MA TESOL

edgeblog 02

Ooooooooooh! A little competition is now heating up among you Neo-Griceans! Nice to see. I think we’ll leave the competition open till the next edgeblog in mid-February and then, as politicians like to say, ‘Some difficult decisions will have to be made.’

Well, this time, I promised revealing insights into that outstanding new teachers’ handbook:

Edge, J. & Garton, S. 2009. From Experience to Knowledge in ELT. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

One that springs immediately to mind is that, as I presented a spanking new copy to my colleagues here, Richard took a quick look, commented, “No entry for ‘intercultural’ in the index,” and passed it on.

He’s quite right, of course. I mean, right that there isn’t, and right that there should have been. The intercultural nature of all that we do in TESOL has been, for me, so built into the warp and the weft of a whole working life that I have rarely thought to feature it as a topic to explore in its own right. And what that means, in turn, of course, is that I have never brought to bear on the contribution of intercultural issues the level of focussed awareness that I might have. It’s been contingent, left to be mentioned when it made itself noticed in some other context. Good, then, that Richard makes intercultural study such an important part of what we do here in the Language Teacher Education Group. Have a look at his stuff while you’re here.

Other than that, what is in the book then, you might ask. Well, what Sue and I are most pleased about is the attempt, as indicated by the title, to help people move from experience to knowledge. It’s not an easy trick to turn, because this is, after all, a book, and a book to read, not a workbook, as such. Nevertheless, we hope that it might encourage the right kind of reader, whether on in-service or pre-service courses, not to be put off by the misconception that teacher education concerns lots of abstract theories that they have to learn. We want them to recognise that they have a great deal of experience to draw on, whether as language learners, or teachers, or both, and that that experience is a sound basis from which they  can create knowledge, in interaction with what we are telling them, using the terminology that we are giving them.

Funny how writing that book now seems like something from history and it only came out six months ago. So much to do, so little time! Stirring in the underbrush of the future at the moment is the TESOL Convention in Boston in March. I’ll be presenting a paper on reflexivity in  teacher education.

Heavens (if you’ll excuse my saying so), I’m already coming up to my 500 words (self-imposed limit), so I’ll tell you more on that next time. And then, I haven’t said a word yet about Luddism, which is very much on my mind and what I actually wanted to talk to you about. It is a very misunderstood concept and one with which I find myself developing ever more affinity. It’ll have to be an edgeblog of the future. If you have any thoughts on the topic in the meantime, or about interculturality, or experiential knowledge, or reflexivity, (Myohmy, we do cover some ground, don’t we??), do send them in.

I’ll be back in a fortnight.

Best,

Julian

Open Education  is an online journal for articles and other pieces about distance and open education and educational technology. It’s the journal of the Hellenic Network for Open and Distance Education for our long time collaborators at the Hellenic Open University in Greece. They are keen for submissions in these fields from outside the Greek educational sphere. Any takers?

English Language Teacher Education and Development (ELTED)

[ISSN 1365-3741]

… is an annual, peer-reviewed journal for the worldwide ELT community which is produced by the English Language Teacher Education and Development Research Group of the Centre for Applied Linguistics, University of Warwick.

It seeks to provide a medium for the exchange of ideas and information on issues pertaining to English language teacher education and development. The journal is targeted at all those involved in English language teacher education and development worldwide, for whom, at present, there are few published journals dealing specifically with this interest area.

All back issues are available for free at the following website:

http://www.elted.net/

Volume 11 (edited by Judith Kennedy and Ema Ushioda) contains the following articles:

 · Towards a pedagogy for empowerment: The case of ‘impostor syndrome’ among pre-service non-native speaker teachers in TESOL – Eva Bernat

· Pre-service ESL teachers’ instructional discourse during one-on-one tutoring – Vicky Giouroukakis, Andrea Honigsfeld, Jacqueline Endres-Nenchin and Lisa Peluso

· Class participation in a teacher training college: What is it and what factors influence it? – Dafne Green

