1. Here’s exactly one week’s notice of the start on 14th February of a new course on English in the multilingual classroom https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/training/english-multilingual-classroom
“This course will introduce you to multilingualism and what it means. You’ll learn how to make your classroom and teaching multilingual so that your learners can learn to celebrate and use many languages in the real world.” Sounds good to me!
2. In a similar vein, Nayr Ibrahim was self-confessedly thrilled late last week to share the news of the foundation of ELLRA, the Early Language Learning Research Association, which “will seek to federate and further research into Early Language Learning (ELL): the acquisition of two or more languages by young learners (2-12 years), and the teaching of additional languages to these younger age groups.”
If you’re interested in finding out more, join the ELLRA Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/524159253154802
By the way, I think the Macmillan Dictionary definition of ‘in a similar vein’ is excellent https://www.macmillandictionary.com/dictionary/british/in-a-similar-vein. I only wish that Leeds had been more exemplary of the phrase this season!
3. Here’s the first of two gift articles today from The New York Times, a piece by their Editorial Board about the pros and cons of making many professions ‘graduate only’ with which it’s very hard to disagree, See Workers as Workers, Not as a College Credential https://tinyurl.com/yckkhcmb
That one was courtesy of Stephen Downes’s OL(Online)Daily, which often has good stuff, including this recent post with stacks of ChatGPT links https://www.downes.ca/post/74832 – you can subscribe here https://www.downes.ca/index.html
4. Continuing with the theme of ChatGPT, Did a Fourth Grader Write This? Or the New Chatbot? is today’s second NYT article, where you get to judge for yourself whether it was the bot or the student who was the author of three pieces of writing https://tinyurl.com/bdcsd3pp
5. And, finally and elegiacally, ‘Once Elephants Lived Here’ by Geetanjali Shree, translated by Daisy Rockwell, the story of “a young office worker in a teeming metropolis (becoming) intrigued with a chimerical elderly woman”:
and Part 2 https://wordswithoutborders.org/read/article/2023-02/once-elephants-lived-here-part-two/
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