We recently held an online event with Adam Schwartz, author of Spanish So White: Conversations on the Inconvenient Racism of a ‘Foreign’ Language Education. Our Editorial Director, Anna Roderick, spoke to Adam about the inspiration behind the book, his writing process and the book’s main takeaways. If you missed the event or want to rewatch it, you can do so on our YouTube channel:
For more information or to purchase this book, please see our website.
We will soon be publishing Meeting the Needs of Reunited Refugee Families by Sarah Cox. In this post Sarah introduces her book.
This book explores the gap between policy, practice and academic literature within language learning for refugees. Both policy and academic literature recognise the benefits of multilingual approaches to language learning, however language classes are often based on monolingual pedagogies which centre on the need to use the target language as much as possible.
The book explores the language learning needs of a small group of refugee women and their children who had recently arrived in Scotland through family reunion. The book is based on a 5-month teaching study, using critical participatory action research to develop a multilingual approach, which combined translanguaging principles (where people use all their linguistic resources to learn) with decolonising methodology. The book is set within the context of arrival in the host community which is often a period of disorientation and profound change.
To draw the recommendations for multilingual approaches into teaching practice, rather than teaching and researching solely in English, I became a learner of the participants’ languages (Tigrinya, Tamil, Farsi and Arabic) to explore how teachers and researchers might use a multilingual approach even when they don’t speak the same languages as their learners/research participants. The translanguaging ‘stance’ we adopted meant embracing an openness to other languages and using them as much as possible in the research. In the book I talk about how this approach can be part of ‘linguistic hospitality’ which complements the principle of two-way, mutual integration laid out in Scotland’s New Scots Refugee Integration Strategy.
The book centres on three key findings:
The book illustrates how policy, practice and theory might be brought closer together as part of a decolonial approach to language teaching that shifts the balance of power in the classroom, repositions the roles of teacher / researcher and learner / participant and addresses inequality between languages by reducing the dominance of English. The themes of mutual integration and language learning as solidarity are at the heart of the book.
I hope the book will be relevant for anyone interested in ESOL, refugee integration, language teaching, language policy or researching multilingually.
If you found this interesting, you might also like Decolonising Multilingualism by Alison Phipps.
This month we will be publishing Making Connections by John Corbett, Hugo Dart and Bruno Ferreira de Lima. In this post John summarises what the book can offer its readers.
Since the very first days of the rise of digital communications technology, many language educators have enthusiastically grasped the opportunity to connect their own language learners with others elsewhere in the world. Online exchanges, or telecollaborations, have been taking place since the early 1990s on a variety of platforms: email, Facebook and virtual learning environments such as ‘Moodle’ and ‘Canvas’. The focus of the exchanges can simply be the development of language competence, or, in ‘online intercultural exchanges’, there can be a dual focus on developing language and intercultural communicative competence.
While there have been many publications on the pedagogy and outcomes of online intercultural exchanges – describing online tasks that learners might undertake, and the capacities required of learners and instructors – little has been written explicitly to give guidance and reassurance to educators who are embarking on online intercultural exchanges for the first time. Most veterans of telecollaboration will say two things about online exchanges: they are certainly worth doing, but they can be frustrating. Novices who start organising an online exchange with the idealistic view that wonderfully rich interactions will occur, simply by putting learners in touch with each other, are probably in for a rude awakening. And yet, given the right conditions, wonderfully rich interactions can occur.
With this in mind, Making Connections: A Practical Guide to Online Intercultural Exchanges was written to give advice to the novice educator, and reassurance to the veteran. The slim, readable volume is informed by the experience of the three authors as much as by the research literature on the topic. In the book, readers will find sensible ideas on a range of crucial topics:
There is also some advice for those educators who might wish to use their experience of running an online intercultural exchange, or participating in such an exchange, as the basis of a thesis or dissertation for a postgraduate degree. The three authors have, between them, decades of experience of participation in intercultural telecollaborations, and one of them used that experience as the basis for his PhD. The book draws on their long history of working on telecollaborations by giving actual examples of when exchanges go well – and when they go badly. The guidance will help organisers and teachers of online exchanges to avoid some of the more obvious pitfalls, and give them support when they hit the inevitable obstacles. All in all, Making Connections encourages language educators to open up the world for their learners – and supports those who are already doing so!
