Roy Cross's Blog

1. A possibly over-optimistically entitled event from the Abidjan Principles team at 14:00 UK time next Monday, 14^th February: “Towards the end of profit and commercial practice in education?” https://www.abidjanprinciples.org/ Scroll halfway down the page for more info on a stellar speaker line-up and all the way to the bottom to register.

2. An article from Ross Crichton, Adam Edmett and Steve Mann in the English Language Teacher Education and Development (ELTED) Journal about a project in Thailand that I became very fond of, after its inauspicious ‘give ’em a quick single-dose shot of training’ beginning, Video based observation and feedback for Thai in-service teachers: the mentor’s role https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/video-based-observation-feedback-thai-service-teachers-mentors-role

Here’s the article itself http://www.elted.net/uploads/7/3/1/6/7316005/crichton_vol._22.pdf and PDF below.

3. Registration’s still open for the Taking Action! Conference on Social Justice in Language Classrooms and Teacher Education on 18^th and 19^th February.

More info here https://div.kuwi.tu-dortmund.de/institut/veranstaltungen/details/taking-action-14603/ and registration here https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/taking-action-tickets-211077326967 PDFs of programme and abstracts below.

4. Strictly speaking, this weeks’ phobia, procrastination, is not a phobia. It’s clearly not one the organisers of the Taking Action! conference suffer from. Here’s a Huffpost blog post on procrastination from a few years back, How to Get Over Your Fear of Taking Action, by Morty Lefkoe https://www.huffpost.com/entry/how-to-get-over-your-fear_b_4598494

5. And, finally, I’m glad I wasn’t on this plane https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/feb/01/ba-jet-in-near-miss-at-heathrow-after-landing-aborted-in-high-winds

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 and if you allow it to, YouTube will play all ten videos one after another.

 2. Today is Safer Internet Day here in the UK https://saferinternet.org.uk/safer-internet-day/safer-internet-day-2022/educational-resources There’s lots of resources and quizzes for all age-groups: PDFs of the resources for 7-11 year-olds, by way of example, below, and here’s a working link to the Digiduck materials referred to in the resources https://www.childnet.com/?s=digiduck

3.  You’ve still just time to register for this event with Scott Thornbury at 13:00 UK time tomorrow, Wednesday 9^th February: Dogme ELT at 21: Has it come of age? https://www.eventbrite.ie/e/dogme-elt-at-21-has-it-come-of-age-tickets-261127458257?keep_tld=1 Here’s some homework reading on Dogme: a Wikipedia page that someone is looking after carefully https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogme_language_teaching two pieces that Scott wrote for TeachingEnglish  https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/methods-post-method-m%C3%A9todos and https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/dogme-nothing-if-not-critical and I’ve attached a PDF of the original piece Scott wrote on Dogme for IATEFL Issues.

4. You need to collect no fewer than 151 stamps to be entitled to claim that you’ve walked the length of Hungary’s National Blue Trail https://www.calvertjournal.com/features/show/13432/hungary-hiking-leisure-outdoors-bureaucracy-blue-trail

5. And, finally, here’s a phrase that took me (and MS Word) by surprise in a meeting agenda the other day: https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/were-just-spitballing-here I shall be spitballing – with some misgivings – tomorrow. Good that it’s an online meeting!

Early notice of Oxford University Press’s ELTOC 2022 on 4^th and 5^th 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. One of those is not such a new topic! PDF of programme below.

2. Chris Sowton and Kris Dyer’s podcast for TeachingEnglish has already reached Episode 6, to my surprise: How can I teach in challenging circumstances? https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/british-council-teachingenglish-episode-6-how-can-i-teach-effectively-challenging-contexts

PDFs of show notes and transcript below, plus a low-fi audio file of the podcast.

[file x 3]

3. I was too slow off the mark with this new series from National Geographic Learning https://www.ngl-emea.com/voices-launch-hub-webinars which began with Chia Suan Chong & Rachael Gibbon on Intercultural skills for the real world on 26th January. Next one is Marek Kiczkowiak on 23^rd February with How to teach pronunciation for global communication. The recording of the one we missed is up on the site. PDF of whole programme below.

4. And, finally, how about an hour of global vinyl via Havana from Cuban record collector & DJ Cami Layé Okún? https://www.nts.live/shows/cami-laye-okun/episodes/cami-laye-okun-1st-february-2022

I want to call it ‘funky’ but I’m not sure people younger than me still use that word …

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 Guardian suggesting that this state of affairs needs to change https://www.theguardian.com/education/2022/jan/31/schools-should-be-ranked-on-exclusions-as-well-as-gcses-say-experts  

2.This piece by Jamie Medwell from Tribune is about a worryingly similarly dehumanising practice, explaining how you can now be sacked by an algorithm https://tribunemag.co.uk/2022/01/amazon-algorithm-human-resource-management-tech-worker-surveillance

We ourselves have an app called ‘MyHR’ at work that has a ‘terminate’ function …

3. First of two pieces today from Stephen Downes’s daily newsletter, OLDaily, a list of educational YouTube channels https://www.reddit.com/r/edtech/comments/sit1xq/i_made_a_list_of_educational_youtube_channels/

Lots of great stuff, including a site devoted to picking locks, but not a single site specifically devoted to languages or literacy, or not that I noticed.

