Many times over the years I have tried to find out about conferences and other TESL-related events available throughout the world in case I could find the opportunity to attend beyond my local events. This has involved me looking through the various well-known organisations, like TESL Canada, TESOL and IATEFL. These sites, through informative, tend to list their affiliates’ events only, so one needs to go from one site to another and mentally try to juxtapose the listed events together. In other places, you tend to find Event Calendars, which are great in principle, but they are often not kept up-to-date and browsing month by month is taxing.
From time to time, I’ll also become aware of online events or regional conferences through Twitter updates suggesting things like “join me in my webinar in 20 minutes”, which is great and all, but it would have been nice to have them all listed in one place. So I Google things like “TESL TEFL conferences” and end up with either outdated links to past events or completely unrelated items.
This led me to making the grand decision for my 50th TESLtree post to spend the time looking through all the websites I could find to collate what I could find together in a nice, chronological list on one page so that not only I, but any other interested parties, could see everything altogether. At this early stage, I’ve just indicated the date, conference/event name with a link to the information website about it, tag line and location. I also made a few calls with regards to ones I included, by self-determining the audience, relative size of the event and whether information was presented in English. As I work through it more closely, I aim to develop it to include key speakers and links to online streaming where available (I’ve begun, but information seems to be limited when events are later in the year).
Please pass this list on and let me know if you know of any other great events that I can list. I’m particularly interested in events that have an online aspect for international attendees to participate in. Leave a comment with links if you find anything extra! Thank you and enjoy!
