Conference Report: TESOL Spain 2025 (Burgos)

The AVE from Madrid arrived into a chilly Burgos just after 11am and a large number of TEOSL Spain delegates emerged onto the platform. Many opted for public transportation to the city centre, we had decided (and we stuck to our plan) to walk in. The snow started falling a few minutes after leaving the station, but we were committed! A hearty lunch later, things felt better and we got a bus from the centre out to the hotel with time for a quick nap before crossing the road to the Facultad de Educación.

After a warm welcome from Rebecca Place and representatives of the University of Burgos and the local government, Darío Luis Banegas kicked off the conference with his opening plenary entitled ‘Roots and Routes in Social Justice in English Language Teaching: Who’s on board?’. He made us think about the history of social justice in ELT and what some next steps might look like. For me, this was a great way to start the weekend, Darío had published my very first article, a brief paper discussing my MEd research on the representation of gender and sexuality in ELT course books; work that he later invited me to develop into a chapter. That first paper was published in ELT Research, a publication that I now edit and yesterday we published issue 40. Then, the rest of my Friday evening saw me attend David Bradshaw‘s talk about Cambridge Assessment’s development of the Foreign Language Assessment (English) for PISA. Although very specific in its content, it was also an interesting history lesson in the comparative language competence. The discussion of multi-level adaptive testing also made me think about where language testing might be going in the future. I finished Friday with Borja Uruñuela talking about teachers’ emotional well-being, just down the road from where he attended primary school and with his own inspirational English teacher in the audience. These three presentations were a great way to start the weekend and the Vino Español reception at the Palacio de Congresos rounded off the evening well with a welcome opportunity to reconnect with colleagues.

On Saturday, I started my day in the company of Robin Walker, who last year at Cáceres had announced his retirement and that he wouldn’t be speaking this year! Nonetheless, his talk on AI in pronunciation appeared on the programme and was both interesting and entertaining. In her keynote, Jessica Mackay talked about gender bias in a fascinating talk reminding us all of how unconscious bias can creep into our classrooms and practices and Hamish Binns followed her in the Salón de Actos, talking about prosody and pronunciation. In this talk, I learned a fair bit about the tone unit and am now interested in using Praat to help my students see their speech. Saturday’s plenary followed and Rose Aylett complemented Darío’s opening plenary beautifully by talking about critical language pedagogy, including a great summary of the seminal work of Paulo Freire. After lunch, it was my turn to talk about ‘Exploiting Every Opportunity for Learning’ (detailed blog post coming) — thank you to my audience, who laughed in the right places! In my final session of Saturday, Mark Meredith talked about neurodiversity, which was both interesting and useful. I can’t quite believe that I didn’t notice the horrifically, deliberately mis-spelled Cambridge in the corner of one of his slides. This talk was a real reminder about the impact on cognitive load.

On Sunday morning, more snow had fallen and as I was getting my morning café solo, I was amazed to see hikers embarking on the Camino de Santiago this early in the year, in these temperatures and this far from Santiago. I think my camino from Vigo to Santiago last year was sufficiently long! I returned to pronunciation this morning with Will Chadwick, who provided a useful toolkit for helping hispanohablantes use sounds they already have to improve their English pronunciation. I attended a great talk on AI by Daniel Martín, and came away with a whole bunch of prompts and inspiration that I’ve genuinely already used in the classroom. I’d suggest checking out his blog, too. In the moments between talks, I was grabbed by Teresa Bestwick, who wanted to interview me briefly for the TESOL Spain podcast, so listen out for my dulcet tones soon! Phil Dexter from Pilgrims gave an interesting keynote on inclusion, and then it was somehow time for the closing plenary given by Mina Patel, who talked incredibly engagingly about the British Council’s Future of English project.

As happens every year, the weekend was full of joy: meeting old colleagues and friends, making new connections, not being able to attend all the talks one wants to, and coming away with notes upon notes that I’ll have to make sense of in the coming weeks, and apply to my teaching. A huge thank you to TESOL Spain for having me on the programme again this year and for putting on such a great convention. See you all again in Sevilla next March!