Roy Cross's Blog

This will be the last post until next Monday, 6^th June, largely because of item 1 below!

1. This coming weekend is Platinum Jubilee Central Weekend (not quite sure what ‘Central’ means in this context) here in the UK, in honour of The Queen’s seventy years on the throne. There’s a range of resources, including flags and bunting for street parties, on the UK government site https://platinumjubilee.gov.uk/

and on the Royal Family’s own Jubilee site https://www.royal.uk/platinumjubilee.

How meaningful a topic is this for students around the world, I wonder? Genuine question!

2. Here’s an approving OECD blog post by Andreas Schleicher on the Sacúdete entrepreneurship programme in Colombia https://oecdedutoday.com/colombian-entrepreneur-programme/

and here’s two Sacúdete sites https://colombiajoven.gov.co/sacudete and https://sacudete.icbf.gov.co/

Google does a pretty good translation job for those of us who don’t have much Spanish at our disposal, except it can’t quite decide whether Sacúdete means shake yourself or shake off – maybe it means both!

3. Alexandra Mihai has a new blog post out, Innovation in Higher Education. Wait, what? https://educationalist.substack.com/p/innovation-in-higher-education-wait?s=r

She has the word ‘innovation’ in her (newish) job title – Assistant Professor of Innovation in Higher Education – and, characteristically, she’s been trying to work out what exactly that should mean.

4. What is it about the USA and gun crime? https://theconversation.com/us-shootings-norway-and-finland-have-similar-levels-of-gun-ownership-but-far-less-gun-crime-183933

5. And, finally, a new free online show by Neda Nezhdana has just opened at the Finborough Theatre, Otvetka (which I think means ‘answer’ or ‘response’?) https://www.youtube.com/user/finboroughtheatre

1. There’s a Council of Europe Common Framework of Reference (CEFR) webinar at 15:00 UK time on Thursday: Assessing plurilingualism: An example from practice with Belinda Steinhuber from the Centre for Professional (berufsbezogene) Languages in Austria. Registration here https://forms.office.com/pages/responsepage.aspx?id=grBJPtViSUilsIbtUZKH0rai7LbFWpVAoRIo3dq5irxUNENFQTFRVERQMU40NjlYRVRLVU5HQkxYVi4u

handout here with example exam tasks (to be discussed during the webinar) https://rm.coe.int/cefr-online-workshop-series-2022-5-handout/1680a6a9d4

and background reading here https://rm.coe.int/cefr-online-workshop-series-2022-5-background-reading/1680a6a9d3

PDFs of both handout and reading below, both of which are probably worth a quick look if you’re interested in plurilingualism even if you can’t attend on Thursday.

2. With a slight delay, and thanks to a prod from my colleague Ellen, here’s the latest edition of The Teacher Trainer from Pilgrims, which has a focus this time on communities of practice https://pilgrimsttj.com/ (I was sure I’d already mentioned it but can find no trace.) PDF below.

3. Another free Cambridge Elements download, free for the next ten days or so:  Thinking and Speaking in a Second Language by Yi Wang and Li Wei https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/thinking-and-speaking-in-a-second-language/A08F458B9DA07FCA64FE614BA44370E6

The authors seek to answer the question, “Does the language we speak affect the way we think?” PDF below.

4. And, finally, The Monocle’s Global Countdown podcast on what’s ‘top of the pops’ in countries around the world. This latest episode is Moldova https://monocle.com/radio/shows/the-global-countdown/59/

and all the other 58 episodes are archived here, including Burkina Faso, Brazil, Colombia, Ghana, India, Italy, Japan, Lebanon and Serbia https://monocle.com/radio/shows/the-global-countdown/

Some reading for the weekend …

1. The Inter-agency Network for Education in Emergencies (INEE) is “an open, global network of members working together within a humanitarian and development framework to ensure that all individuals have the right to a quality, safe, relevant, and equitable education”.

They published a guidance note for Teacher Wellbeing in Emergency Settings earlier this week, establishing “a benchmark for teacher wellbeing; a standard of care and recognition that every teacher – regardless of where they live and work – should expect from the government or humanitarian architecture or communities that support them”. https://inee.org/resources/guidance-note-teacher-wellbeing-emergency-settings

More about INEE here https://inee.org/about-inee

registration for the online launch of the guidance note at 14:00 UK time on 1^st June here https://rescue.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_TmoQt-xPT5aMRq9fPzjbIQ?timezone_id=Europe%2FLondon

and PDF of the guidance note below.

2. Slightly longer notice than usual of this RSA event at 13:00 UK time on Thursday 9^th June, as we have a long Jubilee holiday next week which will probably disrupt this blog a bit: Dismantling racism in British education with Jeffrey Boakye talking about his forthcoming book, I Heard What You Said, in which “he recounts how it feels to be on the margins of the British education system” https://www.thersa.org/events/2022/06/dismantling-racism-in-british-education

3. The Fawcett Society has just published a report whose title speaks for itself (unlike many titles)  Broken Ladders: The myth of meritocracy for women of colour in the workplace https://www.fawcettsociety.org.uk/broken-ladders

Copy of both the full report and the summary and recommendations only below.

