point of the talk however which was on task based learning and did include an example of a task, ways to incorporate language work and a call to action to encourage more take up of task based learning.
Alicia Waters Galan and Harry Waters - Five burning questions to education from a young changemaker
I didn’t attend the final plenary of the conference which was by Harry Waters and his daughter Alicia and was titled five burning questions about education from a young changemaker. Had I not been so tired at this point in the conference, the talk could have been quite interesting as conferences often deal with our views as educators, but rarely take into account the views of students, much less young learners who make up the majority of English students around the world these days. Something I do notice about teachers as a whole is that we can be very focused on what we want for our students, and perhaps not focused enough on what they want or think. With young learners in particular there is perhaps an attitude of “teacher knows best” since we are the adults. However, I don’t think that should ever exclude consideration of what our students’ goals, opinions, concerns and questions are.
What talks did I attend?
One of the things you have to do when you go to IATEFL is to try to plan which talks you will go to in advance. There are easily 20 talks happening at any one time, so if you don’t plan, you may well find you end up in talks that are not that interesting for you. I won’t go through all of the talks I went to here, but just those that resonated with me most strongly.
Authenticity
As I had presented on authenticity, I was attracted to Danny Norrington-Davies‘ talk titled “Renegotiating authenticity in materials design.” At the very least, I had to go along to see if his talk invalidated everything in mine. I’m pleased to say, it didn’t. While I had spoken about task authenticity, Danny introduced the idea of about ten different forms of authenticity. Although I would perhaps question the use of the word authenticity with some of these, there were certainly some interesting ones. For example, the idea of digital authenticity of a text – i.e. that students access digital texts in the ways that they actually would. He also described backdoor authenticity which I would explain as skills or language which is relevant to students being practised through scenarios which may not seem quite so relevant.
AI and Technology
I have been trying to avoid talks that specifically focus on AI, although this is no easy task. In Brighton last year there were around 40, and this year I was told the number that mentioned AI in the abstract was over 60. I did therefore go to a couple including Marcus Siconolfi’s talk “Forget AI, leverage HI: human intelligence“, and Nick Thorner’s “Is technology killing off the language classroom?” In both cases, the message seems to be that language teachers are still likely to have a job in the future. For all that AI can currently do, the human side of learning languages remains far too important with concepts like community and relatedness being of great importance.
Teaching Vocabulary
As I am interested in the lexical approach, I attended Crayton Walker’s “CHUNK vs. CORE: two different approaches to teaching vocabulary“. Crayton does not seem to be very fond of the lexical approach and the influence of Michael Lewis on teaching collocation. One key idea he mentioned is the idea that collocation is not arbitrary, or at least 85% of collocation is not arbitrary, but instead it can be related to the core meanings of polysemous words. This struck a chord with me because I recall when hearing from Hugh Dellar (in 2018) how language was essentially arbitrary that I couldn’t entirely agree with this idea. Language is certainly not devoid of logic; we can see that in the ways that new words are formed, or how words take on new meanings over time. However, there has to be a question of how useful it is for students to understand this logic, and whether that makes for efficacious language learning. Crayton proposed an exercise that would have students grouping chunks or phrases into core meanings. This might be useful, but while Crayton implied that the Lexical Approach depends on rote memorisation of chunks, students would need to be familiar with a number of chunks before they were able to do such an exercise.
Teacher Observation
I attended a couple of sessions on observing teachers, which is something that I have done as both an academic manager and teacher trainer. The title of Carole Anne Robinson’s stood out for me: “How can we make management observations effective, developmental and enjoyable?” This was a question I had tried to answer in my own practice while working for International House in Moscow, having proposed “developmental observations” that were separate to those used for quality control and which were reported back to HR for the purpose of deciding which teachers to renew contracts with. One of the ideas which I recall was that of blind or shadow observations (i.e. an observation where the observer does not actually observe the lesson). I later attended Jason Anderson’s talk with Jaber Kumali on Narrative-Self Observations. In this talk, they provided a framework based on this idea of shadow observation.
In both cases this idea of observing without actually observing was a concept that I hadn’t considered before. While I can see it working potentially with teachers who are both experienced and driven, I feel the biggest stumbling block to such an approach is likely to be those people that represent the commercial interests of the school that simply wouldn’t see the point in investing the time before and after an observation without actually seeing the class. However, the suggestion was also made that the framework could equally be used as a method of peer observation.
I found Matthew Ellman’s talk “Feedback as the barometer of teacher effectiveness” to be an interesting idea. He questioned whether we actually know what effective teaching looks like, and suggested that the presence and quality of feedback may provide a very good indicator. While I felt he made a good argument for this, my concern would be the washback effect of focusing on a single aspect of teaching. If teachers know they are being assessed on feedback, they would likely work on that aspect of their teaching to the detriment of other aspects.
More Teacher Development
Continuing the theme of teacher development, I attended Melissa Lamb’s “Down tools and talk” and Lindsay Warwick’s “Differentiated learning in a teacher education session“. Unfortunately, I was a bit late to Melissa’s session, but it focused on the role of casual conversations in teacher development and the importance of being genuine. Lindsay’s session proposed a model for teacher training sessions which would allow for differentiation in different ways. In my opinion, it looked very similar to the “test-teach-test” or “task-teach-task” lesson framework that we encourage teachers to use. The framework consisted of drawing out teachers’ experience, providing some form of input and then providing opportunities for the teachers to apply it in practical ways.
CELTA
I attended, I’m told, the only CELTA-focussed talk at the conference this year, which was by Alastair and Jacqueline Douglas and was about innovation on CELTA courses. They offered some very interesting ideas about doing the CELTA in different ways. Offering one-to-one teaching practice sessions is certainly a nice idea since student numbers can be difficult to come by and is perhaps more reflective of a lot of the teaching that happens in the real world. More interesting, I thought, was the idea of combining assignments in some way. The example given was to have students do their skills-related task based on a text of their choosing, but then assign language or allow them to choose particular language from those texts for the language related tasks assignment.
Were there any talks I would have liked to attend?
There were a number of talks I would have liked to have gone to but didn’t for one of the following reasons:
- They were at the same time as my talk;
- They was no space left in the room;
- They were the same time as another talk;
- I had to leave to do a CELTA session;
- They sounded interesting but I didn’t think they would be too relevant for me.
What about the rest of the conference?
The most enjoyable part of any conference for me is the networking. This is often awkward to some extent because it involves approaching people that you don’t know, or may have only spoken to by email or in some online capacity before. However, the more you go to these kinds of things the more people you know and the easier it becomes.
Another important part of conferencing is often the evening events. Unfortunately, I had CELTA sessions most evenings and therefore was unable to partake fully, but I did manage to get out on the one evening that I didn’t have CELTA.
While in a new city, you also should take the opportunity to see some of the local sights. I have been to Edinburgh before, but that was when I was a child, so there were certainly plenty of things for me to check out in Edinburgh, and I think I managed to fit in quite a few of them:
IATEFL 2026
IATEFL 2026 will be in Brighton from 21 to 24 April. If you’re interested in going or submitting a speaker proposal, visit the IATEFL conference website.