1. Short notice of this short (45”) webinar, Dyslexia Awareness for Language Teachers with Boelo van der Pool tomorrow, Wednesday, February 7^th at 12:00 UK time. Free registration here, “to understand how to help the 10 to 15% of your students with dyslexia learn better” https://forms.gle/3Ub1kM5XdCri4G2RA

2. More than half of UK undergraduates say they use AI to help with essays The Guardian told us last week https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/feb/01/more-than-half-uk-undergraduates-ai-essays-artificial-intelligence If half are prepared to admit they use it, I wonder how many really use it?

3. The Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) have just published a concise guide to Using research evidence, a surprisingly (?) contentious area in education.

The blog post about the guide is here https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/news/new-guide-to-help-education-professionals-to-make-best-use-of-research-evidence

and the guide itself here https://d2tic4wvo1iusb.cloudfront.net/production/documents/using_research_evidence_-_a_concise_guide.pdf?v=1707066553 PDF below.

‘Red flag warning signs’ to look out for when examining a piece of research evidence include:

• The research is funded by an organisation or individual who has a personal stake in the findings.
• The evidence is shared on a commercial website that benefits from the intervention or approach.
• The number of participants included in the research is small or isn’t representative of the target population.
• The findings have been extended to situations or people – for example, different year groups or subjects – that the research didn’t look at.

4. First mentioned by me exactly (!) a year ago and starting (again) today, is the very popular English in the multilingual classroom course from TeachingEnglish https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/training/english-multilingual-classroom

“This course will introduce you to multilingualism and what it means. 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.”

PDF of the work book for the course below, to give you a fuller idea of what you’d be committing to, and details of several other courses currently running, all free, on this page https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/training

5. Three recent case studies from TeachingEnglish next. Links to download all three on their page and PDFs below.

i) Exploratory Action Research in Thai Schools: English teachers identifying problems, taking action and assessing results Twelve Thai teacher-researchers document their research journeys in this very engaging and encouraging publication https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/publications/case-studies-insights-and-research/exploratory-action-research-thai-schools

ii) Why won’t they speak English? investigates children’s anxiety and autonomy during English lessons in three government primary schools in Alexandria, Egypt through the lens of Self Determination Theory and suggests ways to improve learning experiences https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/publications/case-studies-insights-and-research/why-wont-they-speak-english

If you need it, like I did, here’s a bit more on Self Determination Theory  https://selfdeterminationtheory.org/theory/

iii) Family attitudes towards multilingualism in bilingual education programmes reports on a large-scale study investigating the overall perception of multilingualism in the family environment of children enrolled in an English immersion programme in primary schools across Spain https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/publications/case-studies-insights-and-research/family-attitudes-towards-multilingualism-bilingual

Lots more case studies and research here https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/publications/case-studies-insights-and-research

6. And, finally, the first of three video features from The Guardian, Rowdy Flock, a short film about a big undertaking, Rakel’s assuming responsibility for her father’s sheep farm in the Norwegian fjords https://www.theguardian.com/news/ng-interactive/2024/jan/31/rowdy-flock-a-daughter-her-dreams-and-a-sheep-farm-in-norway

Here’s the article that accompanies Rowdy Flock https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/31/falling-in-love-with-sheep-farming-in-the-norwegian-fjords