1. This Thursday, 19^th June, at 15:30 UK time there’s the last NATESOL event of this academic year, an interestingly different ‘special panel discussion’ with Robert Merrell from Manchester Adult Education Services and two adult ESOL learners, Rabia and Lul, Revisiting ESOL Entry learners’ needs & our teaching approaches. More information and free registration via NATESOL’s website here: https://www.natesol.org/

Robert and his two Pre-Entry learners are going to share what Entry ESOL learners need nowadays. Practical teaching techniques and useful suggestions will be exchanged. The discussion will be of interest to all teachers of English as a foreign or second language.

‘Pre-Entry’ is the ESOL equivalent of ‘absolute beginner’, just in case that’s not obvious, and my assumption is that Rabia and Lul are no longer Pre-Entry level learners!

2. BBC Radio 4 have just done a very good two-part adaptation of King Lear with the oldest ever Lear, the appropriately aged eighty-nine-year-old Richard Wilson, still best known here in the UK for his role as the curmudgeonly Victor Meldrew in the One Foot in the Grave sitcom (the humour of which may not have travelled very well?), supported by a stellar cast.

Here’s Part 1 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002d887

here’s Part 2 https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002dkzx

and here’s The Daily Telegraph review https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/9113b0d51c87753a

3. The Beautiful Betrayal: How AI Reveals the Unravelling of Real Learning is a thought-provoking piece by Carlo Iacono on his Hybrid Horizons blog, which ‘explores human-AI collaboration’ https://hybridhorizons.substack.com/p/the-beautiful-betrayal

I’ve been (…) watching people grapple with generative AI, and what I’ve observed runs counter to every dire prediction about shortcuts and intellectual laziness. When a user crafts what they believe is a perfectly reasonable prompt and receives an AI response that’s technically correct but somehow fundamentally off, something remarkable happens. The tool’s interpretation becomes a mirror, reflecting back not just what they asked, but the poverty of how they asked it. “But that’s not what I meant,” they protest, staring at the screen. And in that protest lies the beginning of wisdom. The AI, in its peculiar combination of sophistication and obtuseness, forces a reckoning. Unlike a human teacher who might intuit meaning from context, who might bridge the gaps in a poorly formed question with experience and empathy, the AI responds only to what’s actually there. Every assumption left unspoken, every piece of context taken for granted, every logical leap glossed over – all of it becomes suddenly, painfully visible.

4. Have you ever heard of Ocracoke Island in North Carolina? Nor had I till Maja Mandekić brought it to my attention. It’s The US island that speaks Elizabethan English according to the BBC https://www.bbc.co.uk/travel/article/20190623-the-us-island-that-speaks-elizabethan-english

I’d never been called a “dingbatter” until I went to Ocracoke, North Carolina for the first time. I’ve spent a good part of my life in the state, but I’m still learning how to speak the Hoi Toider brogue. The people here just have their own way of speaking: it’s like someone took Elizabethan English, sprinkled in some Irish tones and 1700s Scottish accents, then mixed it all up with pirate slang. But the Hoi Toider dialect is more than a dialect. It’s also a culture, one that’s slowly fading away. With each generation, fewer people play meehonkey, cook the traditional foods or know what it is to be “mommucked”.

5. And, finally, confirmation of my memory of that Silent Way class with Mario Rinvolucri that I mentioned last Thursday from Rod Bolitho’s tribute-letter (nice idea) to Mario in the April issue of HLT:

But let me (Rod) talk to you (Mario) for a moment about how we first got together in Cambridge in 1977. I was fresh back from 3 years in Germany and the people at Bell pitched me head first into the role of Director of the RSA Dip TEFL programme, run on behalf of the recognised language schools in the city. You offered to teach a couple of slots on the course and I was advised to agree to your offer but also warned that you could rub people up the wrong way. The first session you led was on Gattegno’s Silent Way and it was a very intense experience for everyone present, myself included. When I talked to you about it, you said the intensity was deliberate as you wanted people to concentrate and to remember the session.

Well, Mario achieved his intention: I can remember that session with him nearly fifty years ago like it was yesterday!