British Council IATEFL Blog

Meet the team

Meet our team from British Council South East Europe attending the IATEFL 2011 Conference in Brighton, UK.

Eilidh Hamilton, Director English and Exams Turkey
I’m Eilidh – pronounced like ‘daily’ without the ‘d’. I’m from Scotland, but I currently live in Istanbul. I’m the Director of English and Exams for the British Council in Turkey and I lead on our work in English across our ‘Wider Europe’ region.

This is my 4th IATEFL conference and every year I look forward to sharing ideas with and being inspired by ELT colleagues from around the world.

With a former colleague who’s now based in Tunisia, I’m doing a workshop on Chanting Creatively with Young Learners. It’s on Monday 18th. We’re going to look at how you can take a simple pattern and write chants in class with your students – as well as discuss why you should! :)

I’m looking forward to being in touch with you all throughout the conference – let me know if you have any questions or sessions you’d like me to attend on your behalf then report on!

Happy IATEFL-ing!

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Željko Jovanović, Marketing and Communications Manager Wider Europe
I am working in our Belgrade office, Serbia, and will try to pull together all of our posts, photos, tweets and videos to you. This means that I will be working closely with the rest of the team, making sure all of our posts are published instantly.

I am pretty excited about the whole thing and cannot wait to get all those posts and tweets coming your way and checking out your comments so please, keep them coming!

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Leo Selivan, Teacher Trainer, Israel
I am a teacher trainer and materials developer with the British Council Tel Aviv. I’ve been at the British Council for the last 7 years and have also taught in Cyprus, Turkey, the UK and Russia. I regularly present at teachers’ conferences, give workshops and write for the BC website TeachingEnglish. I am particularly interested in using multimedia in the classroom and consider myself an advocate of the Lexical Approach. I have recently started my blog for teachers: http://leoxicon.blogspot.com.

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Helen Sykes, ELT Project Manager, Israel
My name’s Helen and this is a picture of me with my favourite word!

I’m originally from the UK but I live in Tel Aviv where I lead the British Council ELT team.  We work with hundreds of Israeli English teachers on all sorts of exciting English projects throughout the country!

I’m already excited about IATEFL Brighton and have my bags half packed as I’m flying in to the UK a few days early to hand over my toddler to Granny and Grandpa before the conference!

I can’t wait to take my seat for the plenary sessions that look really interesting this year and am looking forward to learning, sharing and refuelling the ELT part of my brain as the conference gets underway!  I’ll also be sure to enjoy the evening events and make some new friends along the way.

My workshop (on Monday 18th) is about how to use reading circles to get kids enjoying and discussing good books.   I’ll let you know how it goes!

Come along if you can and if you can’t, keep checking our blog where we’ll try our best to bring the conference to you!

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Sirin Soyuz, e-Learning Projects Coordinator, Turkey
I’m Sirin and I’m ELT e-learning projects coordinator for the British Council in Turkey. This is my first year working on the IATEFL Online project. I am very happy to be part of this conference and have the chance to meet you online.

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Nicola Crowley, British Council Teacher, Israel
I’m from Ireland but have been living in Israel for the past 4 years. I work for the British Council in Tel Aviv under many hats; teacher, teacher trainer, materials developer, coordinator ….This means that work is never dull and there is lots of room to be creative which is great.

This is my second time at IATEFL. Last year I got to sit back and let the knowledge seep into my brain (well at least some of it did) but this year I’m presenting. My workshop is on ‘Using YouTube’ and am looking forward to doing it. Fingers crossed all will go well. I’ll keep you posted!

Now I must figure out what to pack…….

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Fran Sokel,  Regional Inspector for English, Ministry of Education Israel & Pedagogical Counselor/ Lecturer, Sha’anan College of Education
I’m originally from England but have been living in Israel for many years. In addition to my professional hats, I am studying for my doctorate through the University of Bath and very much enjoying the challenge, and am also an active member of ETAI- English Teachers’ Association in Israel.

I have never had the pleasure of attending an international conference other than the ETAI international conferences we hold in Jerusalem every few years, so am really looking forward to this experience.

