1. This month’s free IATEFL webinar is this Saturday, 7^th October at 15:00 UK time: Diversity and inclusion in EMI Contexts: Practical ideas for teachers, presented by Amira Salama from Nile University in Giza* https://www.iatefl.org/events/492

Amira’s blurb says, “Rather than delving deep into theoretical concepts, building on her recent research on EMI in Egypt and North Africa, the presenter will share some practical tools for teachers to assess their own understanding of these two concepts in bilingual (and maybe multilingual contexts) and offer some tips to successfully consider inclusion and diversity into their teaching material and instruction.”

More events – some free, some for members only – here: https://www.iatefl.org/events

*Also known as the home of The Great Sphinx https://maps.app.goo.gl/KBuLtN4aemfegjrEA

2. This week’s Teacher Tapp https://teachertapp.co.uk/articles/time-sinks-phone-bans-and-education-influencers/ includes a survey of mobile phone usage in UK schools over the last few years which suggests that the UK government’s ban announced yesterday is a bit of a catch up exercise.

3. A recording of a comprehensive* recent talk by Robert Gibson for the ICC, From Maps to Navigation Systems – Trends in Intercultural Training https://youtu.be/w1MuiDaZZGw?feature=shared More ICC videos here https://www.youtube.com/@ICClanguages and their website here https://icc-languages.eu/

*Don’t feel ashamed to dip in and out!

ICC stands (stood?) for International Certificate Conference. I well remember being thrown out of a meeting of an earlier incarnation of the ICC in Starnberg in 1986 by its redoubtable founding director, Tony Fitzpatrick, who felt my British Council employment disqualified me from attendance, given that we weren’t members – fair enough with the benefit of hindsight but not how it felt at the time to the sensitive tyro Assistant Director Germany, South!

4. I’ve just discovered the publisher Castledown. They publish a number of interesting free ELT journals https://castledown.online/journals/ (and also offer generous sample extracts from their other publications). Here’s three of the journals:

Intercultural Communication Education https://castledown.online/journals/ice/

The JALT CALL Journal https://castledown.online/journals/jaltcall/

(JALT = Japan Association for Language Teaching and CALL = Computer Assisted Language Learning)

Australian Journal of Applied Linguistics (AJAL) https://castledown.online/journals/ajal/

And here’s a review by Kin Tat Wong from the current issue of AJAL of The Routledge Handbook of Materials Development for Language Teaching (yours for only £164) https://castledown.online/articles/AJAL_6_1_1024.pdf? PDF below.

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5. And, finally, Hanif Kureishi. This week’s TLS (Times Literary Supplement) has a review of a recent biography of Kureishi by Ruvani Ranasinha, which concludes with the following paragraph: “On Boxing Day 2022 Kureishi suffered an accident in Rome that has left him paralysed and unable to hold a pen. His world has been broken in two; his past almost seems to belong to someone else. He mourns his former life and longs to go home, but continues to write with undiminished vitality: thousands of readers are following “The Kureishi Chronicles”, which (his son) Carlo (who once said of his upbringing, “Dad can only write. He outsources everything else”) transcribes and uploads to Substack https://hanifkureishi.substack.com/”

You’ll need to register (for free) on the TLS site to read the review https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/hanif-kureishi-ruvani-ranasinha-book-review-susie-thomas/

Here’s Kureishi’s Wikipedia entry, too https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanif_Kureishi