Tag: English Language Teaching
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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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Innovative writing in English language teacher education and development
Update 2016 The special issue described below has been published and can be accessed from the link below. ELDED 20: Innovative Writing in English Language Teacher Education and Development; Table of Contents I hope you enjoy reading the articles as much as I did. Call for papers Of all the calls for papers that find…
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Tissue rejection in language education
Tissue rejection is a metaphor that helps explain why innovations in language education sometimes fail. Originally used by Holliday in the 1990s, it describes the way new methods are resisted when they do not align with the ecology of classrooms. This post revisits the metaphor to explore its relevance for AI, psychology, and teacher development…
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Intentional Dynamics in TESOL: An Ecological Perspective
The article “Intentional Dynamics in TESOL: An Ecological Perspective” describes intentionality in language education, offering a new way to define language education systems and providing a common theoretical frame for descriptions ranging from individual learners to nation-wide systems.
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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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IATEFL 2015: A retrospective
During IATEFL 2015, I made extensive notes about the sessions that I attended, as I had planned to write up summaries for this blog. It seems, however, that my own recollections of, and reactions to, many sessions have become weaker in the weeks since the conference. However, there’s already quite a lot of material available online, including video…
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Call for Chapters: English-Medium Instruction in Japan
A call for chapters has been issued for an edited collection focussing on English Medium Instruction (EMI) in Japanese higher education. The book, to be edited by Howard Brown (University of Niigata), aims to generate “a picture of EMI in Japan, its development, its current situation and its future”, by looking into topics such as “how…
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The history of ELT: A different perspective
I am willing to venture that, at some point in their careers, all the readers of this blog attended some kind of ‘Approaches and Methods’ module, which most likely traced the development of language teaching as a progression of methods, ranging from Grammar-Translation to Task-Based Learning. This sequence of methods, which -after a flash of inspiration moments ago- I call the progression narrative, is so familiar…
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This year’s ELT Journal debate
ELT Journal are holding their annual debate at IATEFL in Manchester on Monday 13 April 2015. This year’s motion is Language testing does more harm than good. In the latest issue of ELT J (unfortunately behind a paywall!), the rationale of the debate is described as follows: A remarkable amount of time is devoted to testing and…