IATEFL next year is in Glasgow, from Tuesday 20 to Friday 23 March 2012.
If you’re thinking of going, ask yourself:
Adapted from an email from Herbert Puchta, Chair, Publications Committee, and Vice President, IATEFL
Posted by Gary Motteram
edgeblog 17
It seems a long time since edgeblog 16, the main reason for which is probably that the intervening period included a trip to Peru. I shall spare you the details of the wonderful traveling, awe-inspiring sights and sites, welcoming people and delicious food, even of the repeated headaches that moving around the high Andes brings about for some of us, but I must mention the Instituto Cultural Peruano Norteamericano that invited me to Lima in the first place to run some professional development workshops. It is a very large institution, with five branches across Lima, tens of thousands of students and hundreds of teachers.
Working with my friend and long-term collaborator, Bob Oprandy, we ran sessions introducing Cooperative Development and associated skills/attitudes to the teachers and supervisors there. The sound level produced by over two hundred teachers seriously engaged in pair-work in an underground room is pretty impressive, but even more impressive was the effort and energy that they put into exploring such a new approach to peer interaction and professional development. The commitment, the shrewdness of the questioning and the enthusiasm for the idea of seizing more personal autonomy in their teaching was, in a reflexive kind of a way, hugely inspiring and empowering for me.
Follow-up sessions with smaller groups of supervisors (around 20) were no less energising and allowed us to go more deeply and sensitively into procedures and potentials. It was all very satisfying. I came away hoping that some of this work might take root for some of the participants and that I might hear more about it.
Meanwhile, back here in Britain, a very successful BAAL Language Learning and Teaching SIG conference had taken place, organised by friends and ex-colleagues at Aston University, Birmingham. The theme was:
Theorising practice and practising theory: developing local pedagogies in language teaching
(There’s a back-story here about me making a mess over diary dates and commitments, but I have apologised a lot, still feel bad, and so I’ll just look the other way at this point.)
The organisers, Sue Garton and Nur Hooton, allowed me to send in a videoed presentation, entitled, ‘In search of the hybrid: Discourse analysis, TESOL methodology and cultural politics,’ which we have now posted on Manchester University’s server. I’m attaching to this edgeblog The Aston-BAAL_hout that accompanies the talk and the handout also includes the url for the video. My talk turns to a large extent around an analysis of the following article:
Zhang, X. & Head, K. (2010). Dealing with learner reticence in the speaking class. ELT Journal 64 (1), 1-9.
So, it would be even better if you could first read that article and think your own thoughts, or discuss them with colleagues, before going on to the talk.
Hey, I’ll tell you something else. While you’re out there in cyberspace, discovering new delights, I cannot recommend highly enough this recipe for Peach Pie. Peach Pie may not resonate for you the way it does for me, but all I can do is pass on my recommendation for this one as a high-summer treat. And when the weather is a little cooler, I may let you in to the source of last night’s Pork and Black Pudding Wellington, which was also magnificent in its own way.
I hope your summer (or winter, given my growing hemispherical sensitivity) is going well.
Best,
Julian
Interesting report in the online Guardian about the role of English in development. A report commissioned by the British Council.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/jul/05/research-backs-english-language-delotbiniere
Gary Motteram
Well, I have to start by telling you that I am nothing short of gutted to note the absence of edgeblog 15. This is serious. I remember writing it and I remember posting it. There is no sign of it on either home or work computer. I have become to some extent reconciled to my failing memory, but the onset of imagined memories is a new step in a different direction. Don’t know what else to say on that front at the moment, so I’ll get on to what I actually wanted to talk to you about.
I could let you have the formal reference if you need it, but mainly I just wanted to reflect on this elegantly barbed comment with which Henry Widdowson once introduced his response to a critic:
I welcome his intention to take a critical look at my position. The problem is that this involves a reformulation of my position so as to make it more amenable to his criticism.
