1. AI and English language teaching: Affordances and challenges by Helen Crompton, Adam Edmett, Neenaz Ichaporia & Diane Burke does exactly what it says on the tin https://tinyurl.com/bdh2u848 “Policymakers,  funders,  practitioners  and educational leaders can use the information provided in this study to gain a holistic understanding of the current trend in the use of AI in ELT/L, and practical implications are provided to guide future use of AI.” PDF below.

2. Here’s my NILE colleague Carole Anne Robinson’s piece for the Macmillan English blog, Feedback – are we sending our students hidden messages? You can read or listen here, as you choose https://www.macmillanenglish.com/blog-resources/article/advancing-learning-feedback-are-we-sending-our-students-hidden-messages

The problem with any unconscious feedback that we might be giving our learners is that it is unconscious and so we are usually not aware of it!

3. ‘Tu connais le answer?’: Multilingual children’s attempts to navigate monolingual English Medium classrooms in Cameroon by Harry Kuchah Kuchah & Lizzi O. Milligan https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0346251X23002385

Here’s the abstract: This paper explores the ways that multilingual children attempt to access the English medium curriculum in Cameroonian primary education. We focus on Francophone Yaound´e where there has been a sharp rise in the number of children from predominantly Francophone multilingual homes attending English medium schools. The paper draws from a child-centred case study and data generated through classroom observations, child-group and individual interviews and recordings of student interactions around unsupervised tasks to show how learners are drawing from their multilingual resources to attempt to transgress monolingual norms in the classroom. The data also shows that learners are doing what they can to ‘get by’ but they are doing this in ways that are not supported by policy, pedagogy, or teaching materials. The paper concludes with a discussion of the ways that monolingual policies epistemically exclude children in an immensely complex multilingual context and draws implications for more inclusive policy and classroom practice.

Love that “drawing from their multilingual resources to attempt to transgress monolingual norms in the classroom”!

4. Another good piece gleaned from Stephen Downes’s O(nline)L(earning)Daily https://www.downes.ca/news/OLDaily.htm, this time an interview from the Journal of Applied Learning & Teaching with Rose Luckin from the UCL Knowledge Lab which covers a huge amount of ground in a discussion of her career and her accidental early engagement with AI, Exploring the future of learning and the relationship between human intelligence and AI https://journals.sfu.ca/jalt/index.php/jalt/article/view/1659 PDF below.

5. And, finally, a PDF of a typically quirky and recondite piece originally written for the Dhaka Daily Star by John Drew, T S Eliot’s Cat, about how T S Eliot, author of Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, named one of his own cats Mirza Murad Ali Beg. (Eliot’s other cat was named Cuscuscaraway, just in case you were wondering.)