4. The mission of Understood is “to help those who learn and think differently discover their potentials, take control, find community, and stay on positive paths along each stage of life’s journey”. ‘I need you to listen’ is a short film from the perspective of a young person with learning and thinking differences https://youtu.be/C4c3iHU0YzQ

More background here https://www.understood.org/articles/be-the-reason and a PDF of Understood’s ‘Be the Reason’ activity kit for parents below.

1. Here’s the latest free download in the Cambridge Elements series, Explicit and Implicit Learning in Second Language Acquisition by Bill VanPatten and Megan Smith https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/explicit-and-implicit-learning-in-second-language-acquisition/EBABCB9129343210EB91B9198F17C4EB

Their very interesting conclusion is that “second language acquisition is largely if not exclusively implicit in nature and that explicit learning plays a secondary role in how learners grapple with meaning”. PDF below.

2. Here’s a chance to contribute a teaching activity to the University of East Anglia’s research project on Gender-ing English Language Teaching – and win a prize in their raffle! https://app.geckoform.com/public/#/modern/21FO0097qyp9eg00ju77pl7ixw

3. Wednesday’s plenary at IATEFL Belfast last week, Reading the world and the word was by Gabriel Díaz Maggioli.

Here’s the blurb for his talk (or is ‘blurb’ just for book covers and I should say ‘abstract’ here?): “Reading is an enabling skill that allows access to a whole array of contexts, contents and information. The teaching of reading in foreign language settings has been tied to a more or less stable paradigm for the past thirty years. However, with the move to online instruction caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, certain taken-for-granted axioms about the teaching of this skill have come into question. In this plenary we will explore some of the current assumptions behind enabling learners to access the world through texts.”

Gabo’s talk starts 38’30” into the video https://www.facebook.com/IATEFL/videos/554337879583460

4. Some food for thought from Anne Kispal for the NFER blog on Choosing texts for comprehension activities in the classroom https://www.nfer.ac.uk/news-events/nfer-blogs/choosing-texts-for-comprehension-activities-in-the-classroom/

Starts with a sentiment with which I certainly (used to!) agree: “Choosing the right text for assessing comprehension is not an easy, five-minute job. However, for many of us – whether we are teachers or assessment specialists – it is one of the more pleasant tasks.”

5. And, finally, a great cinema and football story about the fifteen-year-old Carlo Ancelotti (against whose team one should not bet lightly this coming Saturday) https://www.theguardian.com/football/2022/may/21/carlo-ancelotti-the-secret-ringer-who-patched-up-pasolini-and-bertolucci

1. Today, the plenary which opened the IATEFL conference in Belfast last week: Nayr Ibrahim on (Re)imagining and (re)inventing early English language learning and teaching. It starts 51 minutes into the video https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?ref=watch_permalink&v=281585834097705

I enjoyed it – including the red sofa – very much!

2. A recent short and very readable paper by Harry Fletcher-Wood of Teacher Tapp and Artur Tavere of the British Council on  ‘Instructional coaching – why it matters and how to make it matter’ https://www.britishcouncil.org/research-policy-insight/research-reports/instructional-coaching

From their conclusion: “It’s clear that our children’s success in school and beyond depends on improvements to teaching. And while instructional coaching may not be the miracle cure, and making it work for teachers can be challenging, it has proven to be a powerful strategy, supported by promising research evidence”. PDF below.

3. Teachers Talk Radio are looking for volunteers https://www.ttradio.org/post/new-schedule-new-era Come on, don’t be shy now: I can think of several readers of this message who’d be perfect!

4. And, finally, this week’s phobia is selenophobia. If you suffer from it, don’t watch this https://twitter.com/michelleatchi15/status/1519272881121013762?s=27

This one’s from the phone on the train home from Oxford to ‘the other place’. Let’s see if my clumsy fingers can manage!

I visited Oxford University Press today with this year’s cohort of Hornby Trust scholars, and today’s message partly reflects that visit.

1. The Oxford Text Checker is primarily intended for teachers who want to check the language level of a text, but students can have fun with it, too. https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/text-checker/

2. OUP have an interesting blog https://public.oed.com/blog/ Try this one on The Language of Climate Change https://public.oed.com/blog/the-oed-october-2021-update/

3. Libor Stepanek gave the Thursday plenary at IATEFL in Belfast on ‘EMI: a language teacher’s leap into the unknown?’ Starts just short of 30 minutes in https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=371752408264095&id=100067745029203&m_entstream_source=timeline

4. And, finally, it’s nearly time for the 2022 Hay Festival. Details here of British Council supported free events https://literature.britishcouncil.org/blog/2022/hay-festival-2022/ Bernardine Evaristo, Monica Ali, Fernanda Melchor (who I’ve just discovered) and lots more!

