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Re-booting educational conferences
The IATEFL conference 2012 is being held in Glasgow this year. I have never been to one of these conferences but what strikes me is the lecture dominated nature of the delivery. Some concession has...
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Minimal evidence tweets?
A quick thought related to the recent attention paid to evidence in education e.g. ResearchED 2013. What would constitute the minimum evidence for you to consider tweeting/linking to an intervention...
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You should have the body!
Mark Hancock has a nice write-up of a talk given by Mike McCarthy on spoken English. The write-up concludes with an interesting metaphor of a corpus being a corpse, language that is no longer alive. It...
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TESOL France 2014 – thoughts, poster, handout and links
TESOL France 2014 flew by again over the weekend (14-16 November). This year I presented a poster on using PirateBox in class. I felt there was quite a strong interest in this and pleased that some may...
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Chomsky, he’s not the messiah, he’s a very misquoted linguist
Sean Wallis runs a great corpus linguistics blog. So I was intrigued as to a recent click bait post titled Why Chomsky was wrong about Corpus Linguistics. I thought initially he was going to go over...
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C’est compliqué: TESOL France 2016, Fractals and things
TESOL France Colloquium 2016 starts this Friday 19 November and no doubt the star attraction is linguist Diane Larsen-Freeman who will be doing a plenary and a Q&A session on the Saturday. Her talk...
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#IATEFL2017 – Stopping the buck
The interviews with Andy Hockley 1 and Marek Kiczkowiak 2 discuss the issue of native speakerism – “a pervasive ideology within ELT, characterized by the belief that ‘native-speaker’ teachers represent...
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#IATEFL2017 – A very partial commentary
The following is my very partial take of the first presenter in Outside in: bringing new technology perspectives to ELT 1. I play the role of the Muppet critics Statler and Waldorf, as this urge seems...
View ArticleOverloading on cognitive load theory in SLA
This is a response to a John Sweller article in 2017 on applying cognitive load theory to language teaching. Geary and the interface hypothesis I want to first discuss cognitive developmental and...
View ArticleBeyond the symbolic violence dome of the native speaker teacher
An article titled How to end native speaker privilege was posted recently on the always readable site Language on the Move. It includes an intriguing historical account of teachers of Persian in India...
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