Roy Cross's Blog

1. ’On disadvantage’ is a thoughtful blog post by Birmingham Teacher, a.k.a. Claire Stoneman https://birminghamteacher.wordpress.com/2022/07/17/on-disadvantage/

“But yes, the term ‘disadvantaged’ is rubbish. I don’t think any labels are helpful. Thankfully, when I was at school, I was not labelled. I could have been ‘Free school meals Claire Stoneman’ or ‘Disabled parents Claire Stoneman’ or ‘Young carer Claire Stoneman’. I am forever grateful to my school for not making assumptions about me, other than the assumption that I could and would achieve.”

2. Several good pieces from the Farnam Street Brain Food weekly newsletter:

i) The Two Types of Knowledge: The Max Planck/Chauffeur Test https://fs.blog/two-types-of-knowledge/ read it just for the ‘Munich lecture’ anecdote with which the piece begins, if you don’t already know it;

ii) an interview with Kunal Shah about Why choosing your friends matters https://youtu.be/I5uap-ZyHDQ

iii) an excerpt from “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol” https://core100.columbia.edu/article/excerpt-philosophy-andy-warhol “What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest.”

iv) “The Art of Being Alone” https://fs.blog/being-alone/ “Loneliness has more to do with our perceptions than how much company we have. It’s just as possible to be painfully lonely surrounded by people as it is to be content with little social contact.”

You can sign up for Brain Food here https://fs.blog/

3. Here’s the latest edition of a new weekly newsletter, The Knowledge, which begins with a wonderful video of the England women’s football team gate-crashing (and much enlivening) the post-match press conference after their victory over Germany on Sunday https://link.newsletters.theknowledge.com/view/62974659e2164fd11e0e2f3ch0dc6.k9g/dd6210bf

You can sign up for The Knowledge here https://www.theknowledge.com/

4. And, finally, this year’s Noirwich Crime Writing Festival runs from September https://noirwich.co.uk/

You can find recordings of all the previous two years’ events here https://noirwich.co.uk/catch-up-on-noirwich-2020/ Scroll down for a favourite of mine, David Peace, talking about his Tokyo trilogy.

1. A ‘golden oldie’ on translanguaging from NALDIC that I stumbled across the other day https://ealjournal.org/2016/07/26/what-is-translanguaging/

This is the NALDIC home page https://naldic.org.uk/

2. One from Mel B (who, thus labelled, may now never speak to me again) on How our brains cope with speaking more than one language, prompted by her memory of my telling her how years ago I’d become exasperated with a Paris waiter who, simpleton that he was, couldn’t understand my simple order for two beers and an apple juice – that I was making in Croatian! https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220719-how-speaking-other-languages-changes-your-brain

3. This one is not from Mel C, as you might have expected, but from Ann V, Bringing the outside in: merging local language practices to enhance classroom learning and achievement https://multilingual-learning.com/about/

On the ‘project blog’ page, you can find the recordings of a number of interesting webinars  that the Bringing the Outside in project have hosted https://multilingual-learning.com/project-blog/

4. My erstwhile – great word that I can now use! – colleagues in China have an interesting job on offer https://careers.britishcouncil.org/job/Beijing-Senior-Academic-Manager%2C-EES-East/832573101/

Closing date 8^th August. Please share with anyone you think might be interested. (Open to UK and China nationals only for reasons to do with local employment law.)

5. And, finally, loath though I am to praise the monster that is Google, this is fun! https://artsandculture.google.com/experiment/puzzle-party/EwGBPZlIzv0KRw?hl=en Best on a laptop or tablet, maybe?

1. As my mother might say, I wasn’t born yesterday, nor did I come down the Swale in a tub, but this is the first I’ve heard of the terms em-dash and en-dash: https://www.thepunctuationguide.com/em-dash.html I rather like The Punctuation Guide!

2. So what did you think ‘kitchen’ meant? Nope! https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/21/books/african-american-dictionary.html Someone let me know if this is subscriber only, please.

3. One possibly unexpected consequence of the pandemic is that many young school pupils can’t really write any more https://www.theguardian.com/education/2022/jul/23/writing-has-dropped-off-a-cliff-englands-lockdown-hit-pupils-get-extra-pen-lessons My own writing dropped off a cliff many years ago!

