Tuesday, 30th June (Cambridge)

Posted on June 30, 2026 by roycross

This will be the last ‘Free Resources’ message until Tuesday 28th July, by which time (Cross fingers crossed) we will have installed a new boiler in Boba’s Zagreb flat, not (Cross fingers still crossed) had to fish Mateo out of a canal in Venice, and made more trips than I can count (on my uncrossed fingers) by ferry to and from the island of Cres. See you in four weeks!

1. From Andy Brock’s blog, Re Education, a guest piece by Sharon Tao, Founder and Director of Level The Field, What Happened to Girls’ Education? The quiet erosion of a global priority https://abrock.substack.com/p/re-education-issue-32-what-happened

The History / Herstory

A decade ago, girls’ education sat at the centre of international development. It was difficult to attend a major education conference, donor meeting or global summit without hearing commitments to girls’ learning. Governments competed to demonstrate leadership. New funding streams emerged. Large-scale programmes were launched. Champions spoke confidently about transforming the lives of millions of girls. Today, the mood is very different. At a time when nearly 133 million girls remain out of school and millions more face harmful gender norms that limit their learning, support for girls’ education is receding. Whilst this is often explained by shrinking aid budgets, funding tells only part of the story.

Here’s Level The Field’s mission statement:

Why we focus on marginalised girls

​Throughout the world, groups of people are marginalised due to poverty, rurality, caste, disability or displacement, amongst others. These marginalised groups often have a very limited share of power, respect, resource, participation and safety within their contexts and societies. Within these marginalised groups, any privileges that remain are rarely distributed equally amongst men and women, and boys and girls. This is due to unequal gender norms, which disadvantage girls even further. Level The Field aims to address this situation so that marginalised girls can realise their full potential. This is not meant to advantage girls to the detriment of boys. Rather, the focus on marginalised girls is an effort to correct for generations of unequal treatment, rather than create it. In the end, when girls and boys have a level playing field – no matter what their background – everyone will benefit. The multiplier effect that comes with gender equality means that families will be better off, people will be healthier, there will be less violence and more security, and economies will develop. We think this is a goal well worth aiming for.

2. A gift article from The Atlantic – hope I’m not giving you too many! – by David Brooks, The People Who Will Thrive in the AI Age: what will differentiate people is not how smart they are but their relationship to mental effort https://tinyurl.com/7pkbyta6

Remember when AI was going to take away our jobs and leave humans with nothing to do? So far, that doesn’t seem to be happening. Researchers from ActivTrak analyzed the digital activity of more than 10,000 workers and found that when people adopted AI, their work life became more intense, not less. The time that these early adopters spent on email, messaging, and chat apps more than doubled. Their use of business software rose by 94 percent. Researchers from UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business found that when using AI, workers started taking on tasks that they had previously outsourced, because activities such as coding and engineering became easier to do. They squeezed in work bursts in the evening, on weekends, in waiting rooms, and whenever else they had a spare moment and AI was handy. They also did a lot more multitasking, supervising a bunch of bots doing different things simultaneously.

3. On the same topic, here’s a good paper from The World Economic Forum, Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Entry-Level Work: A Framework for Safeguarding and Reinventing Early Career Pathways https://www.weforum.org/publications/artificial-intelligence-and-the-future-of-entry-level-work-a-framework-for-safeguarding-and-reinventing-early-career-pathways/ PDFs below of both the full report and the executive summary only.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping work, and this is most visible at the entry level. Globally, more than one in three (37%) young workers are employed in occupations with medium to high exposure to AI-driven task change, including three in four young workers in Eastern Asia (75%) and two in three young workers in Northern America (69%) and Europe (63%). Sectors with the highest exposure include Financial Services, Information and Communication, Professional Services, Science and Education, whereas entry-level roles in sectors such as Agriculture, Construction and Food Services are comparatively less affected.

The World Economic Forum website has lots of good content but is almost too clever/interactive for its own good – for me at least! https://intelligence.weforum.org/ See what you think.

