What did they do next?
This section of the blog has been created to show links to our former students’ activities. So, if you have any news you want to update us on, drop us an email (richard.fay@manchester.ac.uk) and we will add your news. Note also that there are some publications-focused subpages attached to this page in the above drop-down menu ….
- FOORD, Duncan – In 1998, Duncan founded a teacher training company in Barcelona with a colleague. The business has grown since then and now has schools in Cadiz and Prague. This is the school’s website: Oxford Tefl – See here for Duncan Foord’s latest book on teacher development.
- HARLOW, Amanda – This web page shows the work that Amanda is doing in Japan. She has set up a language school there which specifically caters for learners over the age of 50.
- KJARTASSON, Rafn (MEd ELT summer / distance mode, late 1990s) — Although Rafn is now happily retired, before he did so, he was involved in a number of intercultural projects (in part stimulated by his experience of the intercultural course unit on his Masters programme at Manchester). For example, he was involved – through the University of Akureyri in Iceland – in the Cross-cultural Curriculum for European Regions and their students (CERes), a project which “addresses this need by initiating a new internationalised business language curriculum for young people at universities in the target countries of Bulgaria, England, Iceland, Poland, and Sweden …. CEReS aims at introducing new teaching approaches and teaching methods in the field of cross-cultural training and education for trade and mobility“. The outcome of the project was an intercultural curriculum for business departments at universities, featuring a comprehensive selection of film clips integrated into written study modules. The clips were obtained by means of student interviews with business people in the participating countries; Bulgaria, England, Iceland, Poland and Sweden. http://cerespro.unak.is and http://cerespro.unak.is//?mod=sidur&mod2=view&id=31
- LUSSI BELL, Maggie (MEd ELT part-time distance) — After finishing her Master’s in 1996, Maggi continued to teach at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH) and at the University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW) in Wädenswil, Switzerland. She left the ETH in 2002 to concentrate on the ZHAW (www.zhaw.ch), which turned into the full time job she had been looking for. She now heads the team of EFL teachers and was appointed as a Professor in 2008. She has also been involved in teacher development and ran ‘Educational Links’ from 1995 to 2001 together with a fellow MEd student, Keith Sprague, to enable teachers in Switzerland to do the Manchester MEd TESOL on a distance basis. As well as teacher development, one of Maggi’s main areas of interest is testing (the topic of her Master’s dissertation was on the testing of speaking) and she was coordinator of the English Teacher’s Association of Switzerland’s SIG for Examinations, Testing and Assessment from 2006 to 2010. She has been enrolled on the University of Bristol’s EdD programme since 2005 and is currently investigating the use of academic oral presentations in an assessment context for her dissertation.
- NTAVALIAGKOU, Maria (MA TESOL, 2007) — In 2008, Maria successfully obtained a PhD place in the School of Education at the University of Leeds. Her experience of part-time, distance study has resulted in a topic of : “Factors affecting the academic experience of female part-time students in pursuit of a distance learning doctorate”.
