ELLTAS Annual Report 2006

ELLTAS started off on a busy note in October 2006. Two workshops were organized to cater to the needs and interests of teachers. The first, in late November- early December, was on Writing Stories. This two day session was conducted by local award winning author, Christine Lim. It was a very fruitful two days with several teachers being inspired by the muse. The original plan was to collect these stories and have them published. However, the teachers became too busy with their teaching and we have only received two stories. So the publication has been shelved till ELLTAS collects more stories.

The second was a workshop on Reading Diagnosis and Remediation. Because the dates were problematic, this was finally fixed for late December 2005. After many interested queries and the difficulty of arriving at a convenient time, the project was abandoned. However, five teachers from Kong Hua were very interested and their HOD (English) requested that the workshop be run for her teachers. The four session workshop was thus conducted for Kong Hua Primary from December 2005 through February 2006 by Maha Sripathy.

Further workshops that were planned had to be put on hold because of problems related to cheque signatories. These were inherited problems that the new Executive Committee had no prior information about. In order not to confuse matters and to allow for time to negotiate and clear matters with the bank, no further activities were carried out.

The Executive Committee had to also recall a donation that was made to the National Institute of Education on 2^nd June 2005 by Dr. Phyllis Chew, then President of ELLTAS. This donation was done for the purposes of initiating an English Language Prize for the Postgraduate Course in teaching (PDGE) at NIE. The decision was taken by the 2005 Executive Committee. However, the donation of $6000 had to be recalled because the decision to award the prize was not done in consultation with the ELLTAS membership as was required by the ELLTAS Constitution (Clause 8.8). The National Institute of Education has been informed and the process is underway for NIE to return the cheque. The money which belongs to members will be used to benefit members.

It has thus been a difficult year for ELLTAS because despite plans to bring ELLTAS to teachers, residual matters had to be cleared. The Executive Committee is now in the midst of putting the house in order and from now on, ELLTAS will be organizing activities to cater to the expressed needs of English Language and Literature teachers.

On behalf of the ExCo, I wish to thank all members for their understanding and request that you continue your unflinching support because ELLTAS IS FOR YOU AND ABOUT YOU.

President

Maha Sripathy

22 September 2006