Roy Cross's Blog

1. First up today, here’s a cornucopia of recordings from the TeachingEnglish celebration of World Teacher’s Day last week, with speakers from all around the world https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/world-teachers-day-2023

Scroll down to the bottom of the individual pages for each day for all the recordings and for the handouts on each session. By way of way in, how about trying one of the following? (I’ve given links to the YouTube versions as they have subtitles.)

Hafsah Aminu and Rasheedat Sadiq on Planning lessons for the 21st century learner https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPLM7z3qOCc

Jorge Chacon on Increasing student autonomy inside and outside the classroom https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EWXuw7kY_E

Andy Keedwell on Bending the rules: developing learner awareness of how language really works https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49-6g0nENek

Cecilia Nobre on Using video-based observations for self-directed development https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VG098ikUiXI

2. I was shocked to learn the other day that Susan Holden, an ELT publishing great, had died this summer. Here’s Melanie Butler’s obituary in the EL Gazette https://www.elgazette.com/remembering-susan-holden/ and here’s a range of very powerful testimony to Susan’s influence gathered together in this month’s edition of HLT https://www.hltmag.co.uk/oct23/remembering-susan-holden-rip PDF of HLT tributes below.

3. I also had no idea that Sir Ken Robinson, whose TED talk from 2006, Do schools kill creativity?,  remains the most watched of all time, had died a whole three years ago. Here’s the NYT obituary that I stumbled across over the weekend https://tinyurl.com/mr2kzhas and here’s two excerpts from it, the first of which is the moral of a great (true) story about a  primary school nativity play, which starts four minutes into his talk (link below):

“Kids will take a chance. If they don’t know, they’ll have a go. Am I right? They’re not frightened of being wrong. But by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity.”

“There isn’t an education system on the planet that teaches dance every day to children the way we teach them mathematics. I think math is very important, but so is dance. Children dance all the time, if they’re allowed to. Truthfully, what happens is, as children grow up, we start to educate them from the waist up. And then we focus on their heads.”

If you’re not one of the nearly 76 million who’ve already watched it, do watch his first TED talk, Do schools kill creativity? https://www.ted.com/talks/sir_ken_robinson_do_schools_kill_creativity And if you have seen it, watch it again, as I just did with great enjoyment!

Here’s Sir Ken’s other two TED talks:

Bring on the learning revolution! https://www.ted.com/talks/sir_ken_robinson_bring_on_the_learning_revolution

How to escape education’s death valley https://www.ted.com/talks/sir_ken_robinson_how_to_escape_education_s_death_valley

4. The Common Reader is Henry Oliver’s unashamedly opinionated blog https://commonreader.substack.com/ Here’s three sample posts:

Samuel Johnson, opsimath https://commonreader.substack.com/p/samuel-johnson-opsimath-755

Auden was the best poet of the twentieth century https://commonreader.substack.com/p/auden-was-the-best-poet-of-the-twentieth-90d

Philip Larkin. Poet of the almost. https://commonreader.substack.com/p/philip-larkin-poet-of-the-almost

5. And, finally, here’s another NYT gift article, this one on Jon Fosse, the Norwegian author who won the Nobel Prize for Literature last week: https://tinyurl.com/6nsua8sr

1. This month’s free IATEFL webinar is this Saturday, 7^th October at 15:00 UK time: Diversity and inclusion in EMI Contexts: Practical ideas for teachers, presented by Amira Salama from Nile University in Giza* https://www.iatefl.org/events/492

Amira’s blurb says, “Rather than delving deep into theoretical concepts, building on her recent research on EMI in Egypt and North Africa, the presenter will share some practical tools for teachers to assess their own understanding of these two concepts in bilingual (and maybe multilingual contexts) and offer some tips to successfully consider inclusion and diversity into their teaching material and instruction.”

More events – some free, some for members only – here: https://www.iatefl.org/events

*Also known as the home of The Great Sphinx https://maps.app.goo.gl/KBuLtN4aemfegjrEA

2. This week’s Teacher Tapp https://teachertapp.co.uk/articles/time-sinks-phone-bans-and-education-influencers/ includes a survey of mobile phone usage in UK schools over the last few years which suggests that the UK government’s ban announced yesterday is a bit of a catch up exercise.

3. A recording of a comprehensive* recent talk by Robert Gibson for the ICC, From Maps to Navigation Systems – Trends in Intercultural Training https://youtu.be/w1MuiDaZZGw?feature=shared More ICC videos here https://www.youtube.com/@ICClanguages and their website here https://icc-languages.eu/

*Don’t feel ashamed to dip in and out!

ICC stands (stood?) for International Certificate Conference. I well remember being thrown out of a meeting of an earlier incarnation of the ICC in Starnberg in 1986 by its redoubtable founding director, Tony Fitzpatrick, who felt my British Council employment disqualified me from attendance, given that we weren’t members – fair enough with the benefit of hindsight but not how it felt at the time to the sensitive tyro Assistant Director Germany, South!