Without wanting to take up a position on this particular instance, I regularly find this phenomenon one of the more depressing features of our professional and academic discourse. It’s bad enough that we should be trained to ‘make space’ for our own ideas by attacking the ideas of others, but even if one does want to live in this world of displacive discourse, where someone else must be wrong before one can speak, it undermines the whole process if one then fails to represent one’s target in its best light. It drags us down to the level of the politicians I daily hear in the news misrepresenting the views of opponents, or fabricating arguments that no one has proposed in order to put their own views in a better light. If, on the other hand, we make a point of presenting other people’s arguments as soundly as we can, then we achieve two things immediately. First, we clarify what has already been contributed; second, if our re-presentation still leaves something to which we can further contribute, then we have really justified what we have to say as worth the saying. More generally, we might see ourselves as helping develop a world of augmentative discourse that would at the same time be more rigorous in its argumentation. The basic test is an extension of the one that Carl Rogers proposed: Would the person whose ideas I am representing agree with my representation? If not, what am I doing?
Ha! There, after such a heavy opening, that expression, ‘What am I doing?’ makes me smile, because it is also written on a sign, given to me by my friend, Bob Oprandy, that I have fixed at eye-level above my desk at work. I am one of those people (Or is it just me?) who is (a) not great at multi-tasking and (b) prone to be thinking, once I have started to do one thing, that perhaps I should be doing something else. So a constant reminder to focus on whatever it is that I am doing at any one time is always a very useful corrective to the possibility of being overtly engaged in doing one thing while thinking about something else. In contrast to Czikszentmihalyi ‘s concept of flow, this is more like eddy.
Ah, and speaking of Bob, all being well, I shall be off to Peru on 24 June to do some workshops with him and with the teachers at the Instituto Cultural Peruana Norteamericano in Lima. I’ve never actually tried pair and group work in Cooperative Development with gatherings of 200 before, so it’s clearly time that I did.
As our teaching term here has come to an end, I thought it was time for another edgeblog competition. The challenge is to provide a Hoeyan SPRE analysis of the attached text, The Golden Teeth, shamelssly cribbed from The Guardian.
You may feel that this advantages those entrants who have studied relational analysis with me. Well, doh!! This is edgeblog, isn’t it? What did you expect, something on intercultural sensitivity, multimedia sustainability or ecological psychology? Once again, there will be a blisteringly attractive prize for the winning entry, which needs to reach me before the end of July.
So, have fun in the meantime and keep in mind that golden rule: Represent others as carefully as you would wish them to represent you. (And if you find edgeblog 15, do get in touch.)
Best,
Julian
Oh, training will out. Here’s the reference.
Widdowson, H. (1998). Positions and oppositions: Hedgehogs and foxes. International Journal of Applied Linguistics8/1:147-151.
Just like buses, none come along for ages and then two re-vamped European websites on e-learning come along together. Must be the European year for DL! This one is the European organisation for Distance Learning, EDEN.
A useful website and lots of resources, mostly focused on Europe.
Gary Motteram
The edition of IJCALLT that contains articles from recent graduates of our MA (Simon Bibby and Rachel Lindner) as well as an editorial from myself (Gary) and Graham Stanley as editors is now available. You can download and read the editorial, which is a small article, for free.
Gary Motteram
Anyone interested in qualitative research in general, and interviewing in particular, is likely to find something relevant and useful in the last issue of Applied Linguistics (32/1), edited by Steven Talmy and Keith Richards.
I had to smile the other day when I pointed this collection out to someone about to complete her PhD. “No!” she cried. “I don’t want to see anything new about that now!” I do sympathise. It’s a feeling that anyone should recognise when they’re trying to finish something off. Intellectually, of course, you always want to be in touch with the latest thinking, even if it is “threatening”. And pragmatically, it can rarely do you any harm if your text shows that you are aware of what is happening in the current literature. A final word of warning, mind, you have to be sure that you have got your head around just what is being said in that new publication. As the ancient saying has it: It is better not to have referred at all and have people think that you are not aware, than refer inaccurately and have them think that you didn’t understand.