WEF_Artificial_Intelligence_and_the_Future_of_Entry_Level_Work_2026 EXEC SUMMARYDownload
WEF_Artificial_Intelligence_and_the_Future_of_Entry_Level_Work_2026Download

4. Yet more on the AI theme, a typically engaging video from Hannah Fry, Why AI Agents are either the best or worst thing we’ve ever built https://youtu.be/WnzR5aOElvw

I built an AI agent. She opened a shop selling novelty mugs, emailed a journalist without being asked, and then leaked our passwords to a total stranger. AI agents don’t just answer questions – they act. They can browse the web, send emails, and spend your money. Anyone can build one. So my friend Brendan and I did. We gave it a bank card and a few weeks to show us what it could do. The mugs she designed can be bought here https://www.teepublic.com/user/cassandralabmugs Although frankly why you’d actually want one is beyond me.

No CassandraLab mugs in stock any more: they must have sold out!

5. And, finally and degenerately, Why did so many people want to see “Degenerate Art” in 1937? from Katja Hoyer, with a lengthy extract from John-Paul Stonard’s new book, ‘The Worst Exhibition in the World’ https://www.katjahoyer.uk/p/why-did-so-many-people-want-to-see

The Nazis were hoping that by viewing some of the 21,000 items they had seized, people would “gain harrowing impressions of Jewish cultural Bolshevism,” and leave “the exhibition with a feeling of gratitude towards the Führer, who had had these products of madness removed from the museums.” In an effort to give the impression of moral depravity, the authorities banned anyone under the age of eighteen from visiting. According to the Nazified press, the Weimar showing was a resounding success, with some 6,000 people visiting the State Museum in the first week alone. It’s impossible to know who attended and why …

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Friday, 26th June (Cambridge)

Posted on June 26, 2026 by roycross

One day late, occasioned by a late train home from London yesterday evening!

1. Frank Cottrell-Boyce is the current Waterstones Children’s Laureate here in the UK. He gave the annual ‘Laureate Lecture’, The Kids Are Not Alright, earlier this week. He invited a number of guests speakers to share his lecture with him. Well worth a listen/watch! https://youtu.be/_HvrXL50Vb4

Frank and his guests spoke about the impact on children of technology and the digital world, the power of reading to build communities, and all the wonderful work he’s seen across the country during his Laureateship, as different services collaborate and support families to read together.

2. What does good teaching at university level look like? Here’s one university’s take, this year’s Pilkington Prize winners for ‘excellence in teaching’ from Cambridge University https://www.cctl.cam.ac.uk/pilkington-prize/2026

3. Growing apart – The evolution of the disadvantage gap is the title of a sombre recent report from the Education Endowment Foundation https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/projects-and-evaluation/projects/growing-apart-evolution-of-disadvantage-gap PDFs of Executive Summary and of full report below.

The summary of the summary? Once you’ve fallen behind with your education, it’s very difficult to catch up again – especially so if you fell behind early on, likely through no fault of your own.

growing_apart_the_evolution_of_the_attainment_gap EXECUTIVE SUMMARYDownload
growing_apart_the_evolution_of_the_attainment_gap_v.1.0.0-1Download

4. Here’s a robust exchange about Brexit between James O’Brien and a hapless caller called Richard with whom one could almost – almost – sympathise https://www.facebook.com/reel/1630519421540696

5. And, finally, from an age when you could still smoke on television chat shows, Orson Welles’s meetings with Hitler and Churchill https://youtu.be/YDecEVfVhcw

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Tuesday, 23rd June (Cambridge)

Posted on June 23, 2026 by roycross

1. A piece by Gal Beckerman for The Atlantic, The Theory That Explains Trump’s UFC Fight https://tinyurl.com/3ar6zjz3

Bo Nickal, his face shiny with Vaseline, had just finished pounding the nose and eyes and ears of his opponent, Kyle Daukaus, who lay on his back like an overturned, squashed bug. Immediately, Nickal jumped over the edge of the Octagon and landed just in front of Donald Trump, who stood up and grabbed the fighter’s hand. Still panting, Nickal thanked the president: “This wouldn’t be possible without you.” So ended the second bout of last night’s UFC 250, the extravaganza of squirting blood and patriotic kitsch that took place—to the stupefaction of all, including a giddy Joe Rogan—on the South Lawn of the White House.