You can sign up to OLDaily (Online Learning Daily) for yourself here https://downes.ca/

4. Improving Cognitive Presence in Online Discussions in Large Enrolment Courses is the title of the second piece (which means ‘how to help students pay more attention in class’.)

Summary here https://blog.ascilite.org/improving-cognitive-presence-in-online-discussions-in-large-enrolment-courses/

and original article by Janet Mannheimer Zydney et al., Enhancing online protocols through design-based research to improve cognitive presence in a large enrolment course, here https://ajet.org.au/index.php/AJET/article/view/5994/1799

PDF below. Don’t let the title put you off.

5. I’m pretty sure I’ve recommended the Oxford English Dictionary ‘word of the day’ before but I make no apology for doing so again https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/132823

You can sign up for yourself here https://www.oed.com/emailupdates

Wonderfully lo-tech – if the list server ain’t bust, don’t fix it!

6. And, finally and more light-heartedly than some items above, a review of James Joyce’s Ulysses on its first publication one hundred years ago https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/feb/02/james-joyces-ulysses-reviewed-observer-1922

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 if you’d like to attend r.h.jones@reading.ac.uk

Sometimes it suits Ghanaian migrants to disclaim any knowledge of English – ‘I speak small English’; on other occasions, however, they claim native speaker superiority over local Catalan people. PDF of abstract below.

2. ‘Haemorrhaging: why some words are so easy to mispronounce (and why that could be a good thing)’ is the title of a piece in The Conversation prompted by the Scottish MP Ian Blackford getting his tongue in a tangle in Parliament last week https://theconversation.com/haemorrhaging-why-some-words-are-so-easy-to-mispronounce-and-why-that-could-be-a-good-thing-175746

And while we’re at it, how are the following names pronounced – Featherstonhaugh, Cholmondeley, Mainwaring?

3. Iscriverti qui for the next talk in the Eaquals multilingual series at 16:30 on Wednesday 9th February, Applicare la metodologia Dogme all’italiano — idee pratiche con Giulia Brazzale https://www.eaquals.org/eaquals-events/event/applicare-la-metodologia-dogme-allitaliano-idee-pratiche/

“La metodologia Dogme, nata all’interno dell’insegnamento della lingua inglese a stranieri, si incentra sulla comunicazione e sulle strutture linguistiche “emergenti”. ma può essere applicata all’italiano, con la sua grammatica complessa? In questo webinar porterò la mia esperienza nell’utilizzare questa tecnica con studenti di italiano come lingua straniera, i suoi vantaggi e svantaggi, e quello che ho appreso dall’esperienza.”

4. And, finally, watch Boris Johnson get the Dame Edna treatment https://youtu.be/WTIOWecB1ao  Dame Edna Everage is one of Australian actor Barry Humphries’ two most famous comic creations, the other being (non-) cultural attaché Sir Les Patterson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Humphries  

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.

2. This one is a bit of a monster file (11 Mb): Prioritizing Learning During COVID-19: The Most Effective Ways to Keep Children Learning is the title of the latest report by the Global Education Evidence Advisory Panel. Download and video of the launch of the report here https://live.worldbank.org/prioritizing-learning-during-covid-19

There’s a useful timetable of the webinar about 4:15 into the video and Jaime Saavedra from the World Bank (who seems to have grown a (much more) distinguished grey beard (than mine) since we last met) does a useful analysis of the ‘scale of the problem’ roughly five minutes in – one year of school closure equals pretty much one year’s loss of learning.

PDF below if that survives your e-mail system’s attachment size limit.

3. Why Wordle Works, According to Desmos Lesson Developers is the title of a blog post by Dan Meyer https://danmeyer.substack.com/p/why-wordle-works-according-to-desmos “Teachers should steal all of this”, says Dan.

4. “Adriatic Splendor (sic)” is a period piece from 1955 about Croatia & Yugoslavia https://youtu.be/H7eOSJhA2tA sent to me earlier today by the friend who met me on my arrival in Zagreb in 1979 (only a few years later).

5. And, finally and with some trepidation about exactly how PC this is, here’s Norm McDonald’s Professor of Logic joke https://youtu.be/Oseqh7SMIvo Look away now if you suffer from coulrophobia, this week’s phobia.

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 https://www.weforum.org/videos/climate-action-can-save-the-planet-if-plans-are-followed-through-says-john-kerry-and-bill-gates Good clear soundtrack that lends itself well to a variety of listening activities.

