Maria B. Mendoza and Jennifer C. Grill, Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida, USA

At TESOL 2019, we presented two posters and received many compliments. Following our presentations, people asked about our reasons for presenting a poster. We want to share our perspectives on the benefits of poster sessions as well as some strategies to prepare for a successful poster presentation.

Benefits

• Posters work very well to share a single activity or a small set of related activities. The conference app allows you to upload any related materials, so attendees can easily access them.
• You get to interact with attendees in a more personal way (one-on-one) than with a traditional session format. You can have meaningful conversations with attendees, learn about their context, and even share ideas on how they could adapt or extend your activities.
• You prepare your work in advance, so there is no last-minute stress. In a normal presentation, we usually keep editing slides, sometimes until right before the presentation. Because your poster is already printed before the conference, you cannot make any changes, which alleviates stress.
• You know in advance the time that your session will be scheduled (usually around lunchtime on Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday).

Strategies

• Narrow your topic. We have found that a specific activity or a small set of activities works best. Include the goal of the activity, the materials needed, and how to implement it.
• To avoid copyright issues, we have started using our smartphones to take our own pictures to include in the posters. Additionally, we ask for our students’ permission to use them in a poster. Most of our students do not have any problem with this.
• Check out TESOL’s Poster Session Guidelines.
• Start early. Give yourself enough time to edit and print your poster. Find out where you can print your poster and how long it will take so you can plan accordingly.
• Remember that posters are visual documents; the challenge is to be concise but complete. You can provide extra details verbally and through handouts.
• Using poster templates:
• Poster templates can be found online. One good source is the template page on PhDPosters.com.
• Templates are typically PowerPoint documents, but Illustrator can be used, too, if you’ve got the technology skills.
• For our posters, we use a 72” x 42” template. Once we have the content and formatting to our satisfaction, we save the PowerPoint file as a PDF
• Printing your poster:
• Send your PDF to the print shop (we use the UPS on campus). We typically use heavyweight matte paper.
• When you send the PDF to the printer, ask that the printed poster be 72” x 42” in accordance with the size guidelines of TESOL, though every conference has its own size restrictions. We’ve also had posters that were slightly smaller, and these were fine, too.
• The cost for printing in our area is currently around US$85 for this size and type of paper.
• Make sure that you purchase a poster tube to transport your poster to and from the conference. When you arrive at the conference, all you have to do is use pushpins (provided by TESOL) to hang up your poster.
• Work with a copresenter. It is great to have another person put the poster together and help edit. In addition, the two of you can interact with more attendees at once. If you are presenting alone, some people may leave because they do not have a chance to talk with you immediately. Finally, if you cannot make it to your session for some reason, your copresenter can be there.

We hope to have inspired you to submit a poster presentation for TESOL 2021. We have presented several posters over the past 5 years and have different templates that we are willing to share. If you are interested in viewing them, please contact us. We will be happy to hear from you! If the International Teaching Assistants Interest Section has several posters each day for TESOL 2021, we can locate ourselves in the same area and meet with other international teaching assistant professionals to learn from each other.

Jennifer Grill has a doctorate in adult education from Florida State University as well as master’s degrees in adult education and multilingual/multicultural education. She has been able to combine her interests in adult education and language learning through teaching university courses on adult learning, teacher education in English language learning, applied linguistics, and writing.