For more information about this book please see our website.
If you found this interesting, you might also like Second Language Use Online and its Integration in Formal Language Learning by Andrew D. Moffat.
This month we published Intercultural Citizenship in Language Education edited by Kaishan Kong and Allison J. Spenader. In this post Allison discusses the importance of Intercultural Citizenship in the language classroom and how the book can inspire both inservice and aspiring teachers.
It’s back-to-school season where I live in the Midwest region of the United States of America. Heading back to the classroom inevitably means taking a closer look at resources for teaching and learning. Our new edited volume, Intercultural Citizenship in Language Education: Teaching and Learning Through Social Action, explores ways to deepen meaning and connection between language classrooms and the world. By engaging in Intercultural Citizenship work, teachers can bring enhanced relevance to their language classrooms and promote learner engagement.
As a faculty member who prepares teachers for World Language and Multilingual Learner classrooms, I work with undergraduate students who will soon be doing the important work of language teaching. What is important about our work as language teachers? How will we motivate our students to delve into their language studies, and to stay engaged with language learning for more than just a year or two? Our new book gives both theoretical and concrete suggestions for aspiring language teachers who are preparing for their future classrooms. I plan to share with my students some of the insights from the first chapter in our volume. This chapter explains how the important work of Social Justice education is intrinsically connected to developing Intercultural Citizenship. My students will benefit from the specific examples of classroom activities for developing a deeper understanding of one’s identity, engaging students in critical analysis of resources, fostering dialogue, developing agency to act and providing opportunities for reflection. I also plan to share with my students the research findings regarding the role of study abroad in teacher education. My pre-service teachers have all engaged in international study and are curious to explore how those experiences will impact their work as language teachers.
Current teachers are busy envisioning how this school year is going to play out. Through which new lenses can they spark students’ interests in the content they will teach? One chapter describes how Professional Learning Communities can be used to support teachers’ pursuits of Intercultural Citizenship education. Another explores how virtual tandem learning allowed Chinese and American students to build Intercultural Citizenship through structured cultural discussions. The benefits of Contemplative Pedagogies are explored in yet another chapter in the volume, providing concrete suggestions for framing intercultural questions and experiences with students. Finally, our book also explores the opportunities for Intercultural Citizenship that naturally present themselves in elementary and middle level dual language immersion contexts.
The framework of Intercultural Citizenship in Language Education provides teachers with inspiration for curricular innovation that helps students use their language skills to enact social change both within and beyond their local communities. We hope that both inservice and aspiring teachers will find our new book to be a valuable resource!
Allison Spenader
For more information about this book please see our website.
If you found this interesting, you might also like Intercultural Learning in Language Education and Beyond edited by Troy McConachy, Irina Golubeva and Manuela Wagner.
This month we published Grammar in ELT and ELT Materials by Graham Burton. In this post the author explains what inspired him to write the book and what he hopes readers will take away from it.
What motivated you to write this book?
It was a combination of things. I started my career in ELT as a teacher but as my background was in linguistics, I always had a somewhat analytical eye with respect to teaching content and was often far more interested in the ‘what’ of teaching rather than the ‘how’. I also worked for years in ELT publishing as an editor and author and saw first hand how decisions on content selection are made. As I gradually moved from teaching and publishing into academia, I found that – particularly in the field of SLA – the focus was far more on questions of how language should be taught and how it can be learned, but the question of which content was appropriate and useful for learners was largely taken for granted. The latter is more commonly addressed in the fields of corpus linguistics, syllabus design and materials analysis, but it seemed that nobody had brought these things together, particularly in the context of ELT grammar. This seemed to make it ripe for an investigation.