4. I’ve just discovered the publisher Castledown. They publish a number of interesting free ELT journals https://castledown.online/journals/ (and also offer generous sample extracts from their other publications). Here’s three of the journals:

Intercultural Communication Education https://castledown.online/journals/ice/

The JALT CALL Journal https://castledown.online/journals/jaltcall/

(JALT = Japan Association for Language Teaching and CALL = Computer Assisted Language Learning)

Australian Journal of Applied Linguistics (AJAL) https://castledown.online/journals/ajal/

And here’s a review by Kin Tat Wong from the current issue of AJAL of The Routledge Handbook of Materials Development for Language Teaching (yours for only £164) https://castledown.online/articles/AJAL_6_1_1024.pdf? PDF below.

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5. And, finally, Hanif Kureishi. This week’s TLS (Times Literary Supplement) has a review of a recent biography of Kureishi by Ruvani Ranasinha, which concludes with the following paragraph: “On Boxing Day 2022 Kureishi suffered an accident in Rome that has left him paralysed and unable to hold a pen. His world has been broken in two; his past almost seems to belong to someone else. He mourns his former life and longs to go home, but continues to write with undiminished vitality: thousands of readers are following “The Kureishi Chronicles”, which (his son) Carlo (who once said of his upbringing, “Dad can only write. He outsources everything else”) transcribes and uploads to Substack https://hanifkureishi.substack.com/”

You’ll need to register (for free) on the TLS site to read the review https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/hanif-kureishi-ruvani-ranasinha-book-review-susie-thomas/

Here’s Kureishi’s Wikipedia entry, too https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanif_Kureishi

1. Here’s a useful tip from Russell Stannard, Twee: A.I. Powered Tools For English Teachers https://twee.com/

plus introductory video here https://youtu.be/5IOb5Xxk2Hk?feature=shared

2. Jessica Mackay has done a great job again this month, bringing together a very wide range of (mainly) free CPD opportunities in this blog post https://eim-ub.blogspot.com/2023/09/opportunities-autumn-2023-upcoming-cpd.html

Keep it up please, Jessica!

3. Here’s an engaging MUBI podcast interview with the film director Ken Loach, who claims he’s approaching the end of his career https://mubi.buzzsprout.com/1788738/13675694-ken-loach-calls-for-solidarity-in-the-old-oak?t=0

Loach looks back on a long career spent telling the stories of working people and considers why it might end with his most recent film, The Old Oak, which is a call for solidarity in a northern industrial town.

4. This country runs on 98 percent renewable energy is the title of a TED talk by Ramón Méndez Galain, who led Urugay’s successful and astonishingly quick energy transformation https://www.ted.com/talks/ramon_mendez_galain_this_country_runs_on_98_percent_renewable_energy

5. And, finally, are you up to speed on optimal stopping theory? Just one of the topics Hannah Fry discusses in her talk, The mathematics of love https://youtu.be/N37x4GgDVBM?feature=shared

Bit of a Guardian day, today …

1. Guardian 1: ‘English has always evolved by mistake’ says lexicographical superstar Susie Dent https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2023/sep/23/susie-dent-english-has-always-evolved-by-mistake

2. The current One Stop English free offer includes an attractive set of materials and accompanying audio for young learners at three different levels, Round the World https://www.onestopenglish.com/young-learner-topics/young-learner-topics-round-the-world/557630.article PDFs and (very small!) audiofile below as well.

3. Guardian 2: There’s more to ChatGPT than a big memory, it seems https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/sep/23/chatbots-ai-gpt-4-university-students-creativity

4. I met Charlie Gardner, the organiser of Walking in Water in a riverside pub on Sunday. Such a meeting will very likely not be possible in fifteen years’ time … https://walkinginwater.com/

More famously water-threatened is Venice, which is additionally at risk of being swamped by tourists https://theconversation.com/an-entry-fee-may-not-be-enough-to-save-venice-from-20-million-tourists-213703

5. Guardian 3: and, finally, Naomi Wood won this year’s BBC national short story award with Comorbidities https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/sep/26/bestselling-author-naomi-wood-wins-2023-bbc-national-short-story-award and Atlas Weyland Eden won the corresponding Young Writer’s Award. You can listen to Atlas’s The Wordsmith (and all five shortlisted stories) here https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/2cslf9QxZKznVCqplBS0SY0/winner-of-the-2023-bbc-young-writers-award-announced

1. The National Centre for Social Research (NCSR) here in the UK https://natcen.ac.uk/ has now been tracking our social and political attitudes for forty years. In their latest annual report they say that “one clear theme emerges. On many social issues, such as sexual relations or whether women with young children should go out to work, there has been a long-run secular change trend towards a more liberal climate of opinion. In what might be thought a near-revolution in the country’s cultural outlook and social norms, Britain has increasingly come to believe that what people do in the bedroom, what kinds of family they live in, and how they combine family life and paid work should be up to them. The job of government is to respect and facilitate the decisions they make rather than try and take those decision for them”.

