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Is ‘English’ plural?
For decades, Global Englishes (GE) have sat in an awkward corner of ELT: widely acknowledged, quietly tolerated, yet often treated as second-class compared with “proper” British or American norms. Despite millions of competent users shaping English daily, classroom models have tended to privilege a narrow slice of the language. In fact, estimates suggest that roughly…
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Lighten Up, Teach Better
The study To explore SALs, the authors used reflective duoethnography -a collaborative method where two educators examine their own lived experiences through dialogue, written reflections & audio notes. Each acts as both researcher & participant, comparing perspectives to reveal deeper insights into classroom life. It’s a way of studying teaching from the inside, with cultural…
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Getting Fuzzy With It: How Uncertainty Shapes Our Language
Teachers handle plenty of unpredictability, but I’m going to go out on a limb here & claim that very few of us have had to clear the classroom due to a nuclear incident. If we ever did, how might it colour the language we use? A new Scientific Reports study by Abdulrahman Almandeel, Congjun Rao,…
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Messy Problems, Cleaner Learning
When planning a lesson, teachers constantly face a dilemma in terms of how it should be structured & what shape it should take. Should they go more of a deductive route, or try something that’s more of a guided discovery approach. Both are valid, but in reality they still put the teacher in control –…
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When humans first had something to say
Since my day-to-day involves thinking about & talking about language, the thought often crosses my mind as to when humans started to use it. To invent it, if you will. A peer‑reviewed research article by Miyagawa, DeSalle, Nóbrega, Nitschke, Okumura & Tattersall in Frontiers in Psychology offers one of the clearest lower boundaries yet: the…
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Snowblind: Seeing Language Patterns We’ve Missed for Years
We’ve all heard it at one time or another: “the Inuit have 100 words for snow”. It’s an old classic, but one worth revisiting because it’s easy to lose track of whether it’s been debunked or rebunked. A recent paper in PNAS (Khishigsuren, Kemp & colleagues, University of Melbourne) brings the debate back into focus…
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