November 2025: Notes on Teaching, Research, and Writing

The calendar, I think, gives most months a distinct identity. September is reflective (“the Year 1s are always the same; I’m more tired”); October is frantic; December sparkles. November, meanwhile, slips into your life and out of it without making eye contact. It is a season of rain-flecked commutes, dutiful labour, and industrious gloom. If September is reflective, October frantic, and December festive, November is the month of unshowy effort: not dramatic, but essential. This is an overview of what my November is shaping up to be, building on previous newsletter-style posts that I started writing this year.

Publications

November, some of you might know, is celebrated by some as the Academic Writing Month (#AcWriMo). I can’t say I have made much headway with my own writing projects (so hard to find extended writing slots), but the momentum from previous projects is still strong, and I am happy to say that two more publications are now on the way to the printers.

Towards more intentional language policy in Higher Education

The first publication is an article that will appear in the Polish open-access journal Neofilolog. Co-authored with Eleni Motsiou, the article describes the linguistic ecology of the University of Thessaly, noting the visibility of dominant languages and the invisibility of other languages, and highlights how the mechanisms of power, cultural erasure and hegemony play out in language policy. We also make some recommendations for challenging what we perceive to be an unjust linguistic order, by re-framing language policy as not just an overlooked instrument of administration but rather as an instrument of social transformation.

I am rather fond of the introduction, so here it is:

Universities are more than just places where knowledge transmission takes place: they are sites of territorial and ideological struggle between dominant and marginalized linguistic codes and discourses (Holmes et al., 2012). Seen as a site of linguistic contestation, a university is a point of contact among the diverse semiotic resources that make up the students’, administrators’, and faculty’s linguistic repertoires. Although such diversity creates the potential of “almost any university […] to be a ‘multilingual university’” (Bhatt, Badwan, Madiba, 2022: 425), language contact is often typified by power asymmetries between hegemonic and marginalized codes of communication. These asymmetries, which are typically permeated by symbolic violence (Bourdieu, 1982), are particularly important in understanding the distribution and role in education of Less Widely Spoken / Less Widely Taught Languages.

Motsiou & Kostoulas, 2025

One thing that makes me proud of this article is, while the research behind it is relatively straightforward, we managed to overcome more than a few hurdles in getting it out. Interestingly, these did not come from the university itself.¹ Rather, they came from entrenched reviewers, presumably in Greek academia, who strongly thought that dominant national narratives were not adequately reflected in the text (“shouldn’t you explain the reasons why Slavic languages in Macedonia are unwelcome?“). You don’t always win when head-butting with peer-reviewers, but it’s invigorating when you succeed in standing your ground.

Classroom-Based Research
in Language Education

The second article, which won’t make it in time for publication in 2025, is an encyclopedia entry about a matter that is close to my heart: classroom-based research. I first wrote about teachers researching their practice ten years ago, for a presentation I did at the ELT Connect conference in Graz,² and I have always found it important as a means for reclaiming agency in our profession.

In the paper, I talk about what classroom-based research is, and go on to provide an overview of three types: action research, exploratory practice and practice-based research. The table below, which you will be able to find in the entry, summarises their differences.

	Action research	Exploratory practice	Practice-based research
Conducted by	Teachers	Teachers & learners	Teachers & academics
Aim	Change	Profound understanding	Practical impact
Prompt	Problematisation (identifying problems, opportunities for change)	Puzzles about positive or negative aspects of lived experience	Questions relevant to practice
Methods	Mainly qualitative	Naturalistic (Potentially Exploitable Pedagogical Activities)	Qualitative, quantitative or mixed
Criteria of success	Degree of empowerment	Impact on quality of life	Ecological validity, practical relevance

The entry will appear in the upcoming third edition of the Elsevier Encylopedia of Language and Linguistics, and although I am no fan of Elsevier, I must say that it was one of the smoothest submissions I have made in a long time.

Research updates

If November is the month of quite toiling, the place where this is most evident in my life is in my research. This involved lots of work, and few outcomes for the time being – but, like I said, this is a month that is not dramatic, but essential

Research Literacy of Teachers

Last month saw our semi-annual ReaLiTea meeting, where we take stock of progress and plan forward. I was able to report that we more-or-less finished an entire set of materials intended for classroom use, which teacher educators might find helpful for developing the research reading skills of pre-service language teachers. These are now in the hands of our critical friends, and I will hopefully be able to share them soon. I also seem to have committed to producing a podcast, with Kenan Dikilitas, on developing such materials – more on this in due time.