Not an easy read, references to Roland Barthes included, but a good one!

2. UKCISA, the UK Council for International Student Affairs, have just published a new report on International students’ experiences of English language requirements https://www.ukcisa.org.uk/our-work/international-students-experiences-of-english-language-requirements/ PDFs below of the executive summary and of the full report.

Across the UK higher education sector, there is increasing scrutiny and discussion about English tests and requirements for international students, as well as their English language proficiency and preparedness for study. However, the experiences of international students themselves have been underrepresented. UKCISA’s new research report, ‘International students’ experiences of meeting English language requirements for UK higher education’, brings student voice into a debate that can too often focus only on systems, standards, risk, compliance and immigration rhetoric.

international-students-experiences-meeting-english-language-requirements EXEC SUMMARYDownload
international-students-experiences-meeting-english-language-requirementsDownload

3. The Observer got the big guns out quickly in support of Andy Burnham, Andy Burnham’s credo of business-friendly socialism is winning backers from Will Hutton https://observer.co.uk/news/columnists/article/andy-burnhams-credo-of-business-friendly-socialism-is-winning-backersScrew

One of the tragedies of Sir Keir Starmer’s premiership has been his avowed disinterest in ideas; witness his much-quoted, off-the-cuff line in opposition that there will be no such thing as “Starmerism”. In his world, progress is to be achieved by a diligent process of case-by-case reasonable compromises, and, as one insider once told me, so achieving socialism by stealth. Except it has worked neither as a political project nor as a compass for driving forward the fissiparous British state – let alone leaning into the intellectual zeitgeist to offer any kind of vision. Starmerism has become synonymous with indeterminacy.

4. Here’s a recent episode of the How Not to Screw up your Kids podcast from Maryhan Baker, Why Your Child Can’t Concentrate: Focus, Distraction and ADHD https://tinyurl.com/3kx4vpyz

If you’ve ever wondered why your child can spend 40 minutes talking about Minecraft but can’t concentrate for four minutes on homework, this episode explains everything. I’m joined again by Professor Sam Wass (who) breaks down what concentration actually is from a neuroscience perspective, why young children are wired to be easily distracted, and why some children struggle far more than others in noisy classrooms, during revision, or when faced with a blank page. We dig into the two types of concentration every child needs, why the frontal cortex develops painfully slowly, how screens hijack attention, and why understanding something is the single biggest predictor of whether a child can focus on it.

5. And, finally, from Hyperallergic, the story of May Morris and her father William, How a Father-Daughter Duo Changed the Course of Textile Art https://hyperallergic.com/how-father-daughter-duo-william-may-morris-changed-the-course-of-textile-art/

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Thursday, 18th June (Cambridge)

Posted on June 18, 2026 by roycross

1. it’s probably fair to say that the world of assessment and testing is in ferment at present. Just in case your experience of taking exams is as out-of-date as mine is, here’s advice from Duolingo (ear scanning included!), How to set up your space for the Duolingo English Test https://blog.englishtest.duolingo.com/duolingo-english-test-setup-secondary-camera-room-scan/#

The Duolingo English Test (DET) was designed to make language testing accessible to everyone, wherever they live, and your testing environment plays a big part in that. Taking an English test from home is convenient and flexible—but the right setup helps ensure a smooth, secure experience.

This 7-step guide walks you through how to prepare your space, your equipment, and yourself for success—especially now that the DET includes a secondary camera, room scan, and ear scan as part of our standard security check. These checks help ensure every Duolingo English Test score is reviewed fairly and can be certified without delays.

