1. First up today, Jessica Mackay’s latest compilation of forthcoming CPD opportunities https://eim-ub.blogspot.com/2026/05/upcoming-cpd-opportunities-summer-2026.html

Luckily, the first one on the list, from Cambridge University Press & Assessment (CUPA), Motivating and engaging young learners with Helen Kenyon, which you’ve missed today (sorry!), is repeated on Thursday.

2. Also from CUPA – an acronym which I was once told by a Cambridge colleague they were absolutely forbidden to use: something to do with chupa in Spanish (he said coyly) – Jason Anderson’s 2026 updating of Philip Kerr’s 2019 Cambridge ‘White Paper’, The use of L1 in English language teaching, to include translanguaging and multi/plurilingualism – a lot can happen in seven years!

“While the term ‘L1’ wouldn’t be my preferred choice”, says Jason, “the title was retained from Philip Kerr’s well argued earlier version.” PDF below and here https://www.cambridge.org/sites/default/files/media/documents/WP_L1_ELT_CPELE_WEB.pdf

For much of the 20th century, English language teachers working in Western countries were recommended to teach using only, or mainly, English. Other languages were discouraged or even banned from the classroom. Even discussion of the topic was considered, until recently, an ‘elephant in the room’ of English language teaching (ELT). Yet since the start of the twenty-first century, there has been a noticeable and widespread shift in Western opinion towards the use of other languages in the classroom, so much so that some scholars are calling this a ‘multilingual turn’ in language teaching. In other parts of the world (e.g. East and South Asia), other languages played an important role in the English classroom throughout the 20th century, even if (some? Ed.) Western scholars looked negatively upon such practices.

3. StoryScope: Investigating idiosyncrasies in AI fiction by a team from the University of Maryland and Google DeepMind led by Jenna Russell https://arxiv.org/pdf/2604.03136 Not the easiest of reads, maybe, but an interesting one. PDF below as well.

AI stories over-explain themes and favor tidy, single-track plots while human stories frame protagonist’ choices as more morally ambiguous and have increased temporal complexity (e.g., flashbacks, nonlinear structure). Per-model fingerprint features enable six-way attribution: for example, Claude produces notably flat event escalation, GPT over-indexes on dream sequences, and Gemini defaults to external character description. We find that AI-generated stories cluster in a shared region of narrative space, while human-authored stories exhibit greater diversity.

4. See what you think of this one, a TED talk, How to escape the smartphone doom loop with Larissa May and Elise Hu. I respond better to the content than the form.https://www.ted.com/talks/larissa_may_elise_hu_how_to_escape_the_smartphone_doom_loop

Larissa May has spent a decade building digital wellness programs for young people, and she’s discovered something quietly radical: the smartphone doom loop of screen dependence and anxiety is preventable, and joy (not restriction) is the way out. She makes the case for a different relationship with technology — for kids, parents and everyone in between — that starts with swapping screens for some analog fun.

5.And, finally, and governed by the statute of dodgy copy limitations I hope, a home-made PDF of an old piece I found when having a clear out earlier today, 100 Short Stories to Love, from The Sunday Times of 29^th April 2018.