NETRUZ First Teacher-Research Conference and First Publication

Namangan State University and NETRUZ (Network of English Teacher-Researchers in Uzbekistan) organised 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 project and received a copy of the book: The teacher research journey: Voices from champion teacher-researchers of Uzbekistan, published by the NETRUZ (click on the book cover to download). The book was edited by E. Menglieva, M. Alimova, M. Mirvokhidova, E. Maksakova and N. Tillaeva. 

The book consists of two parts: 

• Part 1 tells the reflective stories of the mentors, 
• Part 2 contains the exploratory action research projects of the Uzbekistani teacher researchers. 

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.

Handbook of Formative Assessment Practices

Within the project which was supported by Hornby Trust and British Council, the Handbook of Formative Assessment Practices was developed. This Handbook of formative assessment practices will introduce five main strategies of formative assessment suggested by scholars and help teachers to know how to integrate formative assessment in their classroom processes. These strategies, if used, have the potential to improve the learning processes of students, leading to quality education.

This Handbook consists of two parts: Training materials and Articles. The first part of the book is a collection of (self) training materials produced by local experienced teachers and teacher educators E. Menglieva, G. Niyazova, and G. Tojieva. The second part of the Handbook is an edited collection of research articles written by teachers and teacher educators working at local and international universities in Uzbekistan. The units and research articles were reviewed and edited by Elyanora Meglieva, the Project Lead, Nilufar Begibaeva, Republican research centre for the development of innovative methods in teaching foreign languages, Uzbekistan and Inomiddin Imomov, Inservice and retraining institute of managers and specialist personnel of public education system named after A.Avloniy.

The main reason for publishing this Handbook is to offer English language teachers to explore formative assessment practices, implement some of the outlined strategies in their teaching context and reflect on their formative assessment experience. The first part of the Handbook with training materials can be completed individually or in groups with colleagues. This Handbook can be used informally for your own reflections on your formative assessment practices, for teacher training workshops organised in your educational institutions, etc. Besides, the research articles selected for this publication offer some useful insights into the assessment practices in the context of Uzbekistan.

 To download the Handbook, go to this link: 

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1ke12QbLncimOHVSBXkzz0JSUqJ-JnWbI?usp=sharing