The annual conference of the National Association of English Teachers in Kazakhstan (NATEK) took place on 27-29 May in Kzylorda.  British Council, the co-sponsor of the conference with the US Embassy was represented by the BC’s “ETTE” project trainers and Hornby alumni, with their presentation of BC teacher training materials on ‘Classroom English’ and ‘TKT Essentials’.  BC ELT Consultant Brian Maguire presented BC Global Products and the BC LearnEnglish and TeachingEnglish web sites at the plenary.

More than 100 English teachers participating in the conference plenary were delighted to listen to the BC sponsored UK teacher trainer and EL course-book author Mr Hugh Dellar, who made three presentations on the first day of the conference.

Hugh’s first presentation was a plenary and the topic was ‘Lexis, speaking and non-native speaker teachers’.  The speaker touched upon different types of collocations, idioms, metaphors and fears a non-native speaker faces when trying to produce fluent speech. He then showed how innovations deal with the realities of the monolingual classroom and the ways of overcoming fears of non-native speakers.

In his second session, ‘Five Golden Rules’ Hugh Dellar shared an interesting thought with the audience: “Language is not lexicalised grammar; it is, rather, grammaticalised lexis”. This raised arguments and discussion among the participants and many different opinions were expressed.  In conclusion, he presented 5 Golden Rules:

• Use lexical materials
• Foster Linguistic Awareness
• Deal with errors
• Give the students practice
• Follow the triple X rule!

In his third and final presentation “New Routes to Fluency’ session the trainer started by defining expectations students come to the classroom and outlined unit topics from typical course books. He then described the minimum grammar and vocabulary learners need in order to produce fluent speech and went on to say that using language creatively is part of everyday speech, even at low levels of proficiency.

Next year the NATEK conference is scheduled for the end of April in Pavlodar and the British Council is looking forward to playing a significant role in this forthcoming event.

NATEK 2010 Conference Schedule