Language confidence (by Melissa J. Enns)

Dear followers,
This week I had the privilige of being invited to do a guest post for the Belonging, Identity, Language, Diversity (BILD) Research Group in Montreal. I would love for you to take a look! 🙂

 

Belonging, Identity, Language, Diversity Research Group (BILD)

BILD is very happy to welcome Melissa J. Enns as our latest guest blogger. Melissa is a graduate student in McGill’s Master of Arts in Second Language Education program. Prior to entering the program, she taught ESL at an academic prep school in Saskatchewan. Her thesis research will center on bridging the gap between research and practice. She authors a language education blog, Ramblings of a Linguaphile. With an undergraduate degree in linguistics and Spanish, she is fascinated by all aspects of language, language acquisition, and language teaching.

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In her discussion of translanguaging in Kolkata, Dr. Mela Sarkar beautifully said, “If one is prepared to be linguistically adventurous, I don’t see why there would be any limit to the number of places where one can feel local.”

Interestingly, that is something I have recently been thinking about a good deal. Upon arriving in Montreal last August, my linguistic self-perceptions…

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Reblog: Inspiring teachers to be lifelong learners – 10 ideas to make it happen!

This post by NovaNews beautifully links many of ideas I’ve been writing about in some very practical ways. What can we as language teachers do to ensure our continual professional growth?

NovaNews

I recently read an impassioned article by Geoff Eggins “Teacher Learners: Towards Realistic and Sustainable ICT Professional Development in Schools” in the journal Education Technology Solutions (Issue 41: April/May 2011).   Unfortunately the article doesn’t appear online.  One can only hope that this and many of the other interesting articles appearing in this publication, will eventually become available to a broader audience.

At the outset, Eggins poses a number of rhetorical questions:

Why [do] many schools ignore the lifelong learning goal for their teaching staff’s professional development?  Has it been decided that teachers will not be in the profession long enough to warrant teaching them how to survive their future?  Have we made the assumption that teachers have already learnt how to learn?

The thrust of his argument is that teachers need to be shown how to learn so that they can not only stay abreast of technological advances in…

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