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OUT FEATURES & COMMENT
OF THE

BOX

Making the

voice of ELT

more equal

It’s time for plenaries to reflect the reality

of the English language profession

Have you ever been to an ELT UK. This means that we have
conference and thought that the an international team: Joining
plenary line-up was, well, a bit Fiona (based in Oxford, UK)
‘older white male, native-speaker- and me (in Vancouver, Canada)
ish? Have you wondered why we have Higor Cavalcante (São
there can’t be more women, more Paulo, Brazil), Henrick Oprea
local speakers at conferences? If (Brasilia, Brazil), Aleksandra
so, EVE: Equal Voices in ELT may Popovski (Skopje, Macedonia)
well be an initiative you’d like to and Adam Simpson (Istanbul,
support. Turkey). Between us, we can
The Queen's English: EVE is an organisation keep an eye on quite a good
the name the British founded by Fiona Mauchline proportion of the globe!
give to standard English and myself in early 2018. Fiona
could not apply to the and I got to know each other we reward
great Queen Victoria mainly via the Facebook page
because her first language Women in ELT, where we found organisers who…
was German that we had similar ideas about
a number of things, plenary fully represent the
line-ups being one of them. So, ELT community
in February 2018, we launched
EVE.
It’s a really simple idea: if a What can you do to
models, thus further perpetuating the ideology. conference plenary or keynote help? Well, like hundreds of
I would argue that in order to provide students line-up manages to have parity individuals and organisations in
with truly authentic and realistic input, and in order in terms of gender, or L1/L2 ELT, you can become a ‘Friend
to tackle native speakerism, we need to aim to speaker of English, they contact of EVE.’ This means that you
expose our students to input and tasks from a wide us to get a badge for their event will be able to post a ‘Friend of
variety of ‘non-native speakers’. website: purple for gender, green EVE’ badge on your personal
for L1/L2 and platinum if they or organisation’s website. And
REFERENCES: manage both. The event is talk about us to colleagues and
also placed on our calendar at conference organisers! Join us in
Holliday, A. (2005). The struggle to teach English as https://evecalendar.wordpress. making ELT conferences more
an international language. Oxford: Oxford University com/eve-calendar-2018/. diverse and more inclusive.
Press. However, it’s important to note
that we do not ‘frown upon’ Contact:
Holliday, A. (2006). ‘Native-speakerism’. ELT line-ups where parity has not theevecalendar@gmail.com
Journal, 60(4), 385–387. https://doi.org/10.1093/ been achieved, or condone
elt/ccl030 criticism of such line-ups.
Instead, we reward organisers
Long, M. H. (2014). Second Language Acquisition who have clearly made an
and Task-Based Language Teaching (1st edition). effort to fully represent the ELT n Sue Leather is an ELT consultant,
Wiley-Blackwell. community. trainer and author, with almost 30
EVE looks at conferences years of international experience in
n Marek Kiczkowiak is the founder of TEFL or events all over the world, language education. She is currently
Equity Advocates & Academy, where he raises building on the work of The Fair working on projects with British
awareness of native-speakerism and teaches List, which addresses gender Council India, and British Council
English as a Lingua Franca. balance in conferences in the Iran. www.sueleatherassociates.com

editorial@elgazette.com 29

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