Roy Cross's Blog

1. Here’s the recording of Kristina Hultgren’s talk, Multilingualism vs English: are they reconcilable? at the recent ICLHE (Integrating Content and Language in Higher Education – grown-up CLIL?) symposium in Maastricht on The Englishization of Higher Education https://youtu.be/ptUQwYSfi1g You can find a PDF of the whole symposium programme below, with links to the recordings of (nearly) all the talks.

2. There’s a range of recordings (and lengths of recording) of talks by Lena Boroditsky on How language shapes the way we think (or variations on that theme) available on YouTube and Facebook. Here’s a) a nineteen-minute version https://youtu.be/S_EHrS1b7os b) a one-hour version (plus Q&A) https://youtu.be/I64RtGofPW8 and c) a ninety-second version, for the bus home https://youtu.be/lST0HpO79Hc Several other lengths of talk are available!

3. An article from a Cambridge friend, John Drew, on How East India traders brought cricket to Indian shores 300 years ago this fortnight https://scroll.in/article/1013180/how-east-india-traders-brought-cricket-to-indian-shores-300-years-ago-this-fortnight One way or another, language will need to have been found to explain the concept of LBW (leg before wicket) – unless that was a later complication? PDF below.

If you were John Hattie, would you have agreed to a public debate with Steen Nepper Larsen, the author of a review of your book, The Purposes of Education, that culminated (fulminated?) as follows: “The concluding remark must be that the advantage of John Hattie’s evidence credo is that it is so banal, mundane and trivial that even educational planners and economists can understand it”?

Hattie did, and this engaging blog post by Jenny Mackness tells the story https://jennymackness.wordpress.com/2021/12/14/the-purposes-of-education-john-hattie-and-steen-larsen/

Here’s the video of their discussion at the World Education Summit earlier this year, probably best summed up as agreement to disagree!  https://vimeo.com/592547281/e95b60b935

5. And, finally, how about a little cheese? Here’s Marc King, the head cheesemaker at Fen Farm Dairy in Norfolk https://youtu.be/mlsfV7yESLs

1. Well worth exploring when you have a little time, Alexandra Mihai’s last post on her Educationalist blog for 2021, on hybrid teaching this time. “There is no secret that I am no big fan of hybrid teaching”, she says, but she still serves up a great list of articles and podcasts on the topic https://educationalist.substack.com/p/wrapping-up-2021

plus a rather splendid bonus this time round, an anthology of guest posts on her blog during the year on faculty (staff) development. This one from Sanna Eronen, from the University of Vaasa in Finland, caught my attention, ‘From solo artists to jazz ensembles: Peer support as a tool for teacher development’ https://educationalist.eu/from-solo-artists-to-jazz-ensembles-peer-support-as-a-tool-for-teacher-development-78a05e18cdcc

2. More on hybrid, from McKinsey, ‘It’s time for leaders to get real about hybrid’. Not specifically about education, not least because most pupils and students don’t have the option of resigning and moving to another school or university, but I don’t think it’s completely irrelevant. Many organisations are keen to have their employees return to the office, simply, one suspects, because the office is empty and expensive:

“Employers are ready to get back to significant in-person presence. Employees aren’t. The disconnect is deeper than most employers believe, and a spike in attrition and disengagement may be imminent.” https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/business%20functions/people%20and%20organizational%20performance/our%20insights/its%20time%20for%20leaders%20to%20get%20real%20about%20hybrid/its-time-for-leaders-to-get-real-about-hybrid.pdf

More readable than most ‘management’ literature! PDF below.

3. If you get a bit of a break over Christmas and New Year, there’s still stacks of free courses on FutureLearn:

• English for the Workplace: https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/workplace-english

• Exploring English: Language and Culture: https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/explore-english-language-culture

• Exploring English: Food and Culture: https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/exploring-english-food-and-culture

• Exploring English: Shakespeare: https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/explore-english-shakespeare

• Teaching Young Learners Online: https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/teaching-young-learners-online

• Teaching English: How to Plan a Great Lesson: https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/teaching-english-great-lesson

• English in Early Childhood: Language Learning and Development: https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/english-in-early-childhood

4. And, finally, something completely different https://carnegiemoscow.org/commentary/86013

I rather doubt that the Russia-Ukraine stand-off attracts as much attention around the world as it does in Europe, so apologies if this one’s not your cup of tea or you suffer from severe nucleomitophobia! (All sensible people should suffer from moderate nucleomitophobia, shouldn’t they?)

