Teacher educator & author
Identifying such origins is, arguably, important, because they reveal early understandings of the implications and practicability of this big idea in the classroom, shedding light onto the “significant paradigm shift” (Thornbury, 2016, p. 224) that was about to take place and defining what CLT became (both in theory and practice) and its subsequent longevity.
Jason Anderson and Jaber Kamali The above reflections come from the writings of Michael Connelly and Jean Clandinin, probably the first two researchers who attempted to understand teachers from the perspective of narrative. In their work, Connelly and Clandinin document the profound importance of stories not just in researchers’ understandings of teachers, but also in Continue reading Narratives…
I very much enjoyed Neil McMillan’s witty and creative plenary on the last day of the IATEFL Edinburgh Conference (McMillan, 2025), in which he lamented the lack of interest in methodology in recent IATEFL plenaries and made a convincing case for task-based language teaching (hereafter TBLT). I shared his shock that a key icon in Continue reading Methodological monocultures or ecosystems? A few…
Test-teach-test is one of a number of lesson planning frameworks that are taught widely on short certification courses for English language teaching (ELT), such as the Cambridge CELTA and the Trinity CertTESOL. There are numerous overviews of it on internet blogs (e.g., British Council, n.d.), YouTube videos (e.g., Bolen, 2022) and in guides for such Continue reading On the Origins, History and…
I sometimes think that educational researchers, particularly applied linguists, would benefit greatly from taking occasional time out from their work to engage in what we might call ‘empathetic observation’. It’s rather a simple idea: An academic shadows a teacher at their place of work for a few days to learn as much as possible from Continue reading Empathetic observation
We see ‘languages for learning’ as better able to describe the complex learning affordances of multilingual classrooms because it combines an emphasis on multilingual inclusivity (‘languages’ rather than ‘medium’) with a focus on ‘learning’ (as in learning-centred education) rather than ‘instruction’. Perhaps most importantly, the ‘for’ in LFL enables us to frame languages as facilitative…
...what is actually being invoked is a difference between what we might call ‘academic theory’ and ‘practitioner theory’, and that is a very different type of gap...
If you were to pay a visit to Fithi1 Junior School on a Saturday or Sunday, you could be mistaken for presuming it was a regular day’s schooling. Children are in classes, some working silently, others engaged in discussion activities, and someone is stood at the board, guiding the learning… It’s only when you peek Continue reading Where the teachers are all students
It’s an often unchallenged mantra of many ELT writers, methodologists and commentators that ‘reading aloud’ is an ineffective or misguided practice in English language classrooms (e.g., Wilson, 2019; also see this recent Twitter discussion). This mantra is frequently propagated by trainers on generic initial certification courses designed for teachers of adults, such as the Cambridge Continue…
My recent contribution to the ELT Journal Key Concepts feature (Anderson, 2020a) provided an opportunity to investigate the concept of reflection. Since the 1980s, reflection has become one of the most popular buzzwords in practitioner development, including teacher education, despite Dewey’s (1910/1933) much earlier discussion of its importance, which, while frequently cited retrospectively,…