BC TEAL 2026 Annual Conference

This session presents TELSN (Teaching English Learners with Special Needs), a 60-hour TESL Canada–accredited specialization certificate in inclusive TESOL offered by Score Guides Academy. The program has been fully designed and accredited and is currently offered to candidates across Canada and internationally. It can be completed within 3 to 8 weeks, providing flexible yet structured professional development. TELSN addresses a significant gap in TESOL training by focusing specifically on inclusive practice and special educational needs in language classrooms.
The objectives of this session are to:

• Describe the instructional design foundations of the TELSN certificate.
• Explain how inclusive education theories are operationalized within TESOL contexts.
• Demonstrate the program’s delivery structure, content organization, and assessment design.

The certificate is grounded in Universal Design for Learning (UDL), Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (MTSS/RtI), differentiated instruction, and IEP-aligned planning. The curriculum reflects Canadian inclusive education policy while remaining relevant to diverse ESL and EAL contexts globally.
Delivered fully online through Moodle, the program combines structured asynchronous modules with synchronous virtual meetings. The curriculum is organized around four core pillars: inclusive lesson planning, inclusive instruction of language skills and components, inclusive assessment and learner support, and curated inclusive resources and assistive tools for classroom implementation.
The session will highlight the program’s interactive design, including instructional videos, podcasts, guided readings, discussion forums, formative quizzes, and applied assignments such as adapted lesson plans and video-based observation and reflection tasks. Flexible assessment options maintain academic rigor while supporting diverse teacher needs. Graduate testimonials and participant feedback will be briefly shared to illustrate the impact on professional confidence and classroom implementation. The session will conclude with an invitation for collaborative partnerships and dialogue aimed at extending inclusive Canadian TESOL practices into broader professional and institutional contexts.
Attendees will leave with a clear understanding of how a TESL Canada–accredited specialization certificate can translate inclusive theory into sustainable, classroom-ready TESOL practice.

Internationally trained EAL professionals often enter the field with strong hopes for stability, belonging, and long-term professional security. However, for many immigrant educators, even with prior experience and professional expertise, work in EAL contexts is shaped by temporary contracts, funding instability, and unexpected layoffs. This session examines how these structural conditions shape professional identity and teacher emotion across career stages for immigrant EAL professionals working in Canada
Using the Korean film No Other Choice as a narrative anchor, the session explores experiences of job loss and precarity not as isolated events, but as identity-shaping moments. Drawing on affect theory (Ahmed, 2010), the presentation examines how concepts such as hope, professionalism, gratitude, and resilience operate as “sticky objects” that emotionally bind immigrant EAL professionals to institutions, even when working conditions are unstable. These attachments can intensify self-blame, silence, and emotional self-regulation following layoffs, particularly for educators who have invested migration, legitimacy, and future security in the profession.
Alongside the film, the session incorporates lived narrative from internationally trained, experienced immigrant EAL professionals whose careers have unfolded across shifting institutional, immigration, and employment contexts. These narratives extend the film’s depiction of constraint by examining how hope is not erased under precarity, but reconfigured. Under insecure employment conditions, hope becomes less about institutional stability and more about naming structural conditions, sustaining professional relationships, and refusing to internalize precarity as personal failure.
The session also draws on critical work on teacher emotion and professional identity (Benesch, 2017) to reframe emotional responses to precarity as institutionally produced rather than individual weakness. By foregrounding lived experience alongside theory, the presenters highlight how insecure employment destabilizes not only income, but EAL professionals’ sense of professional worth, belonging, and voice.
Rather than offering prescriptive solutions, this session invites participants to engage in reframing and collective sense-making around emotion, identity, and precarity in EAL work. Participants will engage in guided reflection and leave with clearer language and perspectives for considering sustainability, equity, and retention in the EAL profession.

If you have asked yourself one of the following questions, then this workshop will be of interest to you:

• How can volunteers help bridge the gap in settlement language and employment programs during times of funding cuts?
• What strategies make volunteers effective partners in supporting newcomers and instructors?
• What training do volunteers really need to succeed in second language classrooms, conversation circles, and community programs?

TESL Basics for Language Volunteers (TBLV), its French version AFIB, and the employment focussed TBLV Works, are free, online trainings that equip volunteers with essential tools to assist newcomers to learn a second language. TBLV courses were co-created with instructors and have been piloted with multiple cohorts of volunteer participants. The training includes topics such as cultural awareness, supporting language learning and integration into the workplace.
By the end of this session you will:

• Understand the role volunteers can play in settlement language and employment training programs for newcomers.
• Be able to identify effective strategies for integrating volunteers into classrooms and employment training programs to support both instructors and newcomers.
• Have gained practical ideas and tools for onboarding and training volunteers, addressing barriers, and maximizing their impact without increasing workload.
• Have explored the TESL Basics for Language Volunteers (TBLV), l’ABC du FLS pour instructeurs bénévoles (AFIB), and TBLV Works programs, including their purpose, content, and practical applications.

Research has the potential to be a highly valuable tool for teachers, permitting them opportunities to expand their knowledge, enhance their pedagogical creativity, or explore a potential solution to a teaching or learning challenge they encounter in their classroom. As such, it enables them to keep their professional knowledge and practice rooted in sound principles and relevant to their students’ needs. However, as with assessment, it is important to conduct research in a manner that assures its quality and credibility.
 
The purpose of this session is primarily to present to participants the ten criteria–ranging from selecting the best approach and design, meeting ethical criteria, choosing correct data analytical procedure(s)–for evaluating any research study and for ensuring that their own research possesses the qualities need to make findings credible–believable and valid. The presenter will introduce each criterion and explain its importance, providing specific examples from teacher classroom research studies. Participants will then have an opportunity to evaluate a sample study for group discussion. The session will conclude with a summary evaluation of the sample study and time for questions and answers.
 
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