Also, I am thrilled³ that our upcoming event, where we will present our ReaLiTea work, is about to take place in Larissa (Greece) on 6th December. In the event, my colleagues Sofia Tsioli and Jenny Tassou and I will be hosting English, French and German teachers from schools across central Greece, and talking about how to develop their research literacy skills. We also have an exciting presentation on the use of Aritificial Intelligence in Language Education by my research associate Konstantina Alevizou. And just in case all of the above is not enticing enough, my publishers, Emerald, have also been kind enough to give me some copies of Doctoral Study and Getting Published, which I am happy to give out to participants.

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Artificial Intelligence
in Language Education

Developments in the AI Lang project continue to gather momentum as we approach our upcoming workshop in Graz, on 24–25 November. This will bring together AI specialists and language-education experts from across all Council of Europe member states —a rare opportunity for us to exchange perspectives across very different contexts. Over the two days, we will present the draft guidelines for the use of AI in Language Education, along with the Moodle-based professional-development course that is currently taking shape behind the scenes.

The aim is not merely to showcase work in progress, but to subject it to the kind of constructive scrutiny that can only come from practitioners who understand the day-to-day pressures of language teaching. Engaging with colleagues from such a wide range of educational systems will help ensure that the resources we are developing are relevant, realistic, and genuinely usable by teachers working in diverse settings.

Revitalisation of
Linguistic Diversity & Cultural Heritage

Although the LocalLing project has not officially started yet, the wheels are already in motion for bringing experts on minoritized languages from across the world together for a month of constructive collaboration at the University of Thessaly.⁴

Working with colleagues from Estonia, Romania, France, Spain, Tunisia, Algiers, Morocco, Cameroon, Togo, Sri Lanca and Colombia is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and bringing them together in one place is probably my greatest academic achievement so far. For the time being, however, this excitement is moderated by the sheer drudgery of preparing visa invitations and budget documents. Things will get better.

Events

In my October update, I wrote how much I enjoy the workshop and presentation side of my work. The last month has been kind in that respect: If anything, it over-delivered, providing a steady stream of occasions to share ideas, exchange perspectives, and momentarily escape the administrative churn.

LRGrad2025

On October 22nd, Richard Fay and I led a workshop at the 2025 Language Corpus Research Graduate Conference, organised by the University of Chelmniz. Building on our recent book, Doctoral Study and Getting Published, we and the participants discussed the challenges and joys of academic publishing as an early career researcher.

Despite being the last session after a very long day, we were joined by nearly 60 conference participants, who brought an energy and openness that one does not always dare to expect at that hour. They shared experiences from their own publishing journeys with us, we questioned some of the tacit norms that shape doctoral writing, and we engaged thoughtfully with our provocations about collaboration, reviewer relations, and the politics of visibility. It was an inspiring session, and a reminder that early-career researchers, when given the space, articulate concerns that resonate far beyond their immediate contexts.

Children’s Identity and Citizenship European Association

Later in the month, Richard and I reprised our roles as workshop facilitators in the CiCea international webinar series. This time, we met with a smaller group of more experienced authors, which created a very different dynamic: less about navigating first publications and more about thinking collectively about how the ecosystem of academic publishing is shifting around us. We talked about the constructive (and occasionally capricious) role of peer review in shaping publication outcomes, the structural bottlenecks that make the process slower and more unpredictable than it ought to be, and —inevitably— the ways in which artificial intelligence is already reconfiguring how we write, review, and even conceptualise academic work.

The conversation unfolded with that relaxed candour that is only possible when everyone in the room has accumulated enough publication scars to compare notes unselfconsciously. Originally envisaged as an hour-long discussion, the webinar was almost two hours of thoughtful exchanges, shared frustrations, and a surprising amount of humour about the absurdities of our publishing culture; proof, perhaps, that even seasoned academics appreciate a space where they can momentarily step outside the performative seriousness of the profession.

The General HQ War Diary

In a different capacity,⁵ I was honoured to be invited to present a new history book published by the Hellenic Army General Staff. Published on the anniversary of Italian invasion of Greece in 1940, the volume reproduces the entries of the War Diary of the General Headquarters between 28th October 1940 and 12 April 1941, when the last units of the Army that remained in Greece surrendered to the Germans and the HQ was disbanded. The details of this publication are probably not of much interest to the readers of this blog (except in as much as they can inform thinking about how official narratives emerge), but I photographed well on that day.

Upcoming events

In the weeks to come, the pace does not seem to slow down. In addition to the AI Lang workshop and the ReaLiTea dissemination event that I mentioned earlier, I am also appearing at the Tzartzaneia 2025 conference, where I will be talking about the new Modern Greek language textbooks we have been developing for the Ministry of Education, and –later on– at a Roundtable on the use of AI in language assessment at the University of Perugia in Italy. If you happen to be around, do walk up to me and say hi! Despite what some of my Year 1 students claim, I can be friendly.

