This message today will be my last message as a British Council employee. I started work as an English language ‘lector’ at Zagreb University in what was then Yugoslavia in September 1979, and along the way I’ve worked and lived in Baghdad, Berlin, Bucharest, Edinburgh, London, Munich, Stockholm, and Zagreb (for a second time) and visited fifty-eight – I counted them up just now! – other countries. I’ve loved nearly every minute, as have my wife and children, who’ve put up uncomplainingly with playing second fiddle to the British Council through much of those forty-three years. I promise to reform in retirement!  I’ve had occasion to say to many people this week that I’m retiring, not dying, and I hope and expect to be in touch with many of you in the years to come. From next week, I’ll be doing messages twice weekly, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, unless there’s something I can’t wait to share.

1. Plenty to explore over the weekend here, including an update on the fourteen predictions that David Graddol made about the future of the English language in English Next in 2006: Future of English: what’s the future of the world’s most spoken language? https://www.britishcouncil.org/future-of-english

PDF of English Next below in case you missed it at the time!

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2. You can sneak a peek at Chris Sowton’s book, Teaching in Challenging Circumstances, here https://issuu.com/cambridgeupelt/docs/ticc_sample_9781108816120_c

3. If you missed it live, here’s a recording of last Saturday’s webinar, English Connects Action Research: learnings from the African classroom https://africa.teachingenglish.org.uk/events/english-connects-action-research

4. And, finally, if you haven’t discovered it yet, give Wordle a go https://www.nytimes.com/games/wordle/index.html My daughter is currently comfortably ahead of me in our private competition!

Wordle is now available in a whole host of other languages: https://globalvoices.org/2022/02/02/yourdle-wordle-is-now-available-in-many-of-the-worlds-languages/