Another reason I smiled, I have to admit, was because this situation reminded me of probably my favourite line collected from the recent trip to New Orleans. There we were in a small boat, creeping along a bayou and heading towards some open water among the swamps, with hopes of alligators, water snakes, cormorants, herons, pelicans, egrets and all sorts ahead, when the woman in front of me looked down at her camera and said, “Oh no! My battery’s low. Hope we don’t see anything great!” I thought this was an even greater triumph for the digital world than the idea of kids playing video games all the sunlit, sunshiny day.
Oh, don’t let me get started on that front. IT is so much with us and dealing with information overload is truly a constant battle. On which topic, our colleague, Drew Whitworth, has made a study of this with his work on information obesity.
The trouble with that obesity parallel for me, mind, is that while my body sets certain parameters to help me judge and control the food that I put into my system, my intellect and imagination are not so clearly bounded. So, how small would a topic have to be for me have a shot at gathering even the truly authentic and legitimate information about it, even if I could make those evaluations accurately?
That can’t be the way forward. I think the answer must lie in changing one’s attitude to the status of what is that one wants to say. More than ever, and increasingly, we have to speak and act while knowing not only that our knowledge is incomplete, but that the information we lacked would have been available if only we had known where and how to look for it. Humility, a tolerance for uncertainty, and recognition that others are in the same boat seem to be the qualities required.
None of the above, I might add, have been apparent in the political scene here in Britain of late. We are about to vote in a referendum on changing the system according to which we elect our members of parliament. What has stood out most clearly for me has been the unspoken and unchallenged assumption that the best way to inform the public about the issue is to set up an argument between two people who have already made up their minds. This is Deborah Tannen’s (1998) Argument Culture in all its glory. Rather than any measured information about the advantages and disadvantages of the different systems, we are presented in all media with the unedifying spectacle of people talking past each other while trying to score points off each other. And then we are apparently meant to be surprised when the “debate” sinks into rounds of accusations of misrepresentation and name-calling. Your life in their hands. Oh yay.
On the other hand, meteorologically speaking, I hereby declare this to have been, thus far, the most beautiful British Springtime that I can ever remember.
And Stoke City in the FA Cup Final.
Best,
Julian
Posted in edgeblog
Tagged developing researcher competence, distance education, doctoral community, Educational Technology & TESOL, IATEFL, intercultural education, language teacher education, LTE at Manchester, MA EdTech & TESOL, MA Educational Technology & TESOL, MA TESOL, Narrative Inquiry, research, researcher competence, Teacher education, TESOL
| May 11th in Room 0.2, 4.00pm – 5.30pm, Behrens Building, Didsbury Campus Professor Rupert Wegerif, Graduate School of Education, University of Exeter Technology and Dialogic Space. Dialogic space is a paradoxical concept: on the one hand it is a practically useful concept in classrooms where the opening and closing of dialogic space is an almost tangible reality that can be empirically measured, on the other hand it is a quasi transcendental concept implying that an infinite potential for new meaning emerges from the invisible gap between perspectives in dialogue. In this talk I explore the relationship between technology and dialogic space. Different media of communication, from varieties of oracy through varieties of literacy to varieties of new communications technology, have different affordances in relation to dialogic space. Artefacts can enable continuity and development in dialogues. Through the analysis of recent data from online dynamic concept mapping I compare and contrast a neo-Vygotskian analysis of artefacts as cognitive tools being mastered and appropriated to a more dialogic analysis of artefacts as themselves voices within dialogues. All welcome – feel free to circulate |
Posted in TESOL, The educational technologist
Tagged Educational Technology & TESOL, ICT, MA TESOL, TESOL
Gary and Phil Hubbard discussing links between the LTSIG and the CALL-IS.
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