2. More on the same theme: Assessment Evolved: The ELT Edition is a Pearson webinar at 15:00 UK time next Wednesday, June 24th which is repeated at 09:00 UK time the following day, Thursday June 25th. More info and links to registration for both sessions here – scroll down the page for the registration buttons https://events.zoom.us/ev/AriBpXzF2pZGmP8-brza8YNGMgqSoqUo4idj3WtiRUgI2ENfUT6Y~ApSadZDlz-I3BDjJo60yTRRtt6xoBY-l3IV6PVKxAzxqkTL9kw45EeZ3WA

The webinar is based on Pearson’s new report, Assessment Evolved: The ELT Edition (copy below) and will explore:

  • How AI is changing language teaching and assessment
  • Why formative assessment matters more than ever
  • Practical ways to integrate AI meaningfully into ELT classrooms
  • How teachers can focus on process, thinking, and communication — not just outputs
  • Strategies to support learning integrity while preparing students for an AI-driven future
assessment-evolved-reportDownload

3. What Should Pre-Primary English Achieve? Early Language Learning Explained with Sarah Hillyard & Faidra Faitaki is the first in a four-part series from Oxford ELT exploring not only what effective language teaching looks like in the very early years but also how to do it well! https://youtu.be/lF0bqrRC8jA

What should we really aim for when teaching English to very young learners? In this episode, Sarah Hillyard and Faidra Faitaki explore how language learning for very young learners differs fundamentally from teaching older learners, and why a traditional focus on vocabulary and grammar is not enough in pre-primary English language teaching. Instead, they highlight the importance of supporting the whole child, where language develops alongside cognitive, social, and emotional growth. Through practical examples, they show how meaningful input, interaction, stories, and everyday experiences create the foundation for early language learning, offering a more realistic and effective framework for pre-primary English.

4. I’ve just subscribed to The Atlantic for the first time and get ten ‘gift’ articles a month which I must remember to use. Here’s their take on the Trump Iran peace deal https://tinyurl.com/9y4hnejs There’s an audio version, too.

President Trump has announced that the United States and Iran have reached a deal to end their war. “Congratulations to all!” he said in a posting on his Truth Social site this evening. He then headed off to oversee the garish public spectacle he’d arranged for his birthday on the South Lawn of the White House. The United States, however, has little to celebrate: Trump and his team, in record time, just lost a war to a militarily mediocre—but nonetheless extremely dangerous—adversary.

Plus, a gift article from The Daily Telegraph on Iran with a different perspective on Iran, In post-war Iran, Khamenei is more vulnerable than ever: Islamic Republic’s supreme leader will struggle to hold on to power in a hotbed of rivalry and plotting https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/7a15233dd58a3515

5. And, finally, you can decide whether Louis de Bernières is simply an old fart (who wrote one great novel) or is actually making a valid point in this piece for The Guardian, The hill I will die on: I really don’t like ‘like’ – or other imprecise and redundant speech https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jun/13/the-hill-i-will-die-on-like-imprecise-redundant-speech-junk-food-britain

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Tuesday, 16th June (Cambridge)

Posted on June 16, 2026 by roycross

1. Global Englishes: Research agendas and tasks in English as a lingua franca by Will Baker, Fan Fang & Telma Gimenez has just been made available open access by Cambridge University Press https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/language-teaching/article/global-englishes-research-agendas-and-tasks-in-english-as-a-lingua-franca/9D8CABD3D9DEFBC5B45AB7D66237052A PDF below.

global-englishes-research-agendas-and-tasks-in-english-as-a-lingua-francaDownload

Global Englishes, and within that the field of English as a lingua franca, is a huge and expanding area of research and pedagogy. This paper provides a sample of our beliefs about productive areas of research. The nine tasks presented suggest the importance of research in the areas of intercultural and digital communication, especially through the adoption of trans theories such as translanguaging, transmodality, and transcultural communication. Furthermore, concepts such as communicative competence will need rethinking to match the multilingual, multimodal, and multicultural resources that appear in such communication. The implications for pedagogy are extensive …

2. And, in the interests of Oxbridge balance, here’s a free paper from Oxford University Press, Digital Pedagogy https://elt.oup.com/feature/global/expert/digital-pedagogy?cc=gb&selLanguage=en PDF below.

