Category: All topics
-
Language teaching and learning beyond mainstream populations
These three chapters in ‘Challenging Boundaries in Language Education’ discuss how we might understand and empower populations at the ‘fringe’ of language education theory and practice. Whether it is by capitalising on the linguistic resources of multilingual students, reflecting on the experiences of study abroad students or understanding the challenges of third age language educators,…
-
Becoming Research Literate: Supporting Teacher Research in ELT
Daniel Xerri and Ceres Pioquinto have put together an edited collection on research literacy for language educators (Becoming Research Literate: Supporting Teacher Research in ELT), which is free to download. This post describes the book, and my own contribution to it, and includes a link to download the book.
-
How to spot a predatory journal (and why to avoid them!)
Publishing your work in a predatory journal is a very bad career move. This post explains why, and presents a list of six criteria to help you avoid this mistake.
-
Extending English Language Teaching Theory
Challenging Boundaries in Language Education, the book I am editing, invites readers to rethink how languages are taught. These four chapters that have just been included in the collection map out the theory of langauge education, and show some ways in which it can be extended.
-
Multilingual Learning in Low-Resource Contexts: Opportunities and Obstacles (Call for papers)
Bilingual education and (CLIL) are often associated with relatively well-resourced teaching contexts. However, an upcoming book edited by Elizabeth Erling and John Clegg aims to challenge this perception, and the editors of the book are keen to receive your proposals exploring aspects of multilingual education in low-resource settings.
-
Describing a school as a complex system
In this extract from my book, A Language School as a Complex System, I discuss why it makes sense to describe a school through the lens of complex systems theory, and I outline some advantages that such a perspective brings.
-
Working with refugee-background learners
I recently wrote about a project (Critical Skills for Life and Work) we did at the University of Graz, which aimed to help people with a refugee or migrant background with their professional integration. One of the things I did, as part of my involvement in the project, was to familiarise myself with existing literature…
-
Complexity theory in language education – What is it?
This extract from my book ‘A Language School as a Complex System’ discusses what complex systems are and why it they are useful when thinking about language education.
-
10 Years of Blogging
According to a notification I just received, today is my 10-year anniversary on WordPress. Originally, this was little more than a webpage introducing me as an aspiring PhD candidate. At the time, there was some consensus that having an online presence was a good thing, and I thought it might impress the admissions boards at…