1. Lots of videos on the WWF International YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5MDIy3yhWDrx0MyDo4QmYg including these climate action stories from Monteria (Colombia), Park City (USA), Karachi (Pakistan) and London (UK) https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/wwfurbanart

2. Christopher Graham from Footprint ELT UK chaired a panel discussion at the New Directions East Asia conference last week on Climate Action in Language Assessment https://youtu.be/-cxQ6MZ43CQ

Topics covered included the negative impact on the environment of the testing and assessment community, the steps that can be taken to reduce that impact and their effectiveness, the challenges these measures present and how technological developments in the next few years may allow the sector to become substantially greener.

3. In my own mind, the climate and pandemic emergencies have been conflated over the last eighteen months, which I hope offers sufficient excuse for the inclusion this Climate Tuesday of a piece by my favourite ex-PM about the “inescapable and unacceptable fact that of the billions of doses of vaccine administered, only 0.6% ended up in low-income countries, while over 70% have been administered in high- and upper-middle-income countries” and his plan to put that right https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/dec/20/money-medicines-vaccinate-world-rich-countries-gordon-brown

4. And, finally, how should we understand Amazon’s decision to remove from their Chinese website all reviews of President Xi Jinping’s new book with less than five stars?

1. The first of two from Stephen Downes’s OLDaily newsletter: “How do some teachers hold the attention of their whole class, while others may struggle to keep them engaged?” Find out here, in this piece by Kris Taylor on his Taughtup blog, A Guide to Learning Styles and The Best Teaching Strategies to Use https://taughtup.com/guide-to-learning-styles-and-the-best-teaching-strategies-to-use/

2. Here’s the second: Revising ‘Teaching in a Digital Age’: the Impact of Covid-19 is Tony Bates’s interesting – and, on the face of it, genuine – exercise in writing a new, third edition of his successful book in public https://www.tonybates.ca/2021/12/16/revising-teaching-in-a-digital-age-the-impact-of-covid-19/

 3. Got time for another visit to the EdTech Hub? https://edtechhub.org/blog/ Unlocking data in Uganda https://edtechhub.org/2021/11/11/the-story-of-unlocking-data/, Using technology to mitigate the impact of the pandemic in Pakistan https://edtechhub.org/2021/12/09/building-forward-better-in-pakistan/ and a page of references for future reading, including EdTech and Covid-19: 10 things to know https://edtechhub.org/2021/11/22/cost-effectiveness-and-edtech-copy/   

4. And, finally, just in case you’ve not already been doing it for years, here’s today’s Quick crossword from The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/crosswords/quick/16106 The answer to 1 across is the same as the answer to the question ‘Which county is giving Boris Johnson a headache at present?’!

1. The OECD have just published Teachers Getting the Best out of Their Students, based on data from this year’s Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) report and described as taking “a view of teachers and school principals across all levels of compulsory education and the similarities and differences in the issues they face”. You can read it online here https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/5bc5cd4e-en/index.html?itemId=/content/publication/5bc5cd4e-en# and I’ve presumed to make a PDF of the (short) executive summary, below.

2. Three pieces gleaned from the latest Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) newsletter:

one blog post by Sarah Green on Shining a spotlight on reading fluency https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/news/eef-blog-shining-a-spotlight-on-reading-fluency

a second by Julie Kettlewell on Structured support for independent learning https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/news/eef-blog-structured-support-for-independent-learning

and a podcast hosted by Alex Quigley on Effective Professional Development https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/news/new-episode-of-evidence-into-action-effective-professional-development

3. Google know lots of things about us, many more than most of us can imagine. Here’s a piece by Dorie Clark about something else Google knows, Google’s ’20% rule’ shows exactly how much time you should spend learning new skills—and why it works https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/16/google-20-percent-rule-shows-exactly-how-much-time-you-should-spend-learning-new-skills.html

4. Here’s seven months’ notice of next year’s Trinity-Regent Future of English Language Teaching (FOELT) conference, so you have no excuse whatsoever for missing the 31^st March deadline for submissions https://learn.trinitycollege.co.uk/foelt/events/2022

plus, on the same page, recordings of all the sessions from this year’s FOELT. How about ‘A tale never loses in the telling’: Challenging hegemonic worldviews and decolonizing the EFL classroom with Erika de Freitas Coachman and Izabelle da Silva Fernandes from Argentina? https://resources.trinitycollege.com/teachers/english_language/webinars/a-tale-never-loses-in-the-telling-challenging-hegemonic-worldviews-and-decolonizing-the-efl-classroom-erika-de-freitas-coachma-1625139275175?__hstc=140353068.32e4c39214a3f2ddd0a15bcc9f879020.1639685435308.1639685435308.1639762963482.2&__hssc=140353068.1.1639762963482&__hsfp=1456151666 That’s a long link but I’ve decided not to give it the Bitly https://bitly.com/ treatment!