2. Also from the WEF, a thought-provoking short video on the cost of net-zero https://www.weforum.org/videos/the-cost-of-net-zero-is-in-the-trillions-according-to-new-mckinsey-report

3. According to the European Commission, cities cover just 3% of land on Earth, yet they produce around 72% of all global greenhouse gas emissions. Our electric future depends on cities. Here’s why https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/01/electric-future-cities-transport-net-zero/

4. I can’t imagine that climate will not be a big part of the conversation between Diane Coyle and Anthony Painter at the RSA this Thursday at 13:00 UK time, What is economics – and what should it be? More info and registration here https://www.thersa.org/events/2022/02/what-is-economics-and-what-should-it-be

5. And, finally and worryingly, both for drinkers and producers, a piece in The Conversation on the impact of climate change on coffee https://theconversation.com/coffee-may-become-more-scarce-and-expensive-thanks-to-climate-change-new-research-175766

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 Alatis Prize for ‘Research in Language Policy and Planning in Educational Contexts’ this year was Chris Chang-Bacon from the University of Virginia with his paper “Generation Interrupted: Rethinking ‘Students with Interrupted Formal Education’ (SIFE) in the Wake of a Pandemic” PDF below and more readable than that title might suggest.

2. David Nunan is a TIRF trustee. Here’s his slightly more than two-minute answer to the question, What’s the Point of Education? https://youtu.be/0xS6tcAwha0 David’s talk is the first in a new series of TIRF Talks, slightly curiously billed as ‘talks by some of the most prolific (my emphasis) speakers in the ELT community’.

3. You may need to register to download your own copy of this McKinsey paper, Bias busters: A better way to brainstorm https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/bias-busters-a-better-way-to-brainstorm PDF below just in case you can’t be bothered …

4. Early notice of this Sheffield University course, A Corpus Course for Teachers, which starts on 21st February https://trainingfoundry.co.uk/corpus-course-for-teachers/ to give you time to apply for one of the scholarships they offer https://trainingfoundry.co.uk/a-corpus-course-for-teachers-scholarship-application/

5. And, finally, how about a little TEFL equity? https://teflequityadvocates.com/  Here’s an interview with the founder of TEFL Equity Advocates, Marek Kiczkowiak https://youtu.be/LncjzSThBGY

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 are issued textbooks; in South Korea – 99%. In secondary science 8% of pupils in England are issued with textbooks compared to 88% in South Korea, 92% in Taiwan. Why are English schools not using textbooks?”

Other posts here https://educationblog.buckingham.ac.uk/

2. Another Australian TV programme on education, this time from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), on Why Finland’s schools outperform most others across the developed world  https://youtu.be/7xCe2m0kiSg

3. Another ABC film, about Eddie Woo, the maths teacher you wish you’d had in high school https://youtu.be/SjIHB8WzJek

and here’s Eddie’s TEDxSidney talk, Mathematics is the sense you never knew you had, in which he suggests that “I love mathematics!” is a great conversational gambit for the next party you go to https://youtu.be/PXwStduNw14

4. Two pieces with Irina Dumitrescu from Cologne University:

the first one an LRB podcast where Irina talks about the book ‘Memory Speaks: On losing and reclaiming language and self’ by Julie Sedivy (31:35 into the podcast, if you’re not interested in Antonio Tabucchi) https://play.acast.com/s/tlsvoices/aconstantstateofforeignness

and the second a ‘long read’ of hers about daughters and fathers and students and professors and fathers who are professors https://longreads.com/2021/11/17/the-professor/

5. And, finally and thanks to Amy Lightfoot, a new one to add to our list of wacky acronyms: EAGLE countries. Is your country an EAGLE? Find out here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emerging_and_growth-leading_economies

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’ https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=53387

More posts here, including one on the ‘magical floor shaker’, which is increasingly popular in China. Not yet available here in the UK, alas, where Amazon asks politely if you’ve misspelled ‘flour shaker’.

2. Thanks to Melanie Butler for this one: Is your dog bilingual? A new study suggests their brains can tell languages apart https://www.npr.org/2022/01/06/1070710852/is-your-dog-bilingual-a-new-study-suggests-their-brains-can-tell-languages-apart?t=1643044317208 Great photo of Kun Kun the dog calmly waiting for an MRI scan wearing headphones!

3. I’m not completely sure how multilingual (or not) the education system in Singapore is in practice. There’s certainly a lot of English medium education in this watchable video about education in Singapore from Australia’s Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) https://youtu.be/_aB9Tg6SRA0

SBS was founded in 1978, in response to large-scale immigration into Australia, “to provide multilingual and multicultural radio and television services that inform, educate and entertain all Australians and, in doing so, reflect Australia’s multicultural society”.

4. I’ve mentioned the Abidjan Principles, which address ‘the human rights obligations of States to provide public education and to regulate private involvement in education’ before https://www.abidjanprinciples.org/ and private education is an area where English as the language of learning and teaching is often – not always – a willing accomplice. Here’s a new short video about the Principles which doesn’t pull its punches https://youtu.be/Kzqandgh1k0

5. And, finally and possibly related, here’s some food for thought on philanthropy https://youtu.be/7SXV05834Mw