The Winter School, traditionally held at the end of January, was a two-day event this year which brought together more than a hundred participants from Vladivostok and all over Primorski krai: Ussuriisk, Artyom, Nakhodka, Kavalerovo, Dalnegorsk and Sibirtsevo. Over its twelve-year history, the Winter School has become aevent for both school and university teachers; they all look forward to participating in the seminar and recommend it to their colleagues.

As usual, we tried to make the presentations useful, up-to-date and to cover a diverse range of issues, so that they could meet the needs of all our participants, working in school or university, teaching young learners or adults, dealing with ESP or EFL. The seminar started with a plenary by our distinguished scholar Zoya Proshina. It was devoted to a very topical issue nowadays – World Englishes. Our true friend and a very experienced English Language Fellow Judith Elliott told us about various teaching lifestyles in herpresentation and then gave a follow-up computer-based workshop, a fine example of using the Internet in the classroom.

Natalia Proshjants in her presentation brought up a very tricky question – teaching grammar to non-English majors; in it she shared her own experience of teaching naval students. Maxim Zhuk’s talk on a novel by one of the most outstanding Irish writers James Joyce was admirably presented and highly informative. It has already become a tradition in the Winter School to give teachers an opportunity to tell about their achievements in professional activities, so this year Elena Prihod’ko, a Presidential grantee, made a presentation called. A group of teachers involved in city and krai olympiads made an overview of tasks given at olympiads and commented on the most common mistakes made in these tasks by pupils.

Marina Rassoha’s presentation helped us to uncover many aspects of contemporary Anglo culture by watching a British comedy show. A new form of presentation, the FEELTA jam session, proved to be a rather exciting way of exchanging favourite class activities, and is sure to become one more traditional item in the Winter School. Of course one more event without which we now can’t imagine the Winter School is the raffle. The prizes were kindly donated to us by Judith Elliott, our present ELF, Kevin McCaughey, our former ELF, and the US General Consulate. Thank you for supporting the raffle! We really appreciate it as the money we raise from the raffle is used for buying prizes for Talent Show contestants.

In conclusion, we want to share with you some extracts from the evaluation forms filled out by the participants. For us, these comments are essential feed-back which helps us to improve our seminar and to make them even more useful and helpful for you!

Why did you decide to attend the Winter School?

• To get new information, new emotions
• To communicate with colleagues from other schools/institutes
• To improve my teaching skills
• To exchange experiences and learn something from others
• I know that here I will get inspiration which will last for a long time
• The seminar stimulates me to work better and to find new and more effective ways of teaching

What did you like most about Winter School-2008?

• Diverse presentations, an opportunity to communicate with presenters
• Very refreshing, new forms of presentation, the Jam Session is very interesting
• Well-organized event, using multimedia in presentations
• Very interesting and informative seminar. I think I will come again next year.

And we do hope that you’ll come again and bring your colleagues!

Anna Rusnak, FEELTA membership officer