I shall not be updating this blog regularly over the next few weeks, on account of pressing commitments that now require my undivided attention.
I hope to be able to post in response to topical stories, or share news that I find interesting, but I will not be able to do so in a regular, sustained way as I endeavoured to do over the past few months.
Looking forward to engaging with you all in a few weeks.
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Two Failures, One Habit: On the Arday Case
The Arday scandal is about more than plagiarism and DEI. It reveals what can happen when institutions leave difficult questions and accountability to those who will answer them on their own terms.
Intentionality, Language Education and Complex Dynamic Systems
This post introduces intentionality, a concept that helps us rethink how complex dynamic systems are constructed in language education research.
Inclusion beyond translation: A conversation with Maria Cioé-Peña
What can a teacher do when thirty children bring different languages, cultures, and needs into the same classroom? Drawing on a ReaLiTea podcast, this post considers culturally sustaining pedagogy, multilingual ecologies, multimodal meaning-making, and the unresolved gap between inclusive principles and classroom practice.
About me
Achilleas Kostoulas is an applied linguist and language teacher educator at the Department of Primary Education, University of Thessaly, Greece. He holds a PhD and an MA in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages from the University of Manchester, UK and a BA in English Studies from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece.
His research explores a wide range of issues connected with language (teacher) education, including language contact and plurilingualism, linguistic identities and ideologies, language policy and didactics, often using a Complex Dynamic Systems Theory to tease out connections between them. Some of his work in the field includes the research monograph The Intentional Dynamics of TESOL (2021, De Gruyter; with Juup Stelma) and the edited volume Doctoral Study and Getting Published (2025, Emerald; with Richard Fay), as well as numerous other publications.
Achilleas currently contributes to several projects that bring together his long-standing interests in language education, teacher development, and the social dimensions of language learning. As the coordinator of the expert team of AI Lang (Artificial Intelligence in Language Education), an initiative of the European Centre for Modern Languages of the Council of Europe, he works on developing principles and resources to help educators make informed, pedagogically grounded use of AI in their teaching. He also leads the University of Thessaly team of ReaLiTea (Research Literacy of Teachers), a project that supports language teachers in developing the capacity to engage with, and contribute to, educational research. Alongside these, he contributes to LocalLing, a Horizon-funded initiative to preserve and strengthen heritage and minority languages globally.
In addition to the above, Achilleas is the (co)editor-in-chief of the newly established European Journal of Education and Language Review, and welcomes contributions that explore the dynamic intersections between language, education, and society.
About this post
This post was originally written on 4th May 2014, as I was preparing for the submission of my doctoral dissertation. It is retained here for archival purposes.
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