UST Graduate School Faculty Secretary Alejandro S. Bernardo, Ph.D., was invited by Asia TEFL and the Thammasat University Language Institute to be a featured speaker at the 17th Asia Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) and the 6th Foreign Language Learning and Teaching (FLLT) international conference. It was held from June 27 to 29, 2019 at the Ambassador Hotel, Bangkok, Thailand.
Bernardo, who is affiliated with the UST Department of English, represented the Philippines and delivered a lecture on World Englishes and English Language Teaching (ELT) as his contribution to the realization of the conference theme “ELT for Glocal Synergies across Disciplines and Multilingual Ambiences.” The conference brought together hundreds of leading scholars, classroom practitioners, teachers, teacher trainers and policy makers from all over the world.
An associate professor at the Faculty of Arts and Letters, Bernardo underscored the need for an endonormative pedagogic model for teaching English in his talk. His lecture further explored how the World Englishes (WE) paradigm may inform ELT at the theoretical (axiomatic), the methodological (procedural) and the technical (implementational) levels. He argued that the modern day ELT necessitates WE-inspired, WE-adherent, and WE-compliant approaches that inform methods, methods that inform procedures, and procedures that inform a collection of techniques. He attempted at constructively aligning these three levels with World Englishes as the overall framework and provided practical applications of this alignment so it could be more effectively cascaded and translated to daily classroom pedagogies.
The pedagogical dimension of WE has always been Bernardo’s area of interest. He has published several papers on the topic.
During the conference, Bernardo met with a Routledge series editor, Karen Adler, for a possible project, a book on the development of local WE pedagogies and instructional materials, to be completed in the next two years.
The regional representative of ASIA TEFL, Prof. Isabel P. Martin, Ph.D., of the Ateneo de Manila University, was requested months back to identify a potential featured speaker from the Philippines. Martin nominated Bernardo, and the executive committee accepted Bernardo’s nomination as the country representative.
The other featured speakers were: Le Pham Hoai Huong (English Department, University of Foreign Languages, Hue University, Vietnam), Oryang Kwon (Department of English Language Education, Seoul National University), Fauzia Shamim (Professor and Dean, Faculty of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences at Ziauddin University, Karachi, Pakistan), Yanty Wirza (Assistant Professor at English Education Study Program, Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia) and Raja Nor Safinas Raja Harun (Associate professor at the English Language and Literature Department, Universiti Pendidikan Sultan Idris, Malaysia).
As carried out in the previous conferences, there were six featured presentations in the conference, represented by a speaker from each of the following countries: Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, Philippines, South Korea, and Vietnam.