4. A poignant piece of writing from Mieko Kawakami in a new magazine I’d not come across before, Astra https://astra-mag.com/articles/for-that-one-moment/

5. And, finally, another reason for not going back to university or work – too much CO² in the lecture theatres and meeting rooms! https://mastodon.social/@oliverquinlan/108673209250363105 The whole, rather technical Twitter thread on CO² meters is here https://twitter.com/realsexycyborg/status/1549318414489067520?s=21&t=mRucF9_CxNlg5Llxlb_usg

1. Free access to a wide range of resources for ninety days from Oxford University Press: https://elt.oup.com/feature/global/free-trial/?cc=gb&selLanguage=en Nothing to lose on this one except your e-mail address, as far as I can see!

2. A thoughtful piece from Devi Sridhar of Edinburgh University, As Covid deaths in the UK pass the grim milestone of 200,000, what have we learned? https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jul/13/as-covid-deaths-in-the-uk-surpass-the-grim-milestone-of-200000-what-have-we-learned

plus a review of Unvaccinated – ‘the most infuriating TV show of the year so far’ – in which the scientist Hannah Fry tries to reason with seven vaccine refuseniks https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2022/jul/20/unvaccinated-review-the-most-infuriating-tv-show-of-the-year-so-far

3. Just started on TeachingEnglish, a new ‘Teaching Pathways’ course, Online skills for 21st century teachers https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/teaching-pathways-online-skills-21st-century-teachers

I like the course description: “Enhance your understanding of digital citizenship and your ability to help learners protect themselves online, be kind to others and assess information they find.”

4. And, finally, three pieces from The Conversation:

one on very early language learning https://theconversation.com/babies-can-learn-language-sounds-in-the-first-few-hours-of-being-born-new-research-186867

one on our herd instinct https://theconversation.com/baby-names-why-we-all-choose-the-same-ones-185546

and one that suggests that Big Pharma’s cure for depression was and is too good to be true https://theconversation.com/depression-is-probably-not-caused-by-a-chemical-imbalance-in-the-brain-new-study-186672

1. Here’s the latest two episodes in Alexandra Mihai’s “Around the world” podcast series: https://educationalist.eu/ Jenny Frederick from Yale University on Leading an Integrated Center (sic!) for Teaching and Learning and Simon Beausaert from Maastricht University on A Research-Based Approach to Faculty Development.

Here’s her latest blog post, on What’s next for online education? https://educationalist.substack.com/p/whats-next-for-online-education

“It is perhaps a good moment to try to emerge from the “pandemic fog” and think – realistically, with all the cards on the table – about our options for providing quality Higher Education in the future,” Alexandra observes.

2. And here’s the latest Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) ‘Evidence into Action’ podcast, in which an expert panel discuss the evidence around how to prepare pupils for exams effectively, Supporting pupils during exams https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/news/new-episode-of-evidence-into-action-supporting-pupils-during-exams Scroll down for all the other episodes.

3. I listened to the latest episode of A Good Read on the way home from Yorkshire this afternoon https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0019b5s and enjoyed it as I nearly always do – when I remember to listen! Today’s episode discussed books by John le Carré, Robert Macfarlane and Janice Galloway.

Six hundred and twenty-two (!) other episodes archived here https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006v8jn/episodes/player

4. And, finally and divisively, Marmite! Now proven to be good for you, like it or not! https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/marmite-could-help-quell-anxiety-vitamin-b6_uk_62d66e0de4b0116f21bfec45

1. Next Tuesday, 19th July, at 12:00 UK time, Simon Borg’s leading a webinar for teacher educators, looking at the competences they need to develop to support teachers online https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/which-competences-do-teacher-educators-need-supporting-teachers-online

It’s based on a research paper Simon wrote for the British Council https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/sites/teacheng/files/2022-06/COMPETENCES%20FOR%20SUPPORTING%20TEACHERS%20ONLINE.pdf PDF below, just in case.

2. And next Thursday, 21^st July, at 12:00 UK time, George Chilton, the Creative Director at Hubbub Labs, is leading a webinar looking at going beyond teaching into a career in materials writing https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/stepping-beyond-teaching-exploring-writing-career

“The question is,” says George, “is writing the pathway for you?”

3. I did my first f2f training session (for many years!) earlier today for NILE in Norwich with a group of French teacher educators, a comparative look at the Eaquals, Cambridge and British Council frameworks for teacher and teacher educator professional development. I put together a handout with the key links and I’ve attached it below. Some similarities; some differences!