Here’s the NCSR blog post on their new report https://natcen.ac.uk/different-britain-40-years-changing-social-attitudes

2. Here’s a good, comprehensive post on what exactly Assessment for Learning is on the Macmillan blog from a NILE colleague, Jason Skeet https://www.macmillanenglish.com/blog-resources/article/advancing-learning-what-is-assessment-for-learning-and-why-is-it-important

3. You can choose whether to read or to listen to this one from The Economist, The vital art of talking to strangers https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2021/07/10/the-vital-art-of-talking-to-strangers

4. Helen Lewis’s blog is called The Bluestocking. Here’s her latest post, What Does Keir Starmer Believe? https://helenlewis.substack.com/p/bluestocking-special-what-does-keir

How many of my readers outside the UK have no idea at all who Keir Starmer is, I wonder? And if you haven’t heard of him (yet?), maybe this post is not for you.

5. And, finally, everything you need to know about this year’s Booker Prize shortlist https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/features/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-booker-prize-2023-shortlist

Click on the links near the top of the page for more information on the individual books shortlisted.

1. I met Graham Tennant, the co-founder of My CPD Group, (online) on Tuesday. The platform that he and his colleagues run is primarily for consultants and companies offering CPD courses but also has a fair bit of free stuff (if you register), including ‘Bringing Nursery Rhymes to Life’ from Pyjama Drama https://mycpdgroup.com/courses/bringing-nursery-rhymes-to-life/ and Starter for 10: Maslow’s Hierarchy from Learning & Wellbeing Psychology https://mycpdgroup.com/courses/starter-for-10-maslows-hierarchy/

To find all the free courses, click on the ‘all prices’ button on the home page and select ‘Free’ https://mycpdgroup.com/

2. There are several online events coming up from OUP (Oxford University Press) this autumn. The first one is How to manage mixed abilities amongst our primary learners with Erika Osvath at 14:00 UK time next Wednesday, 27^th September https://events.oup.com/oxford-university-press/How-to-manage-mixed-abilities-amongst-our-primary

Full details of all forthcoming events here https://oup.pagetiger.com/how-to-professional-development

3. Green Action ELT continues to offer interesting online events. The next one is Big climate emotions: eco-anxiety and ELT at 14:00 UK time on Friday 29^th September. Scroll down on this page for more information on this autumn’s events https://green-action-elt.uk/events/ and you’ll find the archive of previous events here https://green-action-elt.uk/events/#past-events

4. Here’s a piece from Quanta magazine, The Usefulness of a Memory Guides Where the Brain Saves It, explaining how the memories useful for future generalizations are held in the brain separately from those recording unusual events https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-usefulness-of-a-memory-guides-where-the-brain-saves-it-20230830/

5. And, finally, the story of a lamppost https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/audley-square-spy-lamp-post

1. Cristina Cabal works at a language school in Avilés in northern Spain, and – a bit late in the day – I’ve just discovered her very rich blog for language teachers. Here’s her latest post, on bingo https://www.cristinacabal.com/ Lots to explore in the archives.

2. Jessica Mackay’s latest post on her blog, EFL Takeaways: Shared Resources and Lesson Plans for EFL, is a really useful compilation of free online CPD this month https://efltakeaways.home.blog/2023/09/05/free-online-cpd-september-2023/ I hope she does it monthly!

3. It’s been a while since I mentioned Alexandra Mihai’s The Educationalist. Here’s her latest blog post, which has a focus on Problem-Based Learning Are your students prepared for active learning? You can help them! https://educationalist.substack.com/p/are-your-students-prepared-for-active

4. The weekly ELT Buzz News Report does a great job hoovering up stuff from all round the web https://eltbuzz.substack.com/ Here’s the latest issue, with a focus on ‘native speakerism’ https://eltbuzz.substack.com/p/the-elt-buzz-news-report-9e2

5. And, finally, here’s one I harvested from LinkedIn on a return to real books and real writing in Sweden https://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/sweden-brings-more-books-and-handwriting-practice-back-to-its-tech-heavy-schools/CUBSWFL3GBHVBN4VFEEKBATT64/

This post has been unavoidably (and most enjoyably!) delayed by the arrival in the post of the latest Mick Herron book, ‘The Secret Hours’.