Your book is both about the past and present of grammar teaching in ELT. What made you want to focus on the past?
There’s a well-known adage – perhaps a little trite – that says we can’t understand the present without knowing the past. In all kinds of professions and walks of life we come across ‘best practice’ – established ways of doing things that are accepted as being optimal in some way. We tend to be inducted into these ways of working when we enter into a profession, including language teaching, and there’s often not much space for people to question the assumptions underlying them. To understand ELT grammar now, we need to understand better where pedagogical accounts of English grammar come from. Were they ever planned out? Who came up with the familiar list of grammar points, such as relative clauses, tenses, reported speech and so on, which are ubiquitous in teaching materials and classrooms around the world? Who decided at which levels these areas of grammar are typically taught at? And while we’re at it, who decided on the level system generally used in ELT and other languages (ELT generally uses six levels, like the CEFR, but why six?). To address questions like this superficially is to do a disservice to the past, so the research reported on in the book includes an analysis of older coursebooks and grammars in order to track how accounts of English grammar evolved, and also interviews with some of the people who were involved in fixing the current consensus on grammar. I also investigated the views of ‘historical’ figures whose work was critical in the evolution of accounts of English grammar over the last several hundred years. While my intention in the book isn’t primarily to present a historical account, I hope to provide the reader a fuller understanding of the present by situating it in its historical context.
What do you hope people will take away from your book?
While there is both implicit and explicit criticism in the book of the grammar that is used in ELT, I hope that readers will also come away with a sense that the people who were involved in creating the familiar accounts of ELT grammar were highly capable and in many ways did a great job in creating rules and explanations that are understandable to learners and usable in the classroom. This is no mean feat and takes skill and experience. Equally, I hope that the book can contribute to reducing the ‘demonisation of the past’ in linguistics and language teaching, and the assumption that we simply ‘know better’ today. That said, there are all kinds of ways in which current pedagogical grammar accounts can be improved; I focus heavily on how data from learner corpora might be of use, but this is just one possible source of renewal. As most people realise, it’s not easy to effect change within the ELT profession because people are used to the status quo, and to the tried-and-tested approaches they’re familiar with; but I do hope we can start to focus a little more again in applied linguistics on pedagogical grammar and syllabus design. I think it’s clear that the explicit study of grammar in language teaching is – in one form or another – not going away, so we need to be sure that what we teach is appropriate, just as much as how we teach it.
For more information about this book please see our website.
If you found this interesting, you might also like Authenticity across Languages and Cultures edited by Leo Will, Wolfgang Stadler and Irma Eloff.
In this post Rod Bolitho and Richard Rossner, authors of our book Language Education in a Changing World, answer some questions on the issues within ELT today and how things have changed since the pandemic.
How did the two of you come to collaborate on this book?
We have worked together before and have shared ideas about language education. We felt that there were few recent and accessible books that explore the broader picture of how language education, including learning of the language of schooling, has developed in response to changes in society and due to ‘globalisation’. Working together enabled us to pool and synthesise our accumulated experience.
Your book was published right at the start of the pandemic, and obviously a lot has changed in language education as a result of Covid. What would you add to the book now?
One of us (Richard) was closely involved in a European Centre for Modern Languages (ECML) initiative on the impact of the Covid emergency on foreign language education. The results of the various surveys and consultations undertaken are described in a recent publication called Rethinking language education after the experience of Covid. In general, while the experience was traumatic for many learners and for some language teachers, language education professionals adapted quickly to the challenges of online language teaching and to using the various internet resources that are available. The publication contains ‘guidelines’ arising from the research which highlight the importance of greater flexibility and of developing a willingness to experiment and adapt methods and resources to circumstances, while at the same time giving attention to the individual and collective well-being of learners and teachers, especially (but not only) during periods of crisis, like the pandemic. We might well have wanted to bring some of these points to the fore if the book had been published later.
What fundamentals of language education haven’t changed over the past three years?
