1. This year’s 41^st NATESOL conference has as its theme Learners and Learning and is free to attend online. Full details of the programme in the flyer below and booking here https://www.natesol.org/event-details/natesol-annual-conference-2025

Abstracts of all the presentations, including Niall Curry’s plenary, Aligning corpus linguistics and language education: a learner-centred approach, and Khawla Badwan’s talk, Unthinking language through its users: a child-wor(l)d language education here https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bea4HZ948AH7ogLADtXzWsdhaBXwocsqY4b2aUnQxHw/edit?tab=t.0

2. ReCALL is the journal of the European Association for Computer Assisted Language Learning. It’s just published an open access special issue on Migrants’ and refugees’ digital literacies in life and language learning https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/recall/latest-issue

Here’s the editorial from Linda Bradley, Nicolas Guichon & Agnes Kukulska-Hulme https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/recall/article/migrants-and-refugees-digital-literacies-in-life-and-language-learning/F373D75688968D971D032038D635D5D2

PDF of the editorial below as well.

3. Jessica Mackay’s latest very comprehensive list of CPD opportunities for language teachers includes – yikes! – several events today and tomorrow (and a lot more besides) https://eim-ub.blogspot.com/2025/03/upcoming-cpd-opportunities-spring-2025.html

4. I mentioned the fiftieth anniversary of the fall of Saigon last week, for many of us summed up in the famous photo of people queuing on the roof of the embassy to escape by helicopter. Here’s a piece by Phil Tinline for Engelsberg Ideas, The helicopter, symbol of American hubris. It seems that photo wasn’t the embassy, though: it was the nearby CIA office! https://engelsbergideas.com/essays/the-helicopter-symbol-of-american-hubris/

Tinline also mentions the famous ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ helicopter attack in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, which I remember being played at deafening volume in the Arts Cinema in Cambridge when I first saw it in 1979. Here’s that clip https://youtu.be/VE03Lqm3nbI I’d always assumed that Coppola meant the film, at least in part, as an anti-war film, but he’d have us believe not in this piece when interviewed by Kevin Perry about his ‘Final Cut’ version for The Guardian in 2019 https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/aug/09/francis-ford-coppola-apocalypse-now-is-not-an-anti-war-film

Peter Bradshaw’s review of Apocalypse Now: Final Cut has no doubts, however, and I’m with Bradshaw https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/aug/07/apocalypse-now-final-cut-review-francis-ford-coppola-dennis-hopper  From Marlon Brando’s extraordinary cameo to Dennis Hopper’s crazed photojournalist, Coppola’s epic ‘definitive’ cut of his brilliant 1979 war film is triumphant in restating the inhumanity of empire.

Anti-war or not, I love this quote from Coppola: “You have to realise, when I was making this I didn’t carry a script around,” he says. “I carried a green Penguin paperback copy of ‘Heart of Darkness’ with all my underlining in it. I made the movie from that.”

5. Why are productions of Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape like London buses? You wait for ages and then two come along at the same time! There are two playing in the UK at present: with Gary Oldman at The Theatre Royal in York and with Stephen Rea at The Barbican in London. I went to see the latter on Friday with a friend and much enjoyed it.

Neither production is on YouTube just yet, but here’s the original 1958 Royal Court production (with Patrick Magee) https://youtu.be/otpEwEVFKLc

And here’s the other half of what has often been a double bill, Endgame, in a 1991 BBC production (with Max Wall & Charlie Drake) https://youtu.be/dWY3wuYiTM8

Thanks to Michael for those two videos!