Around the world many professionals attend conferences. The professionals working in the field of English language teaching (ELT) are not exceptions. Along with two major international conferences organized for ELT professionals, TESOL and IATEFL, there are a great number of other conferences organized by affiliated professional associations in many countries around the world. Given the time and money invested in conferences by attendees and organizers, research into this professional endeavor is almost absent in literature in this field. The present study endeavors to discover the conference attendance motives of Turkish ELT professionals, why they attend, what they are engaged in doing during conferences and what they take back home. The data for the study were collected through a questionnaire designed in four parts. A total of 83 Turkish ELT professionals who attended the 16th International INGED Conference participated in the study. The findings of the study revealed that Turkish ELT professionals attend conferences essentially to obtain new information. However, keynote speakers seem to be another major motive behind their final decision to attend a conference. Although the majority of participants stated that they spend most of their time at sessions the number of sessions that they generally attend was found to be only between 4-6. As for post-conference results, the participants were found to feel more confident, more motivated to attend conferences, and were inclined to integrate the information they obtained into their classroom practices. The study also revealed that the participants have budget-related concerns and this constitutes a major challenge with regard to conference attendance.

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This study investigated the characteristics of effective university instructors as perceived by 547 students. The students came from institutions in two different countries, Sultan Qaboos University in the Sultanate of Oman and Süleyman Demirel University in Turkey. They were asked to indicate the personality and the teaching characteristics they felt were essential qualities of an effective university instructor. The students' responses were also assessed based on gender, year of study, and grade point average (GPA). According to the findings, an effective university instructor respects students as people, recognizes their identity, listens to their concerns and challenges, and is someone students can depend on for support when needed. With regard to teaching characteristics, an effective instructor is the one who treats students equally, builds their confidence, comes prepared for the lesson, and is clear and easy to be understood. Female students placed more value on personality characteristics. In addition, freshmen students were more concerned about optimizing the learning environment by having effective instructors who possess effective personality and teaching characteristics. There were no significant differences between students based on GPA. Finally, the Omani students rated both the personality and teaching characteristics more highly than the Turkish students.

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