The general neglect of language issues in school curricula and especially in teacher education. Despite isolated initiatives, mainly in parts of Europe, there is still no widespread acceptance of the fact that every teacher is effectively a language teacher, or of the need for teacher education to take this fully into account. Teachers of any subject working online with their learners during the pandemic must have felt this even more keenly than they had during face-to-face teaching.
What do you think is the main issue ELT faces today?
An issue that ELT has faced for many years but has never really confronted is the status of English as (currently) the dominant foreign language, and the impact that this has on the status of other languages, particularly those that are under threat. The fact that, for a large majority of speakers of English in the world, it is not their first language, has implications for the ‘ownership’ of the language and what versions and varieties of the language should be considered acceptable. Moreover, the dominance of English has tended to lead to lack of collaboration and interaction between teachers of English and teachers of other languages, and perhaps less attention to, and regard for, other languages in the practice of ELT.
One of the main goals of the book was to influence positive change, from classroom practice to policy. Do you see any signs that this is happening?
There are some signs of positive change that we are aware of. These include reflections on what all teachers including language teachers had to do to cope with the constraints arising from Covid, and national and international initiatives to promote language sensitivity across the curriculum, which is the topic of our most recent book and is the focus of an ECML project called ‘Building Blocks for planning language-sensitive education’. But we can’t yet claim that Language Education in a Changing World has played a role in these developments.
What are the key messages that you hope teachers and teacher educators might take away from the book?
The main ones are that all stakeholders in education, including especially teachers and also decision-makers and parents, should understand the critical importance of the role of language and communication as the lifeblood of any educational process. This has implications for pre-service teacher education as well as for the continuing professional development of all teachers, and for the way it is organised and resourced.
What are you working on at the moment (separately or together)?
As mentioned, we have already collaborated intensively on a new book published in late 2022 called Language-Sensitive Teaching and Learning. This is a resource book for teachers of all subjects and for teacher educators containing well over 100 tasks of different kinds focusing on language, mainly in educational settings. These are accompanied by commentary and discussion of what we see as the key practical implications of language-sensitive teaching and learning. In addition, Rod is working on a book of ‘Case Studies in CPD’ with Amol Padwad in India. Meanwhile Richard continues as a member of a Council of Europe team working on resources for use by those providing language support to migrants.
Rod Bolitho and Richard Rossner
For more information about this book please see our website.
This month we published Language Teacher Wellbeing across the Career Span by Giulia Sulis, Sarah Mercer, Sonja Babic and Astrid Mairitsch. In this post the authors introduce the book’s themes and explain what inspired them to write it.
What is wellbeing? What characterises the wellbeing of language teachers across the different phases of their career? How can language teacher wellbeing be supported at these different stages of their career? These and many other questions are explored in our new book based on a large-scale funded research project, Language Teacher Wellbeing across the Career Span.
Teaching is one of the most stressful professions. For language teachers, there are potentially unique additional challenges, such as language anxiety, energy-intense methodologies, and the status of languages and language teaching. With the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic crisis, these challenges have been exacerbated. Language educators across the globe are facing increasing levels of stress, ultimately resulting in high rates of attrition and burnout. Our book was inspired by our wish to further understand not only the factors influencing teachers’ wellbeing, but also what can be done in practice to support language educators to thrive and teach to the best of their abilities.
One key premise of our book is that each phase of a language teacher’s career is characterised by distinctive challenges and resources which shape their wellbeing. Across their professional lives, teachers experience different issues that may threaten their wellbeing. For example, the challenges experienced by a novice teacher will differ from those of an experienced teacher who is approaching retirement. However, research tends to typically focus only on understanding the lives of pre-service and early career teachers. In this book, we attempt to paint a picture of the challenges and resources of language teachers at all phases of their career, from pre-service education to late-career.
If you are a language teacher, a teacher educator, or a researcher interested in language teachers’ multifaceted lives, we believe that this book may be for you!
For more information about this book please see our website.
If you found this interesting, you might also like Teachers of Multiple Languages by Eric K. Ku.
