Comments & Discussion Points
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Rebuilding ELT as a Resilient Profession
On 8th – 9th October 2021, I had the privilege of being invited to deliver a plenary talk at the 10th ELT Malta Conference. This was one of the first conferences to be held internationally following the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, and at the time (a time when vaccines had been rolled out…
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International Mother Language Day 2019
Facts, figures and thoughts regarding linguistic diversity, globally and in Greece.
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What’s love got to do with it?
Reacting to a bad paper, and some thoughts on the state of academic publishing in language education.
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The Lingua controversy
You have probably read about the mass resignation of all the editorial board and the reviewers of Lingua, a prestigious journal published by Elsevier [in November 2015]. For those of you who may have missed it, here are some highlights. What happened? Last July, the editors of Lingua asked Elsevier to renegotiate the way the journal worked.…
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Language testing for no reason
What happened when the school administrators decided to introduce a new exam without asking anyone if it was needed…
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Revisiting the Target Language Democratisation narrative
We have all been taught the history of ELT. But is it possible that the story we’ve been told is wrong?
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Using YouTube to communicate research findings
A frequent, and fair, criticism of academic research is that it is often inaccessible, either because of the way in which it is written, or because it is often locked away behind paywalls. As a result, alternative formats, such as academic blogs, social media and podcasts have become increasingly popular, but they are still far…
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Non-Native Speakers of English need not apply
As the profession moves away from obsolete beliefs about the perceived advantages of ‘nativeness’, the University of Athens continues to discriminate.
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How are we encouraging predatory publishers?
Recently, Scholarly Open Access, an authoritative blog that tracks the activity of predatory publishers, issued a warning (link no longer active) about The International Journal of English Language, Literature & Humanities (I used to have a link to them as well, but I decided they don’t deserve one), a fraudulent journal that seems to target ELT professionals.…