The theme of this conference was “Transdisciplinarity… what’s in a name?” which was motivated, as the conference chair phrased it, “by a desire to bring closer to researchers in our field the rich intellectual and imaginative resources of thinkers outside Applied Linguistics whose work on language can act as a stimulus and trigger for our own thinking”. In the light of this theme, the conference lived up to its promise. The conference featured hundreds of presentations, poster sessions and colloquia stretching over four days. The range of topics focused on technology, assessments and evaluation, research methods, language and ideology, indigenous language education, corpus linguistics, educational linguistics, language and cognition, sociolinguistics, second and foreign language pedagogy, second language acquisitions, and many others. The attendance of this conference provided me with a fantastic opportunity for professional development and networking.
By immersing myself in a pool of studies and talks for four consecutive days, the information I have learned is nearly impossible to capture in a few words or single paragraph. On the one hand, I recall the finding of a study, as pointed out by Phung Daom, that lower-proficiency learner in their role of information holder produce more Language Related Episodes (LREs), that is worthwhile sharing in my teacher training courses. On the other hand, I feel inspired by ideas for new research projects. Yet, most of all I feel motivated to continue with what I love to do.