‘Normal’ service resumes …

1. Well, I managed a few WhatsApp posts from the IATEFL conference in Belfast last week but not a single blog post, for which I can only apologise. (My excuse is that I was working on my phone, not my laptop.) Here’s a link to the IATEFL Facebook page where – with a little patience! – you’ll find recordings of all last week’s plenary talks https://www.facebook.com/IATEFL

Each day this week, I’ll signpost one of the plenaries more directly. Here’s Thursday’s plenary by Asmaa AbuMezied and Hansa AbuMezied from Palestine talking about Education, English and the question of future in conflict areas. It starts 31’30” in if you want to cut to the chase https://www.facebook.com/shaun.wilden/videos/1070459663828441

2. Short notice of two webinars: tomorrow, Tuesday 24^th May, at 16:00 UK time, Panos Athanasopoulos from Lancaster University will be talking about the ‘Representation of time in bilingual cognition: The case of duration’. Why do some languages, such as Swedish and English, use distance metaphors to talk about time (a long time) while others, such as Greek and Spanish, use quantity metaphors (much time)? Cross home-made PDF below; as usual, contact Rodney Jones for the Zoom link r.h.jones@reading.ac.uk

I guess we also talk in English about much time, don’t we, as in “much time was spent attempting to help the giraffe to its feet”?

3. The second webinar, with slightly more (or should that be longer?) notice, is being given by Peter Skehan at 12:00 UK time on Wednesday, 25^th May on “Linking Second Language Speaking Tasks and Language Testing”. This one looks likely to give most of us a good mental work-out: The presentation will try to relate two broad literatures: one concerned with research into second language task-based performance and the other focussing on the testing of speaking. Don’t be frit!

Registration here https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSezGCi6Rwsny5S-nrfMRq6QRaVqrHVIoeFJoV38frVzXi1Zdw/viewform and more info in the Cross home-made PDF below

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/frit

4. A little way off the ELT beaten track this one, but good, I hope you’ll agree: Creative Scotland’s illustrated guide to being a freelancer – ‘a practical resource for the increasing number of artists, makers, writers and other creatives working freelance in Scotland today’ https://www.creativescotland.com/resources/professional-resources/guidance-and-toolkits/the-illustrated-freelancers-guide

We’ll all be freelancers soon, and teachers are indisputably ‘creatives’. PDF below.

5. And, finally, occasional novelist Roger McGough’s discussion with occasional poet Colm Tóibín in the Poetry Please series https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0017k4r

One or two other episodes available here https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qp7q/episodes/guide Frustrating that more episodes aren’t available for longer, as with many other BBC radio programme archives.

I’m at IATEFL in Belfast this week, so probably won’t get chance to write my daily message. If I can do the odd quick one, I will!

1. Here’s the latest TeacherTapp blog post, which I suggest you read through a ‘comparison of education systems’ lens. Unlimited colour photocopying will be a dream for many, and the policy on permitting mobile phones in class (if students have them in the first place) will vary widely between schools and countries. I’m less sure of coffee and tea policy worldwide! https://teachertapp.co.uk/can-you-colour-photocopy-can-kids-use-mobile-phones-who-buys-the-coffee-this-and-more/

2. Well worth another mention, I think: the Teaching for Success series of self-study booklets to download and work on in your own time, at your own pace https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/teaching-success-self-study-guides

If you’re still not 100% sure what 21^st Century Skills are, try this one https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/promoting-21st-century-skills-self-study-booklet PDF below as well.

3. Next Wednesday, 18^th May, sees the next event in the Education Exchange series, a panel discussion on Disability in education. More information and registration here https://www.britishcouncil.org/education/schools/education-exchange-digital-events/disability-education

The event will draw upon this report by Hannah Ware and Nidhi Singal, English language teachers with disabilities: an exploratory study across four countries https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/sites/teacheng/files/BC_English_language_teachers_and_disabilities_Screen_Reading.pdf

PDF below just in case that’s easier and a short introductory video here https://youtu.be/ZUMYZ9aGC1Q

4. And, finally, a Premier League football referee, Jon Moss, with all sorts of interests off the pitch https://www.whathifi.com/features/me-my-stack-my-record-shop-premier-league-referee-jon-moss

1. VERY SHORT NOTICE of this Multilingual Matters ‘meet the authors’ event from 10:00 to 16:30 UK time tomorrow, Thursday 12^th May – mea culpa! More info here https://www.multilingual-matters.com/page/Events/ and registration here https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/7216510639185/WN_BezPJZhHR02cZzthMg0KNQ

You should feel free to pop in and out during the day.

2. The Research Excellence Framework (REF) is a very big thing for universities here in the UK. Here’s a good clear explanation of what it’s all about from David Kernohan of WONKHE which will be of interest to university staff in other countries, who may like to compare it to their own national equivalent and feel either relieved or jealous that they don’t have something similar, and to schoolteachers who want to take a look over the fence https://wonkhe.com/blogs/what-is-the-meaning-of-ref/

3. Seven hours sleep each night is all you need, say a team of scientists from Cambridge and Fudan https://theconversation.com/sleep-heres-how-much-you-really-need-for-optimal-cognition-and-wellbeing-new-research-181879

4. Not just one phobia this week – fifty of them on the Phobia Guru’s website here, categorised into animal, medical and situational https://www.phobiaguru.com/phobias.html But what if you have a phobia of shaven heads, I wonder?

5. And, finally, C’mon, Get Happy! https://choices.scholastic.com/pages/promotion/btsbacktogether/cmon-get-happy.html