I’m fortunate to have 3 abstracts accepted in 3 consecutive years from 2020-2023 to present at TESOL International Association‘s (TESOL) annual conference. This year’s event is like a fairy tale because, together with a team of Vietnamese professionals, we’re honored to be sponsored by RELO Vietnam to present and attend the conference in-person in Portland, Oregon at TESOL 2023.
FIRST FAILURES
I first submitted an abstract proposal to TESOL in 2016, exploring the use of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) on Coursera (this course) in EFL speaking classes for students taking a second degree in the English major programs. At first it was rejected. After a month or two, the conference organizer changed their decision and accepted my proposal. However, I emailed them to withdraw my presentation because I realized that my proposal would not be feasible when the students of diverse backgrounds in those evening classes were not motivated.
In 2017, I made a second, co-authored (with a Monash University lecturer) submission on intercultural communication, but it was still not accepted (read the abstract here). Proposal reviewers noted that “Intercultural interaction in the context of this presentation sounds interesting and current and related to the filed. However, the study lacks the in-depth description needed for such qualitative research oriented study” and that “Facebook link [of my project] does not work”. Looking back, in addition to those problems mentioned, I realized that my submission was filled with contextual information but lacked interesting findings that may benefit conference attendees. Given that only “22% of the proposals submitted were offered an acceptance”, the proposal selection is a competitive process that needs our careful planning and writing.
SUCCESSFUL SUBMISSIONS
The hard deadline for TESOL is normally on 1 June when I’m totally involved in required teaching and professional development activities at my university. In other words, it is challenging for me to finalize my research works so writing a proposal that wraps up my year of teaching and showcase my practices can be a better approach. Therefore, from 2020-2023, I switched to pedagogy-based submissions, sharing my teaching/teacher training practices drawing on strong theoretical frameworks and current English Language Teaching trends that can be of interest to a global audience.
My last year submission, “Designing authentic tasks to develop global engineers’ world knowledge” can be read here. This virtual presentation was well-received, and later turned into a classroom exploration article for TESOL Journal entitled “Utilizing media-based materials to design authentic tasks for information technology students” here. You can notice major changes when reading both my initial submission and the published article. This is why peer-reviewed publication is still the gold standard of academic works, and conference presentation should be seen as a good place to ask for participants’ feedback before considering whether it is suitable for publication 🙂
For TESOL 2023, you can find my successful proposal here and the slides I’ve shared with the participants of my session here. Reading the original proposal, you can also notice several modifications I’ve made when designing the slides because of the time limit for presentation (I chose 30 minutes) and actual activities that were carried out in my classroom.
PREPARING FOR PROPOSALS
You should immediately read the comprehensive Call for Convention Proposals (here) to get an overview and download all important documents and additional resources before exploring the TESOL Research/Conference Agenda and the criteria for selection (i.e. rubric).
In what follows, I will list useful activities and resources for your TESOL proposal.
Firstly, BRAINSTORM interesting pedagogical ideas that are strongly supported by established theories and state-of-the-art research findings for your proposal submissions. If you get stuck, you can read TESOL 2023’s conference schedule (here) to learn about this year’s successful proposals and presentations.
Secondly, READ the assessment rubric here. I’ll take notes of key lines from the rubric below:
- The proposal addresses a critical, groundbreaking or cutting-edge topic in TESOL.
- The proposal fully integrates with or builds session content upon current and relevant research, theory, practice, or policy, e.g., through the use of citations and terminology.
- Participant outcomes are clear and specific.
- The proposal describes the session, including how it will achieve the stated objectives, clearly, coherently, and in detail.
Two questions arise: (1) How do you know that your session is critical, groundbreaking or cutting-edge? There are several ways of doing so:
- Read TESOL’s top journals: TESOL Quarterly, TESOL Journal (practice-oriented), ELT Journal (practice-oriented), System, Language Teaching Research, etc.
- Read top journals of your areas of research/practice. For example, if your proposal involves the use of technology, you should read Language Learning and Technology or Computer-Assisted Language Learning; if it involves writing, then you must read Journal of Second Language Writing.
- Attend TESOL/IATEFL/leading publishers’ current webinars or watch their recordings.
- Read TESOL Research Agenda: https://www.tesol.org/media/zbyaoumx/2014_tesol-research-agenda.pdf. Choose appropriate question(s) as your starting point and build on that.
- Talk to PhD candidates or your colleagues in your academic networks and circles.
(2) How do you know that your session fully integrates with or builds session content upon current and relevant research, theory, practice, or policy? Make sure that your proposal submissions include a few citations of both seminal and state-of-the-art works and relevant terminologies.
Next, WRITE up to 300 words for the session description first, then write the abstract and the title later. You should meet the word limit for both the abstract and the session description of your proposal. What should you include in your abstract and session description? The TESOL Conferences Professional Council has prepared a PowerPoint presentation here with useful examples for each component from Slides 15 (be noted that the deadline is not correct because it is for TESOL in Houston in 2021). I cannot find any other conferences which provide better support and guidelines for potential presenters than TESOL 🙂
Then, POLISH your proposal. You can read TESOL 2023’s conference schedule AGAIN to pick up relevant terminologies and what is expected of language and style here.
Finally, SUBMIT your revised proposal. Check the time zone difference carefully and pay membership requirements (if required by TESOL). If you’d like to be considered for sponsorship of accepted proposals by RELO Vietnam, your submissions should be in-person presentations.
CONCLUSION
In summary, a TESOL proposal submission process should include BRAINSTORM – READ – WRITE – POLISH – SUBMIT. I hope this post can help you write a successful proposal for TESOL 2024 and onwards. This approach can be revisited for writing proposals for other conferences (OpenTESOL/VietTESOL/IATEFL/JALT etc.) as well.
Enjoy proposal writing process and Good Luck 🍀
Read!