This month we published Teaching and Learning Third Languages by Francesca D’Angelo. In this post the author explains what inspired her to write the book and what readers can expect from it.
Driven by a true passion for modern foreign languages, as a learner, teacher and researcher, I gained experience in teaching from secondary school to PhD level. What prompted me to write this book was the desire to convey the advantages of multilingual education to teachers, educators and language learners from different points of view: cognitive, linguistic and pedagogical. The work highlights the potential benefits of different types and levels of bilingualism, considering the effects of contexts of instruction, amount of exposure and method of acquisition of each language involved, challenging the idealised monolingual approach of language teaching. Language teachers, educators, learners and researchers dealing with multilingual education will particularly appreciate:
1) The broader, interdisciplinary approach of investigation of the phenomenon of bilingualism with a specific focus on the peculiar profile of additional language learners, making Third Language Acquisition a different area of research from Second Language Acquisition. Starting with a theoretical, introductive insight into bilingualism research conducted in different contexts across time, it questions the most widespread prejudices towards bilingual education and bilingualism, including confusion, language impairment and cognitive deficit, discussing the most prominent studies which demonstrate the benefits of bilingualism from a teaching and learning perspective.
2) The different implicit and explicit routes of acquisition available to language learners with practical examples of multilingual practice selected from the latest and most influential projects implemented worldwide. A critical discussion of the way each method of acquisition affects the development of different types and degrees of Metalinguistic Awareness (MLA) is presented. More specifically, the academic debate regarding the non-unitary nature of this fundamental factor (i.e. cognitive or linguistic? Implicit or explicit?) and how it may facilitate and foster performance in additional languages.
3) The focus on the multilingual learner approach, rather than on the target language(s) with a native-like competence to achieve that has traditionally characterised multilingual education. Teachers and educators are presented as “connecting growers” with practical examples of innovative educational practices, in particular translanguaging, to fully exploit and give voice to all the multilingual and multicultural resources available in the classroom. The multilingual practices propounded and discussed aim at creating connections between languages, inviting teachers to resort to the whole multilingual background of the language learners. This could foster the process of teaching and learning third (or additional) languages, not only in terms of broader linguistic repertoire and linguistic skills already developed but also in terms of learning strategies, multicultural, and multisemiotic awareness.
For more information about this book please see our website.
If you found this interesting, you might also like Preparing Teachers to Work with Multilingual Learners edited by Meike Wernicke, Svenja Hammer, Antje Hansen and Tobias Schroedler.
We recently published Vocabulary Theory, Patterning and Teaching edited by Paweł Szudarski and Samuel Barclay. In this post the editors discuss their book’s contribution to the flourishing field of vocabulary studies.
Let’s step back in time. It is the 1940s and we are sitting in the back of an English language class. The teacher is standing at the front reading a dialogue aloud. After listening, we voice first one character and then the other before completing substitution, transformation, and chain drills. Forty-five minutes later we recite the dialogue perfectly and leave the classroom smiling.
Cut to thirty years later, the 1970s, and the teacher has embraced the communicative approach. We are interacting with our classmates, completing discussion and problem-solving activities. We are encouraged to focus on transacting meaning and communicating fluently, and after another, slightly noisier, forty-five minutes we stand up to leave.
These two scenarios represent markedly different views of language, learning, and learners and yet they are similar in one very important way: neither adopts a principled approach to the teaching and learning of vocabulary. In 2021, although many curricula may still lack a systematic process of vocabulary selection, instruction, and recycling, the picture looks, on the whole, lexically richer, at least when it comes to empirical findings and a growing interest in this area. Vocabulary plays an increasingly central role in language teaching, and research into lexical studies has flourished over the past few decades. The field then, is in a healthy state.
