Like many other conferences and events in our industry, the 9th ELT Malta Conference is being held virtually this year. The event is open to English Language teachers in Malta and it will be held over a period of 3 days, from the 8th until the 10th of October 2020. The theme chosen for this year’s conference is “Teaching in Challenging Times”.

Like in previous years, the conference will have the input of some of the best local and international teacher trainers. A very interesting session that was held earlier on today during the Business Stream, which is a branch of the ELT Malta Conference that focuses on CPD for school owners and Directors of Studies, was the talk on How to Grow from Covid-19, a talk given by Hazel Miller who has over 20 years experience in developing, delivering and facilitating personal growth and development programmes in the areas of stress management, emotional resilience and stress management.

The Virtual conference kicked off today, the 8th of October at 1300hrs CEST with a welcome speech by Dr. Daniel Xerri, ELT Council Chairperson. In his welcome speech, Dr. Xerri focused on the challenges that teachers in the ELT sector have had to face this past year mainly as a result of the global pandemic that brought about a dip in student numbers worldwide, including in Malta. This resulted in a number of teachers having to re-learn how to deliver lessons to students who are not present in their classes, in a relatively short period of time. But as is usually the case in our industry, teachers have risen to the occasion thanks to training and CPD.

The rest of the day on Thursday and the seminars on Friday consisted of talks on various topics related to English Language Teaching and challenges that teachers are currently facing right now due to the global pandemic.

The peak of the 9th ELT Malta Virtual Conference will be on Saturday afternoon with the announcement of the winners of the 7th ELT Inspiring Award and the 2nd ELT Career Service Award.