On 6-7 October 2016, Monthon Kanokpermpoon, or Moddy, a third year IPhD student in Educational and Applied Linguistics at ECLS, participated in and presented his paper at the 2nd LITU-CULI International Conference: ELT Unlimited at the Ambassador Hotel, Bangkok. The event featured research presentations in Applied Linguistics and TESOL in ASEAN and Thailand in particular, such as corpus-based analysis, communicative language teaching, language learning, computer-mediated language teaching, and so on. Plenary speakers were Professor Douglas Biber (Northern Arizona University), Dr Willy A Renandya (Nanyang Technical University, Singapore), Professor Winnie Chang (The Hong Kong Polytechnic University) and Dr Suwichit Chaidaroon (University of Westminster). There were about 200 international participants from different countries, such as Malaysia, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Iran, Australia, and more, and leading professionals in Applied Linguistics and TESOL participating in this conference.
On the first day, Professor Biber presented his interesting views in the morning plenary session on a re-analysis of academic writing between native and non-native English users using corpus-based analysis. Moddy’s presentation was also in the morning parallel session entitled, “Limited or Unlimited Memory? Reading Text Presentations for Tertiary Education”, which received high attention from the audience and positive feedbacks on the results of findings. In the afternoon plenary session, Dr Renanya from Singapore encouraged participants to bridge TESOL research with practical application, especially in the Asian contexts, and presented challenges and benefits in doing so.
During lunch on the first day, there were presenters from Malaysia singing for the audience, which received high appreciations from the public. The evening welcome event also featured a traditional Thai dancing and participants could interact freely and joined traditional Thai dancing. The event ended with love, good rapport and professional tights.
On the last day of the conference, Professor Cheng from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University presented her plenary session on a new approach in teaching and learning research writing, featuring data-driven approach. Another plenary talk by Dr Chaidaroon from the University of Westminster engaged his experience on training English for ASEAN teachers of English with his suggestions on how to internationalise universities in ASEAN. As for the last panel discussion, the discussions were very fun and friendly with more thought-provoking questions on how to go from now to the future of English language teaching in Asia.
The last moment of all was very fun and touching. There were lucky draws and many small prizes for all of the participants in the conference.
This fruitful and friendly moment could not be made possible without the ECLS PGR funding for Moddy. Thank you so much!
Written by Monthon (Moddy) Kanokpermpoon, 3rd Year, Integrated PhD Education & Applied Linguistics.