This situation has not come about by chance but rather is the result of the consistent endeavour of a handful of individuals. These researchers nurtured the foundations of the field, providing the roots upon which current research activity proudly stands, actively cultivating the field from an overlooked sapling into the position of prominence it holds today. One of these scholars is Professor Norbert Schmitt, in whose honour this edited volume is written. Anyone who knows Second Language Acquisition and Vocabulary Studies knows Norbert from his considerable research contributions over the last 30 years, and perhaps also the colourful Tigger t-shirts he wears to conferences. He has written about various aspects of the field – teaching and learning, formulaic language, assessment, theory – and, crucially, for a variety of audiences – from textbooks for students and introductory books for instructors, to research manuals and reports for those who are more research oriented. In doing so, he has helped to ignite and sustain research interest in vocabulary, while nurturing the next generation of scholars and ensuring that students of applied linguistics have a positive educational experience.
This volume is, however, much more than an extended thank-you letter to Norbert. It presents cutting-edge research from prominent scholars in the field. There are nine experimental chapters organised into three sections – theory and assessment, formulaic language, and teaching and learning. Each section also contains an opening chapter written by leading scholars in the field of Vocabulary Studies, where they offer their perspective on the reported findings, their place within the wider area of lexical and applied linguistic research, and also make suggestions for future studies. In this way, the volume acts as a microcosm of Norbert’s career; it contains thought-provoking and innovative designs and methodologies, but also seeks to foster future research activity. There is also a fascinating preface written by Michael McCarthy and a hilarious afterword penned by Zoltan Dornyei, both of whom were Norbert’s colleagues and collaborators during his career at the University of Nottingham. The volume represents, to continue the metaphor started above, that the vocabulary tree is strong and healthy. It has solid roots and is growing ever bigger, expanding in different directions, and becoming denser in certain key areas. Thankfully, the more it develops, the more ground it has the capacity to influence, the more nutrients its products feed into the educational ecosystem. The image on the front cover of this volume is this tree and we hope that the reported findings sufficiently contribute to the foliage. We may have stretched the metaphor a little too far now, so let us make one final point before wrapping up.
This volume would not have been possible without our gracious contributors. Specific thanks go to Ana Pellicer-Sanchez. Not only has she co-authored a chapter, but she also suggested we contact each other when first I (Paweł) and then I (Sam) called her to discuss an idea for an edited volume. What started as an innocent chat in a small café in London has now turned into an academic publication we are deeply proud of. It has been a great pleasure to have worked together on this volume for the past three years. It has not been all hops and barley, but our work as editors was made easier by the energy and positivity of all the collaborators. It is a sign of the esteem in which Norbert is held that each and every person we emailed about contributing to the volume replied enthusiastically. We hope that you are similarly enthusiastic about the volume and look forward to hearing your thoughts. Happy reading!
Paweł Szudarski and Sam Barclay
For more information about this book, please see our website.
If you found this interesting, you might also like Perspectives on the L2 Phrasicon by Sylviane Granger.
We recently published Language Teacher Noticing in Tasks by Daniel O. Jackson. The author previously wrote a post explaining the concept of ‘teacher noticing’ – in this follow-up post, he discusses why we notice.
Following up on my previous blog contribution on Language Teacher Noticing in Tasks, I wanted to share that book’s practical implications. In my view, one role of a language teacher is to consciously perform the art of noticing. This differs from noticing by learners and is grounded in core assumptions about language learning and teaching. As the book explains, teacher noticing involves attending to, interpreting, and making decisions about events while engaging with learners. Noticing is essential to teaching practice because it supports five major goals.
The first three pertain directly to instruction. Namely, noticing helps us to:
The final two goals link instruction to teacher development, where noticing is used to:
These reasons to notice are discussed in more detail in the book, which opens the door to an integrated account of noticing by teachers and learners by providing a theoretical framework and methodological options for future studies. The book also reports a task-based study of noticing by pre-service English teachers in Japan. More research is needed on when, what, and how language teachers notice, as we live through and learn from these challenging times.
You can read the author’s previous post here.
For more information about Language Teacher Noticing in Tasks please see our website.
Channel View Publications and Multilingual Matters 