Calls for Papers

Still in keeping with the idea of November as the Academic Writing Month, and the month of endless toiling, some of you might want to take a look at these calls for papers. I find that even if I can’t contribute to most of them, they give me a sense of new readings I can look forward to.

• Ali Al-Hoorie and Phil Hiver are putting together a new special issue in The Modern Language Journal, focussing on what they call ‘meta-motivation‘, i.e., “the processes by which individuals reflect upon, monitor and attempt to regulate their motivation”
• Building on the idea that AI “is increasingly becoming a co-strategist, cognitive partner, and even a research instrument in the study of strategic behavior itself”, Peter Gu and Osamu Takeuchi have issued a Call for Papers for an special issue in System, which will focus on AI and Language Learning Strategies.
• One more special issue, this one appearing in Teaching in Higher Education (Madriaga, Seniuk Cicek, Mpamhanga, & Harrison, eds.), will focus on the topics of participatory approaches, pedagogies and power in the education of marginalised communities.

If none of the above appeals to you, and you happen to be looking for a friendly journal where you can publish your work, why don’t you try out the one I am editing?

In the blog

Prompted by the Academic Writing Month theme, this month I tried to focus my blogging on academic publishing. Just in case you missed them, here are some of my latest posts.

Things I read

I try to make a point of continuing to read books as much as I can, including non-academic ones, no matter how busy things become. You cannot sustain writing unless you keep reading widely, and it also helps to keep my thinking fresh. This section is also part of my attempt to hold myself accountable to this resolution.

That said, this month I have struggled to meet this goal. One book that is on my wishlist is Fictional Linguistic Landscapes,⁶ by Osman Solmaz. Any book with a sandworm on the cover page needs no further endorsement. But in addition to the awesome artwork, the book also connects well with my recent interest in linguistic landscapes in education, which you can check out here, here and here.

And while I am on the topic of science fiction, I am in the process of reading The Promised Planet, by Julian Edge, which I am thoroughly enjoying. I won’t give you any spoilers (not least because I’ve only made it to Chapter 4), but here’s something that I underlined:⁷

I understand with new clarity how rights and power
co-exist in any structured relationship.
Without the power to enforce them,
so-called rights are just hopes and expectations.

The Promised Planet, by Julian Edge

If you happen to read any of the books, or have any other recommendations of books I should read, I’d love to read your thoughts in the comments box.

Behind the scenes

Some of you might know that the last few months have not been uniformly pleasant for me, as a number of personal and health challenges converged around me and people who are important to me.

What I am learning —slowly, and perhaps not always gracefully— is that such periods demand a kind of gentleness towards oneself that academia rarely trains us to practise.

If you ever find yourselves in a similar situation, perhaps you might want to allow the rhythm of your life to slow down without interpreting it as failure. Walking helps. So does reading. Coffee too, if your doctors are not looking closely. Ask for help early, even if doing so feels unfamiliar or uncomfortable. You will be surprised at who helps you and how. Protect your energy ruthlessly, and let go of obligations that can wait. Most importantly, remember that vulnerability is not evidence of inadequacy. It is simply part of being human, and it is something we all are likely to navigate sooner or later.

I am still learning these lessons myself, but they have helped me move through the year with a little more steadiness, and I hope they might be of some use to you too.

Footnotes

1. Julian Edge, one of my doctoral supervisors once told me that the great thing about being an applied linguist is that you are relatively free to research and publish more or less anything you like. The not-so-great thing, he explained, was that this happened because nobody powerful really cares about what you write. ↩︎
2. It was a good presentation. So good, in fact, that the only criticism I got to hear from my line manager was that I ‘clearly had too much free time’ in my hands. ↩︎
3. No, I am not. I’m operating at a stress level usually reserved for doctoral vivas and malfunctioning projectors five minutes before a keynote. But we always have to write that we are ‘excited’, ‘delighted’ or ‘thrilled’, and I’m using the word ‘exciting’ later in this paragraph, so my options are limited. ↩︎
4. Assuming the University manages to find a room, or at least a very large tent, for us to meet. ↩︎
5. It is sometimes attributed to me that “of all the times you hear ‘I’ll never forget you’, it’s only true twice: from the lips of the tax office and of the Army”. Everyone else eventually moves on; these two do not. ↩︎
6. The usual reminder: if you buy this book (or any other book) after following a link from this blog, I will get a small commission from your purchase. This will not cost you any additional money. As an alternative to making Jeff Bezos and me richer, please also consider supporting a local bookstore. ↩︎
7. Metaphorically, that is. I do not underline books. Or break their spines. That’s something only savages do, Lou H. <3. ↩︎