1. From Spiegel International, a piece about the Kakhovka Reservoir in Ukraine that was blown up in June, A Trip to the Dried-Up Kakhovka Reservoir https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/russia-s-scorched-earth-policy-in-ukraine-a-trip-to-the-dried-up-kakhovka-reservoir-a-992aef1d-f4a7-4fbf-84a2-74c5d93b6566

2. Obscenely conspicuous consumption, at over £600 a person for dinner (without much wine)? Probably, but I hope it’s nonetheless interesting to hear from someone who ate recently at Noma, Nadine and René Redzepi’s ‘legendary’ Copenhagen restaurant. Who Deserves to Eat at Noma? from Taste https://tastecooking.com/who-deserves-to-eat-at-noma/

3. ICAI (the UK’s Independent Commission for Aid Impact) have just published a report covering the last four years, a very challenging period for UK (and other countries’) aid programmes, UK aid under pressure: a synthesis of ICAI findings from 2019 to 2023. They aim “to provide an overview of the state of UK aid” and suggest “some key measures that could be taken in the coming years to restore the quality and reputation of UK aid”. https://icai.independent.gov.uk/review/uk-aid-under-pressure-synthesis-2019-2023/ PDF of full report below, summary here:

The 2019-2023 period has been a challenging one for UK aid. There were emergency responses to a series of global crises, including the COVID-19 pandemic, the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan and the Ukraine war. In September 2020, the Department for International Development (DFID) and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) were merged to create a single department, the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO). There have been frequent changes of ministerial and government priorities, and a series of budget reductions which had a significant impact on the aid programme.

4. An informative short film from The UK National Archives about the Partition of British India https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yb_gq-wZDig

Lots more to browse in the National Archives YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@TheNationalArchivesUK

5. And, finally and probably for font nerds only, 8 micro tips for remarkably better typography from Medium https://uxdesign.cc/8-micro-tips-for-remarkably-better-typography-986c8c4f6d85

More from Medium here https://medium.com/

Back into the groove ….

1. I’m about to enrol – if my nerve holds – on this Harvard course, which is free if you ‘audit’ it: Harvard CS50: Introduction to Computer Science https://www.edx.org/plp/introduction-computer-science-harvardx-cs50x Old dogs ….

2. Ample notice for this interesting sounding online RSA event with Amy Edmondson and Tim Harford at 13:00 UK time on Tuesday 26^th September, Why learning to fail can teach us to thrive https://www.thersa.org/events/2023/09/why-learning-to-fail-can-teach-us-to-thrive

3. A piece in Tech Brew on tennis commentary, AI tennis commentary is coming to the US Open https://www.emergingtechbrew.com/stories/2023/08/29/us-open-ibm-ai-tennis-commentary Football next!

4. ‘Flash fiction’ from The New Yorker: Haruki Murakami’s ‘My Cheesecake-Shaped Poverty’ https://www.newyorker.com/books/flash-fiction/my-cheesecake-shaped-poverty-haruki-murakami

5. And, finally and tastily, how about some kosua ne meko? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3wlinXueBM

This will be the last ‘Free Resources’ message till Tuesday 12^th September. With a certain amount of trepidation, I’m driving out to Croatia. It’s a journey we made annually for twenty-five years, but this will be the first time for eighteen years …

1. Maybe not so surprising to learn that software designed to detect the use of ChatGPT by students is often biased against non-native English writers? Here’s an article from Patterns by a team from Stanford University, GPT detectors are biased against non-native English writers https://www.cell.com/patterns/fulltext/S2666-3899(23)00130-7 Has an interesting set of links & references at the end. PDF below.

2. An article on another worrying use for ChatGPT, this time in Iowa, School district uses ChatGPT to help remove library books https://www.popsci.com/technology/iowa-chatgpt-book-ban/

3. Three from The Conversation on working together (or not):

Teamwork is not always the best way of working https://theconversation.com/teamwork-is-not-always-the-best-way-of-working-new-study-211693

Collaborative problem solvers are made not born https://theconversation.com/collaborative-problem-solvers-are-made-not-born-heres-what-you-need-to-know-110663

How many work projects are too many? Here’s why you should tell your boss to stop at five https://theconversation.com/how-many-work-projects-are-too-many-heres-why-you-should-tell-your-boss-to-stop-at-five-190512

4. Here’s a new(ish) podcast from David Runciman on the history of ideas, Past Present Future https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/past-present-future/id1682047968 Try this one on George Orwell? https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/history-of-ideas-george-orwell/id1682047968?i=1000623267325

5. And, finally and I hope amusingly, Lorna Rose Treen cracked the funniest joke at the Edinburgh Fringe this year. She won for her joke: “I started dating a zookeeper, but it turned out he was a cheetah.” In second place was Liz Guterbock with: “The most British thing I’ve ever heard? A lady who said, ‘Well I’m sorry, but I don’t apologise.’ Amos Gill came third with: “Last year I had a great joke about inflation. But it’s hardly worth it now.”