There is no any exact word I can say to express my gratitude to be able to attend the special big event: The 20th Asia TEFL – 68th TEFLIN – 5th iNELTAL 2022 Indonesia. I was so lucky to be selected as one of the sponsorship awardees to present my research in this event. Despite some technical issues I had before the conference, like being misplaced in the session type in the conference program book and lost my poster (it turned out it was ‘wandering’ to Denpasar in another flight), I really enjoyed participating in this event. There were some positive impacts I obtained from joining this event as follows:

  1. All of the sessions I attended were great, insightful, and fruitful. All the keynote and featured speakers were experts in ELT and they delivered the presentations very well and understandable. One presentation (online) I liked the most is delivered by an Indonesian lecturer. He talked about English in basic education in Asia and Indonesia. This really represents the condition in Indonesia right now, relating to the new curriculum (Kurikulum Merdeka). Some other impressive sessions were the workshops in the pre-conference day. I found the workshops about extensive reading and writing of technology review were very useful and insightful.
  2. Another great moment I experienced was when I presented my poster on the 8th floor of the venue of this conference as some other presenters and participants visited my booth. They were interested to know about how I conducted the research and some other technical matters regarding the topic I presented. Interestingly, some research experts also came to visit and gave brilliant suggestions for my future research.
  3. Connecting to people (meeting some old friends and new friends alike) was also a very pleasant moment I had during the event. There was a lot of information exchange happened as well as some good plans ahead for the future.

In short, getting the sponsorship from TEFLIN and British Council Indonesia to attend this event has become one of my best, most amazing new learning journeys. It also helps me to learn a lot in order to improve myself to be better professionally and personally. I do expect TEFLIN and British Council Indonesia to keep giving this kind of great opportunity for educators, particularly teachers, in the future.

Thank you a million TEFLIN and British Council Indonesia!

Safitry Wahyuni