What does it mean to teach and learn English effectively in the digital age? This is the central question guiding this position paper. As digital tools have become increasingly embedded in the daily realities of English language teaching, many teachers find themselves navigating a rapidly evolving landscape (…) Amidst the buzz and potential innovation, a deeper, more urgent question remains: how can digital tools be used to genuinely support more meaningful learning?

digital-pedagogyDownload

3. Here’s Jessica Mackay’s latest update of her list of CPD opportunities, for the months of June and July https://eim-ub.blogspot.com/2026/05/upcoming-cpd-opportunities-summer-2026.html?m=1 I’m not quite as late as last time: you’ve only missed two events!

4. Keir Starmer’s motivation for banning young people from social media at precisely this point in his political career has been questioned. Here’s The Daily Telegraph’s take, Social media ban is Starmer’s desperate scramble for a legacy https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/54d0c64ef8e131a2

And here’s the website of an activist organisation very much in favour of such a ban https://www.smartphonefreechildhood.org/

5. Abdullah Ibrahim died yesterday at the age of 91. Here’s (one version of, there are several on YouTube) the very best of him https://youtu.be/n_pGN_pASB0

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Thursday, 11th June (Cambridge)

Posted on June 11, 2026 by roycross

1. Pride of place today to the ‘personal passion project’ that Chris Sowton has been developing over the last few months, Teach Any Class https://teachanyclass.org/ It’s a wonderfully rich resource, covering Professional Development, Classroom Activities, Skills Development, Important Concepts, Great Thinkers, Amazing Objects, English Resources and Teaching Terms.

In Chris’s own words: Teach Any Class is a 100% free-to-use resource hub for teachers, with professional development materials, ready-to-use activities, teaching tips, student-facing skills development work, a huge English language resources section – and much more besides. In total, there are already nearly 2,000 separate resources on the website, but I hope this is just the beginning, and that Teach Any Class can grow into a significant global teaching community. I wanted to build something practical, open, and genuinely accessible – learning which does not sit behind a paywall and has not been created by big publishing companies. Everything is completely free to use, and there is no sign-up required. Whilst the resources can be used by any teacher, they are especially designed for those working in challenging situations, where class sizes may be high and mobile data may be limited.

2. This LSE online event next Wednesday, 17th June, at 18:30 is likely to be an engaging and lively one, Surviving Extreme Times with Mishal Husain & Lea Ypi: sign up here https://www.lse.ac.uk/events/lse-festival/2026/surviving-extreme-times

In their books, both Mishal Husain and Lea Ypi have explored their family histories through periods of authoritarianism, conflict and political upheaval. In this conversation they will explore the resonance with the present of themes from the past, like the rise of fascism, migration, colonialism and inequality. What can history tell us about how to live through difficult political times, and where to find hope?

More events in the LSE Festival, which begins next Monday, 15th June, and runs all week, here https://lselive.eckoenterprise.net/festival/2026/presentations

3. The last NATESOL free webinar of this academic year is next Tuesday, 16th June, at 16:00 UK time,  A Brief Journey into the Science of Learning and How It Applies to Foreign Language Learning with Dr Carolina Kuepper-Tetzel from Glasgow University. More info and registration here https://www.canva.com/design/DAHLl2KOfAo/6Jva7TOrfeoDrtLtiuFonw/view#1

In this session, Carolina will take the audience on a journey that explores how our memory works and how we can use this knowledge to tweak foreign language teaching. She will share research insights on human learning that can directly inform activities in the classroom and provide hands-on practical tips. There will be demonstrations to experience the learning strategies, and the audience will leave the session inspired and ready to apply new ideas.

