Category: Comments & Discussion Points
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Thoughts on academic blogging
This post has been prompted by a small personal landmark. Earlier today, this blog passed the 30,000 views mark, after about 30 months of operation. Of course, the views are not evenly distributed: for more than a year after it was created, this webspace operated mostly as an online CV/academic homepage, and the blog section…
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Reviewing your supervisor’s work?
There was a blog post recently over at Peer Review Watch, reporting on a small scale survey among postgraduate students in City University London, regarding their views on peer review. In one of the questions, participants were asked how they would feel about providing peer review for papers submitted by their supervisors. The responses, I am afraid,…
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“Primary English Language Teaching does more harm than good”
As education systems around the world are keen to increase the English Language Teaching provision in primary schools, the ELT Journal debate examines possible drawbacks of such policies.
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What shapes language policy in education?
This post was prompted by the publication, last week, of a story in the Washington Post about changes in language use in the US over the last 30 years. Some key takeaways from the story were the decline in rank of what one might term ‘European heritage’ languages such as Greek, Italian, Yiddish and Polish,…
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Fake papers are not the real problem in science
In case you missed it, the ‘big story’ in academic news in the past week was the retraction of more than 120 papers that had been published by Springer and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE). The retraction followed the discovery, by Dr. Cyril Labbé of Joseph Fourier University, that all the fake…
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International Mother Language Day
Information about language policy, and minority and heritage langauges in Greece, written on to commemorate the International Mother Language Day.
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Breaching confidentiality in research
Researchers have a duty to protect the anonymity of study participants, even from law enforcement agencies.
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Is the ‘endangered languages’ movement threatening linguistics?
Archive: This post was published in 2014. As of 2026, the link mentioned in the post is no longer active. However, the post is retained for archival purposes. On 15th October 2014, Paul Newman (Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Indiana University) delivered a lecture at the School of Oriental and Asian Studies at the University of London, which was titled ‘The Law of…
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Fake papers: what do they reveal about the academe?
I think it’s fair to say that 2013 was a year that put the peer-review process to the test: In addition to the much-discussed ‘sting’ operation that was published in Science, in the past year we read about several cases in which hoax papers managed to find a home in academic journals. Some papers were…