I will be presenting at IATEFL on the Sunday. My presentation ‘Teaching (English) in a Changing World’ is founded upon parts of my doctoral literature review. Even though I’ve given many presentations before I’m really nervous about this one… I guess that’s normal :)

Looking forward to meeting everyone!

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Ivana Lekić, Education and Teacher Training Agency, Croatia
I am an education advisor and a teacher trainer. My job responsibilities include providing professional and advisory support to teachers of English and German as foreign languages; organizing a wide range of both primary and secondary teacher training courses (seminars and workshops); monitoring county coordinators of teacher training; supervising internship-teaching candidates and organizing state exams; school inspection. My main area of interest is the role of teachers, teaching philosophy and transformation of teaching methodology.

This is my 1st IATEFL conference and I am looking forward to meeting and sharing ideas with ELT colleagues from around the world. I will be presenting at IATEFL on Monday, 18th. I’ve been working on my presentation ‘How to improve EFL teaching in primary schools’ for a few days now and haven’t finished it yet.  I hope everything will go well.

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Karin Tirasin, English Teacher, Turkey
My name is Karin and I am a Norwegian English teacher currently living and teaching full time in a private K-8 school in İzmir, Turkey. I took my first baby-steps into the blogosphere in February when I decided to enter the British Council’s Blogathon 2011 competition under the alias of “CoffeeAddict”. To my surprise and delight, I won the Gold award, a trip to the IATEFL conference in Brighton! During the conference I hope to be able to share some of my experiences, observations and thoughts with you here in this blog.

I also have a personal blog at http://coffeeaddict.edublogs.org - check it out!

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Suzanne Mordue, Teacher Trainer, Turkey
My name is Suzanne and I am the Teacher Trainer at the British Council in Istanbul.

In the last year we have started training teachers through organising short ELT festivals in different cities and the positive reaction to these means that I hope to continue this theme for the foreseeable future.

Apart from teacher training I am also involved in producing online learning materials and developing courses in virtual learning environments (VLE).

I am looking forward to IATEFL and found this conference very useful from a networking perspective last year as I made a few new contacts and renewed a few old ones.

This year I will be doing a joint presentation with my colleague, Sirin Soyoz, on E-tivities in which we hope to share a lot of ideas while also having a bit of fun. Hope to see you there!
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Eva Buyuksimkesyan, Teacher, Turkey
Hi, my name is Eva Buyuksimkesyan. I’m an EFL teacher and an edublogger from Istanbul. I’ve been teaching for 22 years and attending an IATEFL conference was one of my dreams. I took British Council’s blogathon challenge just because of that dream. I got one of the silver awards and now I’m packing form y 1st IATEFL conference and I believe it will be a great event to update my teaching skill and it will also be another challenge for blogging. I’ll try to share what I learn with my colleagues who won’t be able to attend the conference this year. Also I believe our presence will make them to dream for IATEFL 2012.

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Marina Simovic, Teacher, Montenegro
I have been teaching English at ‘Miloje Dobrasinovic’ Secondary School, Bijelo Polje, Montenegro since 1997. In 2004 I took part in programs of teacher training and mentoring younger colleagues. My area of interest is work with teenagers and what makes it easier for them to acquire and enjoy learning English. I took several courses based on MI which help me in my work with this age group. I am very interested in drama and try to implement it in my teaching whenever I can.

I have been recently appointed to the position of president of the association of teachers of Montenegro.

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Sylvia Velikova, Teacher and Teacher Educator, Bulgaria
I am a teacher educator at the University of Veliko Turnovo, Bulgaria and have been involved in British Council Bulgaria projects related to teacher education and development. I have presented at various conferences in Bulgaria and abroad, but this is my first ever IATEFL Conference and also my first year as  President of the Bulgarian English Teachers’ Association (BETA), so I’m truly excited to be able to take part in IATEFL Brighton 2011. I look forward to the chance of meeting, networking and learning with colleagues from around the world, and to sharing my experiences with those who could not attend the event. 

At the conference, on Monday (18th April), I will also be doing a workshop, which will focus on the “why” and “how” of fostering a culture of listening in the language classroom.
See you in Brighton!

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