4. A good piece from Geoff Mulgan, Rethinking universities’ social contracts … and how to avoid the fate of the monasteries  https://geoffmulgan.substack.com/p/rethinking-universities-social-contracts

Universities are in a paradoxical position. In some respects, they have never been stronger – richer, more influential, more deeply embedded in national economies than at any point in history. Yet they are simultaneously under attack from multiple directions, and the threats are serious enough to warrant more than defensive reassurance. I was struck by an analogy suggested by Glyn Davis, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Melbourne and head of the Australian public service. Five hundred years ago, monasteries dominated Europe as centres of learning, wealth and prestige. Yet over the next two centuries they steadily declined. In England they were suddenly dissolved by an angry King Henry VIII who simply stole their treasures and left them in ruins. Institutions that had seemed permanent and powerful faded to the margins of society. It turned out they had no divine right to exist. They had failed to understand the profound change in systems of knowledge that was happening around them, involving printing, the renaissance, religious innovation and a new spirit of inquiry.

5. And, finally, and less light reading than is often the case in this last item, Ethan Mollick’s latest blog post, What it feels like to work with Mythos: Claude Fable represents another big jump in AI https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/what-it-feels-like-to-work-with-mythos

I had early access to the first Mythos-class AI model being released to the public, Claude 5 Fable. Much of the discussion of Mythos has centered on its impact on software security, but I tested it on everything except that (the guardrails around Fable essentially prevent it from being used for cybersecurity at all). My conclusion is that it represents a very real leap over every model I have used before, and, maybe more important, suggests our relationship with AI is changing in drastic ways.

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Thursday, 4th June (Cambridge)

Posted on June 4, 2026 by roycross

Posting early today as we’re off up to Sheffield later on to babysit The Artful Dodger while his dad exhibits at the Goldsmiths North show and mum supports. Venceremos!

1. The latest free-to-attend IATEFL monthly webinar is at 15:00 UK time this coming Saturday, 6th June, presented by Fahd Ali Ahmed Abdulwahab AlFatesh, Volunteering Across Borders: Online EFL Support for Non-Native Learners in Conflict Zones https://www.iatefl.org/event-details/#/?id=833

This session presents a personal case study on how volunteer English language support has been provided to learners in conflict zones such as Yemen and Sudan. Drawing from years of informal education and outreach via social media, the presenter explains how non-formal online teaching can reach underserved populations. The session begins with background context, followed by an overview of the tools, platforms, and strategies used. It also addresses ethical concerns and the importance of cultural sensitivity when working with displaced learners or those affected by trauma. Participants will leave with practical, low-cost methods and a clearer understanding of how educators can make a transnational impact without institutional support. This talk is especially relevant for teachers, volunteers, and Special Interest Groups focused on global issues and equity in ELT.

2. If you’re interested in that first item, you might also be interested in Teaching English to refugees and displaced learners, which is a three-module TeachingEnglish online course that’s now open for enrolment https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/training/courses/teaching-english-refugees-and-displaced-learners

Make your classroom a trauma-sensitive learning environment. Help your learners to shine by working creatively with limited resources and by managing challenging behaviour positively. By the end of Teaching English to refugees and displaced learners, you’ll be able to:

  • identify strategies for creating physical and emotional safety for the learners in your classrooms;
  • plan activities for large classes and/or with limited resources;
  • recognise and apply effective strategies for responding to challenging and trauma-informed behaviours.

3. Ri Willoughby is leading the next workshop on the IH Teacher Portal, Recycle, recall, retain – activities for revision, at 16:30 UK time on 10th June. More info here: you’ll need to register for a free (and simple) account on the site first https://teacherportal.ihlondon.com/course/webinars

We know that students need to revise vocabulary to help them remember but what can we do to really help them retain new language? This webinar will look at what research says about revision, how we can best incorporate it into our teaching and how to motivate learners to revise outside class. Attendees will leave with a range of practical activities and ideas to help learners remember vocabulary using both tried and tested methods as well as AI-supported revision techniques.