· Studying discourse analysis: Does it have an impact on trainee English language teachers? – Ramona Tang

· Process versus product? Personal reflection and experimentation in task-based learning with the Hiroshima Teacher Trainees 2008 – Clari Searle

· Changing approaches to teaching grammar – Sheena Gardner

· Evolving academic journal editorial systems – John Adamson and Theron Muller

· Taking stock of ELTED (A conversation) – Judith Kennedy, Richard Smith and Ema Ushioda

For the next (Winter 2009) volume, to be edited by Peter Brown and Steve Mann, we are focusing on the theme of ‘innovations in teacher education and development’. We particularly welcome contributions in areas such as the following:

 • Use of ICT, multimedia or the internet to support teacher development

• Co-operative or collaborative teacher development

• Use of video in supporting teacher development

• Mentoring and support of novice teachers

• Developing communities of practice

We would also encourage innovative genres of writing, including brief reports of exploratory practice or action research, and contributions involving multimedia (e.g. with links to video of classroom data). Contributions or enquiries about the next issue can be sent to Steve Mann (Steve.Mann@warwick.ac.uk)  or Peter Brown (P.J.Brown@warwick.ac.uk).

I quite recentlyattended a stimulating IALIC (International Association of Languages and Intercultural Communication) symposium on the Intercultural Writer (a spin-off term from Mike Byram’s term ‘Intercultural Speaker’) at which I came across:

Ware, V. (2007). “Who cares about Britishness? A global view of the national identity debate”, London, Counterpoint, British Council. [1-905147-58-9]

When I was in Sofia recently for a workshop, I met up with María del Carmen Méndez García from the University of Jaen in southern Spain who reminded me some work of relevance for this course unit undertaken under the auspices of the Council of Europe. Specifically, you might want to check out:

See the results section of this set of webpages for the Intercultural Competence for Professional Mobility project.

Mari-Carmen is also heavily involved in the Autobiography of Intercultural Encounters

Further, a former MA participant Rafn Kjarkasson took this course unit and then applied some of his learning from it in this set of European-funded resources

Finally, I came across a video clip which I really like which addresses the sense of ‘home’.

Byram, M. (2008). From foreign language education to education for intercultural citizenship, Clevedon, Multilingual matters. [978-1-84769-078-4]

Council of Europe (2009). Bergan, Sjur & Restoueix, Jean-Philippe (eds). Intercultural dialogue on campus, Strasbourg, Council of Europe Publishing. [978-92-871-6503-9]

Fairclough, Norman (2006). Language and globalization, London, Routledge. [978-0-415-31765-8]

Jackson, Jane (2008). Language, identity and study abroad, London, Equinox. [978-1-84553-142-3]

Pennycook, Alistair (2007). Global Englishes and transcultural flows, London, Routledge. [978-0-415-37497-2]

Riley, Philip. (2007). Language, culture and identity : an ethnolinguistic perspective, London, Continuum. [978-0-826-48629-5]

Spencer-Oatey, Helen (2009). Intercultural interaction: a multidisciplinary approach to intercultural communication, Houndsmills, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan. [978-1-4039-8631-3]

Weedon, C. (2004). Identity and culture: narratives of difference and belonging, Maidenhead, Open University Press. [0-335-20086-9]

SECOND CALL FOR PAPERS: IAWE 2010

16th Annual Conference of the International Association for World Englishes
Date: 25-July-2010 – 27-July-2010
Location: Simon Fraser University Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue
Contact Person: Suzanne K. Hilgendorf
Meeting Email: iawe2010@sfu.ca
Web Site

Elsewhere in this LTE blog, the long-standing links between Manchester’s MA TESOL programme and the Hellenic Open University’s comparable programme have been mentioned. The HOU TESOL team have now launched their online journal celebrating the contributions being made by their students, tutors, and collaborators. 

Check out the journal at:

http://rpltl.eap.gr/

Quite a bit is in Greek but by no means all of it

In the upcoming Issue 2, I will have a contribution (based on a paper I gave at the HOU conference in May 2009). So will ex-LTE colleague Mike Beaumont

The 2nd CLIE Call for Papers is now out, accompanied by the message below from Professor Cornelia Ilie, a conference convenor and plenary speaker. 