5. And, finally, Forty Names by the Afghan poet Parwana Fayyaz:

text here https://www.forwardartsfoundation.org/forward-prizes-for-poetry-2/parwana-fayyaz/parwana-fayyaz-forty-names/

and video with Parwana here https://youtu.be/wYTYwADxVrE

Not clever, to have used up most of my ‘multilingual’ material yesterday!

1. This looks likely to be both fun and complicated to organise, an online school debate festival organised by the QLS language school in Greece, supported by Eaquals https://www.eaquals.org/2020/01/06/call-for-participation-4th-qls-online-school-debate-festival/

Open to learners of English as a foreign language aged 11-17 from around the world, with three CEFR levels and three debate topics:  B1 – This House believes all people should become vegetarians; B2 – This House believes mass tourism should be banned; C1/C2 – This House believes nuclear power should be banned.

The festival is in late March; you need to enter your students before the end of January. I’m not quite sure how they’ll stop C1 level learners entering for a lower level. PDF of mini-poster below.

2. The LSE has a rich programme of online events for the Lent Term https://www.lse.ac.uk/Events/Events-Assets/PDF/2022/LT2022/21-0395-Events-lent-2021-v4-online.pdf

Your choice includes Anger on 17^th January, Punishment on 31^st January, 30 years of EU migration and asylum policies: success or failure? on 14^th February (quite a lot of anger and punishment in that last one, too), and lots more besides. PDF below.

 3. Here’s a three hundred and thirty-two word long work of ‘microfiction’ by Álvaro Baquero-Pecin from this month’s issue of the Words without Borders magazine, Our Nueva York: Writing the City in Spanish https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/article/december-2021-spanish-new-york-statistics-baquero-pecino-pollack

4. And, finally, thanks to Rose Aylett, something I’ve found fascinating and depressing in equal measure, given the apparent correlation between poverty and high data costs https://www.cable.co.uk/mobiles/worldwide-data-pricing/

1. Three good, inter-related project mini-sites from the ECML which I was reminded about while attending one of their events today:

one on Plurilingual and Intercultural Education https://www.ecml.at/Thematicareas/Plurilingualandinterculturaleducation/tabid/4145/language/en-GB/Default.aspx,

one on Resources for assessing the home language competences of migrant pupils https://www.ecml.at/ECML-Programme/Programme2020-2023/Resourcesforassessingthehomelanguagecompetencesofmigrantpupils/tabid/4297/language/en-GB/Default.aspx,

and a third on Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) https://www.ecml.at/Thematicareas/ContentandLanguageIntegratedLearning/tabid/1625/language/en-GB/Default.aspx

Lots to explore!

2. If you’re not an astrophysicist – and you don’t suffer from this week’s phobia, astrophobia – challenge yourself by listening to this podcast from The Conversation on The James Webb Space Telescope: what astronomers hope it will reveal about the beginning of the universe https://theconversation.com/james-webb-space-telescope-what-astronomers-hope-it-will-reveal-about-the-beginning-of-the-universe-podcast-173436

And if you are an astrophysicist, I’d like to think you’ll still find it interesting!

3. Here’s a blog post from Philip Kerr on the relationship between TESOL/TEFL researchers and English language teachers and the way in which the former typically frame the latter as being less expert than themselves, ’We need to talk’ https://adaptivelearninginelt.wordpress.com/2021/12/13/we-need-to-talk/ There’s a good set of references at the end, too.

Link here to an article, The Dysfunctions of the Theory/Practice Discourse, by Mark A. Clarke (with whom I worked on a summer school in Yugoslavia many years ago, I now realise) that Philip suggests first raised this issue https://www.researchgate.net/publication/264606374_The_Dysfunctions_of_the_TheoryPractice_Discourse and PDF below.

4. And, finally, here’s a piece on a survey of views of the UK that Ipsos MORI conducted for the British Council of one thousand ‘educated adults’ aged 18-34 in each of the (other) nineteen G20 countries in autumn 2021 https://www.britishcouncil.org/brand-britain-wins

I’ve checked and ‘educated’ means ‘with a minimum of secondary education’. PDF of a readable summary version of the report here https://www.britishcouncil.org/sites/default/files/global_perceptions_survey_2021.pdf and below. I admit to being slightly surprised by the results!