4. Revisionist History is a podcast by Malcolm Gladwell of Tipping Point and Outliers fame which has just completed its fifteenth series https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/revisionist-history/id1119389968 There’s a lot to explore in the archive: 200 episodes plus.

From the latest season, try The Blackberry Problem https://omny.fm/shows/revisionist-history/the-blackberry-problem-the-mistakes-series or from Season 12, The Tipping Point Revisited: Broken Windows https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-tipping-point-revisited-broken-windows/id1119389968?i=1000674180062

5. And, finally, Lea Ypi’s lecture at the Central European University (CEU) in Budapest on Indignity, Communism, and Personal History https://youtu.be/5KHlL-nws1w which covers much of the same territory as the wonderfully engaging talk, not yet online, that she gave at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies in London on Monday which I was lucky enough to attend.

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Tuesday, 2nd June (Cambridge)

Posted on June 2, 2026 by roycross

1. First up today, Jessica Mackay’s latest compilation of forthcoming CPD opportunities https://eim-ub.blogspot.com/2026/05/upcoming-cpd-opportunities-summer-2026.html

Luckily, the first one on the list, from Cambridge University Press & Assessment (CUPA), Motivating and engaging young learners with Helen Kenyon, which you’ve missed today (sorry!), is repeated on Thursday.

2. Also from CUPA – an acronym which I was once told by a Cambridge colleague they were absolutely forbidden to use: something to do with chupa in Spanish (he said coyly) – Jason Anderson’s 2026 updating of Philip Kerr’s 2019 Cambridge ‘White Paper’, The use of L1 in English language teaching, to include translanguaging and multi/plurilingualism – a lot can happen in seven years!

“While the term ‘L1’ wouldn’t be my preferred choice”, says Jason, “the title was retained from Philip Kerr’s well argued earlier version.” PDF below and here https://www.cambridge.org/sites/default/files/media/documents/WP_L1_ELT_CPELE_WEB.pdf

For much of the 20th century, English language teachers working in Western countries were recommended to teach using only, or mainly, English. Other languages were discouraged or even banned from the classroom. Even discussion of the topic was considered, until recently, an ‘elephant in the room’ of English language teaching (ELT). Yet since the start of the twenty-first century, there has been a noticeable and widespread shift in Western opinion towards the use of other languages in the classroom, so much so that some scholars are calling this a ‘multilingual turn’ in language teaching. In other parts of the world (e.g. East and South Asia), other languages played an important role in the English classroom throughout the 20th century, even if (some? Ed.) Western scholars looked negatively upon such practices.

Use of L1Download

3. StoryScope: Investigating idiosyncrasies in AI fiction by a team from the University of Maryland and Google DeepMind led by Jenna Russell https://arxiv.org/pdf/2604.03136 Not the easiest of reads, maybe, but an interesting one. PDF below as well.

AI stories over-explain themes and favor tidy, single-track plots while human stories frame protagonist’ choices as more morally ambiguous and have increased temporal complexity (e.g., flashbacks, nonlinear structure). Per-model fingerprint features enable six-way attribution: for example, Claude produces notably flat event escalation, GPT over-indexes on dream sequences, and Gemini defaults to external character description. We find that AI-generated stories cluster in a shared region of narrative space, while human-authored stories exhibit greater diversity.

StoryScopeDownload

4. See what you think of this one, a TED talk, How to escape the smartphone doom loop with Larissa May and Elise Hu. I respond better to the content than the form.https://www.ted.com/talks/larissa_may_elise_hu_how_to_escape_the_smartphone_doom_loop

Larissa May has spent a decade building digital wellness programs for young people, and she’s discovered something quietly radical: the smartphone doom loop of screen dependence and anxiety is preventable, and joy (not restriction) is the way out. She makes the case for a different relationship with technology — for kids, parents and everyone in between — that starts with swapping screens for some analog fun.

