NETRUZ Conference 2022: New Trends in English Language Teaching and Teacher Education

Namangan State University and NETRUZ (Network of English Teacher-Researchers in Uzbekistan) organized the first Conference of English teacher researchers in Uzbekistan named "New Trends in English Language Teaching and Teacher Education". The conference was organised on May 27-28, 2022 at Namangan State University.

The conference aimed to bring together English language teachers, practitioners, teacher educators, teacher trainers, researchers, teacher-researchers, and mentors to discuss the current issues and trends in teacher education and ELT in Uzbekistan. Besides, this conference served as a platform for NETRUZ teacher-research mentors and action researchers to share their exploratory action research findings and experiences with practitioners.

At the conference, the NETRUZ mentors reflected on their mentoring experience on doing exploratory action research, while other teacher researchers shared their EAR findings and materials with teachers who face similar challenges. Several teacher educators also talked about the importance of teachers being reflective and having an inquiry mindset. The conference videos and materials (classroom materials, e-book) will be shared on the NETRUZ blog so that every teacher has access to them.

Conference participants also learned about the NETRUZ project and received a copy of the NETRUZ book: The teacher research journey: Voices from champion teacher-researchers of Uzbekistan. The book consists of two parts: part 1 tells the reflective stories of the mentors; and part 2 contains the exploratory action research stories of the NETRUZ teacher researchers. The book was edited by two members of the project team – E. Menglieva and M. Alimova – and 3 mentors – M. Mirvokhidova, E. Maksakova and N. Tillaeva. The reason the NETRUZ team decided to produce a book was to allow mentors to share their mentoring experience and their journey of being teacher-researchers and to provide recommendations to future mentors of teacher-research and teacher-research programmes. The book was also a great opportunity for teacher-researchers (including mentors) to share their exploratory action research projects with other teacher-researchers and particularly the authorities of their institutions (schools and universities). These institutions are now encouraging other teachers to be involved in classroom research projects and NETRUZ.