1. A mesmerising speech by Mia Mottley, the Prime Minister of Barbados, at the opening of COP 26 that a friend in Thailand has just brought to my attention: https://youtu.be/PN6THYZ4ngM

2. Here’s a piece from the BBC website on the naming of storms https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/34581210 which is a much more recent practice than I’d realised: the first was Abigail, just over six years ago, on 10^th November 2015.

3. The Brookings Initiative on Climate Research and Action (BICRA), in its own words, “brings together experts who are shaping workable solutions for local, national, and global leaders to meet the climate challenge and seize opportunities for climate-resilient growth around the world”.

Here’s their website https://www.brookings.edu/initiative/brookings-initiative-on-climate-research-and-action/

and here’s a blog post from the BICRA site by Homi Kharas, ‘Missing from COP26: Lifestyle choices of middle-class and rich consumers’ https://www.brookings.edu/blog/future-development/2021/11/23/missing-from-cop26-lifestyle-choices-of-middle-class-and-rich-consumers/

‘Avoid, Shift, Improve!’ is Homi’s mantra.

 4. And, finally, here’s another three-word mantra, ‘Think, Pair, Share!’, from Kate Jones and Dylan Wiliam: https://www.ascd.org/blogs/getting-the-think-pair-share-technique-right

1. Try to find a little time tomorrow between 08:30 and 16:15 UK time to pop in to the live stream of the European Centre for Modern Languages (ECML) annual colloquium on The future of language education in the light of Covid – lessons learned and ways forward: https://vimeo.com/event/1634631

Programme here https://www.ecml.at/Portals/1/6MTP/future-of-language-education/ECML-Colloquium-programme-2021-EN.pdf

and more background info here https://www.ecml.at/ECML-Programme/Programme2020-2023/Thefutureoflanguageeducation/tabid/5491/Default.aspx

Maybe try the ‘Expert Panel’ at 15:05 UK time on ‘Where to from here?’, where all the panellists in my experience talk good sense in their different ways!

Also below, PDFs of the ECML publication A Guide to Language Education in Pandemic situations – and beyond and the colloquium programme below.

2. Lynda Taylor is giving the next UCL online seminar on Wednesday, 15^th December at 12:00 UK time on Reframing the discourse and rhetoric of testing and assessment for the public square. Testing and assessment became very hot political potatoes in the UK (and many other countries) during the pandemic. PDF of Lynda’s abstract below and registration here https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf8syJjiCoQHGJ5iTAcFN-BOUTnRXUcOMOfOAfMfzqTD3SB4w/viewform

3. See what your older students – and you! – make of this speech at Chatham House in London by Liz Truss, the UK Foreign Secretary (Minister) last Wednesday on the UK’s foreign policy priorities https://www.chathamhouse.org/events/all/members-event/foreign-secretary-liz-truss-and-uks-foreign-policy-priorities

Transcript here https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/foreign-secretary-liz-truss-building-the-network-of-liberty

(Does anyone else find the earrings distracting?)

4. And, finally, listen to this https://youtu.be/KRyLw1aK5oA while looking at this https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/5531

And if you get really interested, try this https://youtu.be/VLPDeUiZ_Rk

1. Today is/was United Nations Human Rights Day, something I could usefully have reminded you of earlier in the week, to give you time to prepare a lesson. Here’s a useful page on What are human rights? https://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/Pages/WhatareHumanRights.aspx and here’s a page with a lovely photo and a wide range of resources https://www.un.org/en/observances/human-rights-day/resources#campaignmaterials

2. Below is a PDF copy of a wonderful spoof from Michael Swan at the expense of ‘predatory journals’ (Michael’s spot-on term), as reported on the BAAL list today.

3. My colleague, Steve Copeland, sent me this message today in response to my comment yesterday about the likely size of audience for books that cost £85.50: “Those not wanting to spend £85.50 could always look at the original ELTRA report https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/settveo-evidence-based-reflection-teacher-development and the webinar Steve Walsh did for us last year: https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/evidence-based-reflection-teacher-development PDF of ELTRA report below.

4. And, finally, a piece on why mobile phones and driving do NOT belong together. I speak as an occasional driver who’s just completed a four-and-a half-hour drive home from Yorkshire, keenly aware that I am no longer – if I ever was – “above average at driving”! https://theconversation.com/drivers-and-hand-held-mobile-phones-extending-the-ban-wont-solve-the-problem-heres-why-172327