Author Archives: roycross

1. Ladies and gentlemen, a big hand please for the ten winning schools in the Climate Action school video competition! https://www.britishcouncil.org/climate-connection/get-involved/action-language-education/school-video-competition/winners Scroll down the page for links to all the prizewinning videos: start with Our Climate Hero from Ethiopia https://youtu.be/JHAy8ckDITg … Continue reading →

Early notice of Oxford University Press’s ELTOC 2022 on 4th and 5th March, so you can register in good time https://elt.oup.com/events/global/eltoc-march-2022?cc=us&selLanguage=en I’m guessing ELTOC means ELT Online Conference? Three strands to the conference: Climate Action, Digital Learning, and Classroom Management. … Continue reading →

1. Schools in the UK often exclude difficult pupils, usually for no better reason than they want to ensure their school’s performance stats are not damaged by poor exam results or frequent absence from school. Good piece here from The … Continue reading →

1. Great title for the next talk in the Reading University Applied Linguistics Research Circle series by Maria Sabaté-Dalmau from the University of Lleida, ‘I speak small’: Unequal Englishes and transnational identities among Ghanaian migrants in Catalonia Contact Rodney Jones … Continue reading →

1. I was worried this would be a monster file but it’s not too bad (5 Mb): the OECD report on How Learning Continued during the COVID-19 Pandemic with forty-five ‘education continuity stories’ from round the world https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/education/how-learning-continued-during-the-covid-19-pandemic_bbeca162-en  PDF below. … Continue reading →

This edition is sponsored by the World Economic Forum – if only! 1. Here’s Bill Gates and John Kerry in conversation about climate change at the World Economic Forum, both of them guardedly enthusiastic about what COP26 in Glasgow achieved … Continue reading →

Late home this evening from the inaugural meeting of the London TESOL Research Forum, ably spearheaded (his word) by Jim McKinley … 1. More research: TIRF is The International Research Foundation (for English Language Education) https://www.tirfonline.org/ The winner of their … Continue reading →

Some reading, watching and listening for the weekend … 1. A blog post by Barnaby Lenon from the University of Buckingham on the use of textbooks – or not – in the UK https://educationblog.buckingham.ac.uk/2021/05/16/why-are-english-schools-not-using-textbooks-by-professor-barnaby-lenon/ “In England 10% of 10-year olds … Continue reading →

1. Language Log is the blog of the University of Pennsylvania’s Institute for Research in Cognitive Science. Here’s a recent post on the story of Creation and the subsequent Great Flood from south-west China, as told in Naxi ‘pictographic writing’ … Continue reading →

1. First of two today from Lancaster University: next Friday, 4th February, at 13:00 UK time, Jennifer Rowsell from Bristol University will be giving the first of this term’s Lancaster Literacy Research Centre talks, on ‘Research creation during a pandemic’. … Continue reading →