4. And, finally, a podcast that will delight some of you and confuse slightly more of you completely, The Nightwatchman https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-nightwatchman-podcast/id1624904001

And, no, a nightwatchman does not look after a factory overnight!

1. Three pieces from the international edition of Der Spiegel:

i) a very forthright piece on Boris Johnson’s fall from grace https://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/boris-johnsons-abgang-und-die-folgen-fuer-europa-warum-wir-auf-die-briten-nicht-verzichten-koennen-1657274390-a-590a7ec1-8e75-4bab-a638-e29a11022ee8

ii) a visit to Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s home town https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/a-visit-to-volodymyr-zelenskyy-s-hometown-kryvyi-rih-city-of-steel-a-95aa1a79-905c-462f-aa02-c61b103321f8

iii) an interview with the Afghan Minister of the Interior, Anas Haqqani https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/der-spiegel-interview-with-taliban-leader-anas-haqqani-you-ask-questions-like-an-investigator-a-da3d8658-fcce-4865-a4f2-91eb3e1aff93

2. Is this a development that we should welcome, notwithstanding its genesis? https://campustechnology.com/articles/2022/07/07/meta-releases-open-source-ai-machine-translation-model.aspx

3. The UK National Poetry Day website has had a revamp in preparation for this year’s celebration on 6^th October https://nationalpoetryday.co.uk/ Lots of individual poems here https://nationalpoetryday.co.uk/poems/ and resources and lesson plans here https://nationalpoetryday.co.uk/resources/ Try this one from the new Children’s Laureate, Joseph Coelho https://nationalpoetryday.co.uk/poem/february/ or James Carter’s suggestions for using his poem, Kennings, in class https://nationalpoetryday.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/NPD22-Resource-Kennings.pdf PDF of the Kennings resource below.

4. And, finally, how about some window shopping on this photography site? https://www.picfair.com/users/CarolineHumphreys/boards/F8IEQIt8R_0 Here’s one of my favourites, a goose-stepping bird https://www.picfair.com/pics/015875516-free-kick What I didn’t know, though, is that the goose-step has absolutely nothing to do with geese (or any other kind of bird) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goose_step

1. NATESOL’s next free webinar is this Saturday, 9^th July at 10:00 UK time with Marijana Macis from Manchester Metropolitan University: Teaching Collocations in the EFL Classroom: New Insights from Research. How are collocations best taught?

More info and registration here https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdQSjHmAUi5uCfRAbhRc7AwVCz3tHVos5H7TibepLjmsg46Xw/viewform

2. Also on Saturday, at 15:00 UK time, Gamification and Language Learning is the title of Deborah Healey’s Facebook Live event for Eduling International. What are the important considerations when games are used in the classroom?

More info and registration here https://www.facebook.com/events/1377012932780561/?sfnsn=mo

 3. The next Eaquals webinar is next Tuesday, 12^th July at 10:00 UK time: Sue Hackett will be talking about Academic Integrity: issues, challenges and considerations for an online world. What is academic integrity and what does it mean for an international student in particular?

More info and registration here https://www.eaquals.org/eaquals-events/event/academic-integrity-issues-challenges-and-considerations-for-an-online-world/

4. And, finally and with apologies to those of you who never want to hear another word about Boris Johnson, something that may seem a little eccentric. I was walking home from the supermarket yesterday evening, listening to Far from the Madding Crowd and came across this description of Sergeant Troy, Bathsheba’s cad of a suitor, which rang a contemporary bell https://americanliterature.com/author/thomas-hardy/book/far-from-the-madding-crowd/chapter-xxv-the-new-acquaintance-described PDF below.

1. Here’s a piece from Nature Neuroscience with no fewer than 24 credited authors, Shared computational principles for language processing in humans and deep language models (DLMs) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-022-01026-4.pdf Worth persevering with: not as difficult a read as it might seem at first sight.

“DLMs learn language from real-world textual examples ‘in the wild’, with minimal or no explicit prior knowledge about language structure. Autoregressive DLMs do not parse words into parts of speech or apply explicit syntactic transformations. Rather, they learn to encode a sequence of words into a numerical vector, termed a contextual embedding, from which the model decodes the next word. After learning, the next-word prediction principle allows the generation of well-formed, novel, context-aware texts.” Much the same as we do, apparently! PDF below.

