Γλωσσολογικές Αναζητήσεις
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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Scholarly Open Access, an authoritative blog that tracks the activity of predatory publishers, issued a warning (link no longer active) about The International Journal of English Language, Literature & Humanities (I used to have a link to them as well, but I decided they don’t deserve one), a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.…
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Rethinking Language, Diversity and Education
For additional content on language, diversity and education, you may also want to read about the volume I am editing, Challenging Boundaries in Language Education. The Rethinking Language, Diversity and Education conference will take place on 28-31 May 2015 in Rhodes, Greece. The conference, which is co-organised by the University of Toronto and the University of the Aegean, aims to…
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Teaching English to Young Learners, revisited
A discussion of the effectiveness of the Greek TEYL project, based on recent publications.
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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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Reading Digest (15-22 December)
Here’s a round up of various articles, posts and stories I came across in the past week: Is this the future of academics? The How I Get By series in Vitae describes the diverse everyday lives of academics: in one of the most powerful articles I’ve read this week, they present an interview with Mary-Faith Cerasoli, an…
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Oppressive language education
In recent years, Modern Foreign Languages in Greece have been taught in accordance with the ‘mother language+two’ policy, which has held that learners should receive instruction in two modern foreign languages, namely English plus one of the following: French, German, Italian or Spanish. I have, in the past, expressed reservations regarding the selection of these…
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Teaching English to Very Young Learners in Greece: When research findings don’t align
In this post I compare a small-study I conducted with the findings of the Greek TEYL project. Various explanations are considered, regarding the differences in our findings.
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Greek Model Experimental Schools: Some reflections
Last Saturday, I had the pleasure of presenting a paper, along with my colleague Ioanna Gkourogianni, at the 1st National Conference for Model-Experimental Schools (link now defunct) in Thessaloniki (Greece). In our presentation, we problematised the function of Model-Experimental schools. At present, it seems that these schools function primarily as Models in a top-down system,…