5.And, finally, and governed by the statute of dodgy copy limitations I hope, a home-made PDF of an old piece I found when having a clear out earlier today, 100 Short Stories to Love, from The Sunday Times of 29th April 2018.

Sunday Times ‘100 Short Stories to Love’ from 29th April 2018Download
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Thursday, 28th May (Cambridge)

Posted on May 28, 2026 by roycross

1. Ethan Mollick’s latest blog post, Choosing to Stay Human … …means choosing when and how to use AI, https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/choosing-to-stay-human

If you go to your favorite social media site, you will find it full of posts that start to look suspiciously similar to each other. Many of the comments to these posts are also generated by AI. So are an increasing number of academic papers and New York Times opinion articles, and, apparently, award-winning short stories. If you use AI a lot, you probably have noticed how much AI writing is around you (frequent AI users have historically done quite well identifying AI writing), if not, I promise you it is much more than you think.

2. Accelerating Scientific Discovery with AI is a lecture that Sir Demis Hassabis, the founder of Deep Mind, gave in Cambridge earlier this year https://youtu.be/hHooQmmzG4k There’s a certain amount of Cambridge nostalgia in the first part of the video which you should feel free to skip unless it has personal resonance, followed by some interesting and accessible serious science.

On a visit to Cambridge in March 2025, Sir Demis Hassabis – who in 2024 became the first Cambridge Computer Lab alumnus to receive a Nobel Prize – gave this talk on ‘Accelerating Scientific Discovery with AI’. The co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind, Demis was awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry jointly with his DeepMind colleague Dr John Jumper “for protein structure prediction”. This was in recognition of the major advances made possible by their AI model AlphaFold2, with whose help they have been able to predict the structure of virtually all the 200 million proteins that researchers have identified. In this lecture, he describes his journey from a child chess prodigy whose interest in computers was sparked by using them to improve his chess game, to his time at Cambridge University to his AI career today. And he talks about how the AI tools Google DeepMind is developing have the capacity to greatly speed up discoveries in areas of science from health to the environment, and more.

3. Ben Knight has co-authored an interesting article with colleagues from Oxford, Towards an Evaluation Methodology for AI in Second Language Education: Lessons Learned from Developing L2-Bench https://arxiv.org/html/2603.20088v2 PDF below.

Access to language education is a human right (World Conference on Linguistic Rights 1996). Large Language Models (LLMs) are rapidly being integrated into language learning products used by millions of learners worldwide. However, no widely recognised benchmarks exist for evaluating AI capabilities in education beyond narrow lesson generation (Clark et al. 2020) or knowledge of pedagogical concepts (Leli`evre et al. 2025). Although important aspects, learning experience design requires knowing when and how to use these capabilities in practice, reflecting the diverse educational scenarios encountered in real-world settings.

Towards an Evaluation Methodology for AI in Second Language EducationDownload

4. In cases such as this one, an acronym – in this case, RFCDC – is to be excused: Review of The Implementation of The Council Of Europe Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture (RFCDC) 2023 https://www.coe.int/en/web/reference-framework-of-competences-for-democratic-culture PDFs of whole report and of key findings only below.

The RFCDC as a set of materials can be used by education systems to equip young people with all of the competences that are needed to take action to defend and promote human rights, democracy and the rule of law, to act as active citizens, to participate effectively in a culture of democracy, and to live peacefully together with others in culturally diverse societies. The RFCDC provides a systematic approach to designing the teaching, the learning and the assessment of competences for democratic culture.

One can only hope that initiatives such as the RFCDC survive the current inimical, anti-woke climate.

RFCDC Eng Review KEY FINDINGSDownload
RFCDC Eng ReviewDownload

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5. And, finally, in the week of his death, just a little more Sonny Rollins https://youtu.be/_MpC6WC_nuU

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