Thanks to EL Gazette for that one – their latest issue is here: https://elgazette.com/elg_archive/ELG2205/mobile/index.html

2. Something we all knew instinctively? Struggling to learn a language? 6 tips on how pop songs can help by a team from Charles Sturt University in Australia in The Conversation https://theconversation.com/struggling-to-learn-a-language-6-tips-on-how-pop-songs-can-help-184642

Includes as an example task the song These Days by a group from South Africa that I’d not heard of before, The Rudimentals, https://youtu.be/UlXPdOuNU3Q

One of the authors’ six tips is, ‘Avoid using textbooks or sources that don’t interest learners or they are less able to relate to.’ Easier said than done for most teachers?

3. Two summaries from the latest OASIS research database update next:

1. Examining non-native second language teachers’ decremental beliefs toward their target language proficiency https://oasis-database.org/concern/summaries/mc87pq83q?locale=en ‘Decremental’ is a new one on me! PDF below.

2. Teachers misunderstanding of translanguaging in preschool https://oasis-database.org/concern/summaries/qz20st15d?locale=en Good intentions on the part of the teachers that seem to have gone well off track. PDF below.

4. And, finally, a wonderful discovery made yesterday, Dancing at Dusk: a moment with Pina Bausch’s ‘The Rite of Spring’ performed on a beach in Senegal by a specially-recruited ensemble of 38 dancers from 14 African countries https://www.sadlerswells.com/digital-stage/dancing-at-dusk-a-moment-with-pina-bauschs-the-rite-of-spring/ Only available till midday UK time on 11^th July.

There’s a bit more background to the project from Sarah Crompton of Sadler’s Wells here http://blog.sadlerswells.com/when-the-world-paused-the-dance-continued/ Even in lockdown, you can dance on the beach!

1. My tongue was slightly in my cheek – only slightly, mind you – when I shared that HBR piece on Tuesday about over monitoring workers and asked if it might apply to education. There was an article in yesterday’s Times Higher Education (THE) that asked, without its tongue in its cheek, Are universities over-assessing their students? https://www.timeshighereducation.com/depth/are-universities-over-assessing-their-students

More than 10,000 undergraduate students took part in the survey reported on in the article, and on average each of them was asked to complete nearly seven summative assessments and four formative assessments each term. Seems a lot to me! Not sure whether ‘formative’ isn’t being used a bit loosely here, to mean assessment that doesn’t count towards one’s degree?

THE is also one of those publications that lets you sign up for free for a limited number of articles each month.

2. Here’s a piece from the EdTech Hub about A new research study on equity and SMS-based personalised learning in Kenya https://edtechhub.org/2022/05/20/a-new-research-study-on-equity-and-sms-based-personalised-learning-in-kenya/

Some sobering stats at the beginning of this piece, one of whose premises is that throwing hardware at an education problem is rarely successful.

3. Have you ever read a story originally written in Wolof? Maybe not. Now’s your chance! The latest short story from Words without Borders is An Ordinary Monday Morning by Boubacar Boris Diop, translated from Wolof by El Hadji Moustapha Diop & Bojana Coulibaly https://wordswithoutborders.org/read/article/2022-06/an-ordinary-monday-morning-boubacar-boris-diop-el-hadji-moustapha-diop-bojana-coulibaly/

4. I tucked this one away a while ago and forgot about it. It’s a PDF copy of a 1955 issue of Teaching English: A Magazine Devoted to the Teaching of the English Language in India https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/teaching-english-magazine-devoted-teaching-english-language-india-volume-1-number-4

It includes a piece by Lionel Billows, Educational Aims in Language Teaching, which confidently proclaims that “(…) children, when they learned their first language, were helped by their isolation to an overpowering urge to communicate, and by the effervescence of their high spirits to utter sounds – if not words. This can be made use of in the learning of a new language by reproducing artificially the sense of isolation, in that no word of their first language is used in the classroom (my emphasis). Only in this way can they get the practice they need in learning not to feel bewildered in strange surroundings, to feel their way into a strange language.” We’ve come very nearly full circle since then in our attitude to the use of pupils’ first language(s) in the classroom! Might be fun with a cup of coffee over the weekend? PDF below.

And here’s a bit more about Billows from the Warwick ELT Archive Hall of Fame https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/al/research/collections/elt_archive/halloffame/billows/life/

5. And, finally, something that I hope works!