The following paper was given at the previous CLIE conference by:

Ntavaliagkou, M., Fay, R., and Lytra, V. (2008). Multicultural awareness through English: An opportunity for repositioning TESOL in Greek schools. Paper presented at CLIE 2008 (1^st Conference on Linguistic and Intercultural Education): Multilingualism and Plurilingualism, Migrants’ languages, Minority Languages, 27- 29 November 2008, Alba Iulia, Romania. Published in the Proceedings, pp.362-374.

Maria Ntavaliagkou is an alumnus of the onsite MA TESOL programme.

Dear colleagues,
On behalf of ENIEDA (European Network for Intercultural Education Activities) and the CLIE2 Organising Committee I am pleased to invite you to the 2nd International Conference on Linguistic and Intercultural Education hosted by the University of Montenegro in Herceg Novi, 10-12 June 2010.

Please find attached the call for papers for CLIE2 – 2010.

We would be grateful if you could forward this email to anyone who might be interested.

Best regards,
Cornelia Ilie–
Cornelia Ilie
Professor of English Linguistics
Malmö University, Sweden
E-mail: cornelia.ilie@gmail.com

This is my first blog in the sense of an ongoing process, as distinct from the over-long Introductory piece about the nature of time and tennis that you might have skimmed through on my home page. To get into the spirit of the thing, I have decided to think of it as edgeblog. My initial goal is to write an entry every fortnight and see where it goes from there.

A great part of my interest in getting involved with edgeblog arises from an exchange I had with Keith Richards while we both worked at Aston University. He talked about ‘writing to fill a space‘ and ‘writing to say something.’ In fact, if you wanted to read about that, you could take a look at the attached pdf of Chapter 9 from my (2002) book, Continuing Cooperative Development. It’s a lot more interesting than this stuff, I can assure you.

Anyway, I have always felt lucky to have got this far through a working life in TESOL on the basis of writing because I wanted to say something and now, at this undeniably late stage of the game, I find myself writing to fill a space. That’s to say, I have recently learned that if we (as a team of colleagues) are to make our MA TESOL visible to people around the world who are googling for such a course, what we have to do is create ‘traffic’ to our website. If there is lots of traffic, Google will spot us and deliver us up to the screens of said searchers. The simile that Gary used to explain this was,

‘Like The Eye of Sauron.‘

‘Heavens!‘ I thought, in a determinedly secular manner, and shifted my thoughts immediately to the luminous delights of the Lady Galadriel . . .

However, I now understand better how the search engine must make bloggers of us all, rather as though in a perversion of a Gricean Maxim of Quantity:

Make your communications as frequent and widely dispersed as you can.

This must be what people mean when they talk about human cognitive evolution developing in interaction with our technologies, in the same way that the possession of mobile phones slowly erodes our ability to make arrangements that we feel any obligation to keep to. A Maxim of Quality, perhaps:

Make your statements as retractable as possible.

The difficulty then arises, however, that if you post only inconsequential drivel, people won’t come back, and where’s your traffic then? Eh? So quality does rear its stubborn head after all, and edgeblog has to appear not only frequently, but to be worth reading and worth coming back to. Oh dear.

Right! Competitions, they’re supposed to work. (Aren’t they?) I hereby invite entries for the best IT ‘evolutions’ of Grice’s maxims, in connection, possibly, with your thoughts on human cognitive evolution in interaction with our technologies. If you want to check out Grice’s originals, by the way, you could go to:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gricean_maxims#Grice.27s_Maxims

But be sure to come back here again and give us a bit more traffic. Entries will be judged at some auspicious future date and prizes may be awarded.

edgeblog will return at the end of January, along with revealing insights into that outstanding new teachers’ handbook:

Edge, J. & Garton, S. 2009. From Experience to Knowledge in ELT. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

And, some real surprises!

Julian