Did anyone go? Please share.
I went, but I didn’t enjoy much.
Too many presentations just lacked either
presentation skills
or
real content
What do you think? 
KenTaiwan98
Agreed.
That, and the disorganisation (speakers changed at last minute, running around from building to building like a chicken, etc)
Generally, I was too busy meeting people and the seminars I did get to were uninformative (for me) and a few verged on ridiculous!
There was one in which a man shared his hour with this woman who droned on and on reading a report, seated, with her head down. The presenter from my company was in there with me and interrupted the woman, telling her he wanted to hear the guy talk, and it was time for her to shut up. When the guy talked, he wasn’t much better because he had no objective to his discussion and wandered around handing out partial papers
(The topic sounded interesting… 
)
I missed most of the big shots, although they did mill around together in a clique. And, Krashen was there doing his Tony Robbinsesque “power of positive teaching” speech and making wild stabs about the order of SLA, which he’s never researched properly. He’s got this far due to his presentation skills, I assume.
Also, they really should limit the number of people allowed in the rooms. One poor fellow was crammed into a tiny hot room with about 150 Taiwanese teachers standing on chairs.
What kind of seminar is that?
I hear JALT is much better.
what is JALT? do they have a conference in Taiwan as well?
JALT = Japan Association for Language Teaching. See jalt.org/main/about/
For the conference schedule see
jalt.org/main/conferences/.
Looks like they had one at Jian Tan last month.
That looks like it WAS the ETA conference. Perhaps Alien is referring to the JALT conference in Japan. Anyway, it would be nice if the ETA conference were more useful/informative for teachers. I didn’t even know about it until after teaching in Taiwan for four years, but when I did finally check it out, I wasn’t impressed. I wonder if more foreign English teachers would make an effort to attend if it were better.