A bit of a language education policy riff today …

1. Short notice again of this one, sorry! At 13:00 UK time tomorrow, Wednesday 21st February, George Wilson will be talking about his experiences with multilingual learners and promoting regional languages in a Facebook Live event, How can we promote minority languages in class? https://www.facebook.com/events/756409536064136

2. Here’s a recording of another TeachingEnglish event that I missed at the end of January, How can teacher educators enhance learning and teaching in English-medium education? with Ann Veitch https://youtu.be/ZbOXkaaJOWc?feature=shared

This one’s more for people working in education policy and planning, say the TeachingEnglish team, and it might not be a bad thing at all if more education authorities around the world counted to ten before introducing English-medium education.

Lots more TeachingEnglish webinars and events for teachers here https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/news-and-events/webinars/webinars-teachers

and for teacher educators here https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/news-and-events/webinars/webinars-teacher-educator

3. There’s an ECML event with Terry Lamb on Challenging Societal Attitudes towards Language and Culture this Thursday, 22 February 2024, at 15:00 UK time. More info and registration here https://www.ecml.at/Resources/Webinars/tabid/5456/Default.aspx

The purpose of the Council of Europe ‘recommendation’ on ‘The importance of plurilingual and intercultural education for democratic culture’ that Terry will be talking about is explained as follows:

The efficient functioning of democracies depends on social inclusion and societal integration, which in turn depend on an understanding of, respect for and engagement with linguistic and cultural diversity. This recommendation aims to give fresh impetus to the promotion, development, and implementation of plurilingual and intercultural education, recognising its importance for personal and professional development, equity, societal integration, the exercise of human rights and participation in democratic culture.

PDF of the recommendation and appendices below. If you’ve not read a document like this before, you might find the way it’s written interesting – one single six-page-long sentence!

4. Large Language Models: A Survey by Shervin Minaee, Tomas Mikolov, Narjes Nikzad, Meysam Chenaghlu, Richard Socher, Xavier Amatriain & Jianfeng Gao is not an easy read, but neither is it an impossibly difficult read! https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.06196

Abstract here: In this paper, we review some of the most prominent LLMs, including three popular LLM families (GPT, LLaMA, PaLM), and discuss their characteristics, contributions and limitations. We also give an overview of techniques developed to build, and augment LLMs. We then survey popular datasets prepared for LLM training, fine-tuning, and evaluation, review widely used LLM evaluation metrics, and compare the performance of several popular LLMs on a set of representative benchmarks. Finally, we conclude the paper by discussing open challenges and future research directions.

PDF below. Give it a go!

5. And, finally, if that last one seems a bit daunting, here is something magical, the Oscar-nominated The Last Repair Shop https://psyche.co/films/repairing-instruments-for-children-is-its-own-art-in-this-oscar-nominated-short

Still to do with education policy, though?