BBELT 2023 Plenary Speakers

Steve Copeland is Research and Insight Lead for the English Programmes team at the British Council. He was previously the British Council’s Head of Examiner Standards for IELTS, prior to which he spent twenty years as a teacher, examiner, teacher trainer, materials writer and academic director in South-East Asia, South America, North Africa and the UK. He has an MA in TESOL from the Institute of Education in London and the RSA DipTEFLA.

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Mina Patel is a researcher with the Assessment Research Group at the British Council. Her background is in English language teaching and training. She has worked in the UK, Greece, Thailand, Sri Lanka and Malaysia as a teacher, trainer, materials developer and ELT projects manager and has extensive experience working with Ministries of Education in East Asia. Mina has presented at numerous national and international conferences on ELT related matters.

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Academic Learning & Development Manager at Cultura Inglesa in Brazil. Responsible for pre and in-service training, development initiatives, continuous professional development solutions, managing and developing courses for teachers, and for developing teacher performance assessment programs.

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Kieran Donaghy is an award-winning writer, international conference speaker and trainer. He is the author of books for students and teachers of English as a foreign language. His publications include Film in Action (Delta Publishing), Writing Activities for Film and Video (ELT Teacher2Writer), The Image in ELT (ELT Council), Films in Health Sciences Education (Edicions de la Universitat de Barcelona) and Language Hub (Macmillan).

Lindsay Clandfield is a multiple award-winning writer, teacher, teacher trainer and international speaker in the field of English language teaching. He has written more than fifteen coursebooks for language learners and is the co-author of various methodology books for teachers as well as various creative web projects.

María José has been teaching English since 2003, a teacher trainer since 2011. She is currently the Educational Technologist at St Brendan’s School where she helps and guides teachers in the application of technology in the classroom. She has always been very much interested in the application of technology in the classroom with a meaningful purpose and that is why she is still in the classroom enjoying the challenges of teaching and how to use technology in the classroom. 

Tamires Gama has been involved in ELT for over 12 years and has acted as a teacher trainer, speaker, presenter, materials writer and a teacher through different levels of proficiency. She has been teaching English Online for six years and runs her own online English school, Simplifica Inglês. She is passionate about the use of technology in the classroom, studying about gender and race and how to design more inclusive lessons. Tamires has a B.A. in Languages from USP.

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Fernando Gatica has been involved in ELT for over 5 years and has acted as a teacher and teacher trainer through different levels of proficiency all over Latin America. He has been teaching English online as a freelancer since the pandemic started, but was working at 2 notorious English schools in Mexico before that- Harmon Hall and English Access. He runs the social media profiles of English With Fernando and has over 1 million followers combining TikTok, Instagram and Facebook.

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Gisela is a teacher of English, she also holds a BA in advertising. She has taught both at primary and secondary school and she has been a speaker in FAAPI, BBELT and many other seminars and conferences. Together with Belu, she has created The Teaching Touch, a thriving community of educators all around the world. Once a year, they both host an international online conference for educators: TTT Reunion. 

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