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CMMR - What does a TESOL Teacher Teach Anyway?

When:
Venue: Online

No booking required

In this talk, Dr Fiona English and Dr Tim Marr dig into what it means to be an English language teacher in 2020, how we perceive our work, how we perceive ourselves in relation to our work and how we are perceived by others, in our institutions and beyond. In the process we will be reflecting on how different factors might shape our teacherly identity and affect how we think of ourselves as professionals (or otherwise), such as whether we are native or non-native English speakers, and how we came to be English language teachers in the first place.

 

Dr Fiona English is Honorary Senior Research Associate in the Centre for Applied Linguistics at the UCL Institute of Education. She has been working in the field of language, communication and linguistics for many years in both research and teaching and has published books, chapters and articles reflecting her broad experience in the field. Fiona’s expertise encompasses a number of interrelated specialisms: TESOL and language education, forensic linguistics and language testing and last but not least, academic literacies, genre and multimodality which was the subject of her PhD with Gunther Kress. She is currently involved in an ongoing series of workshops and seminars exploring new ways of writing at university based around her concept of ‘regenring’ and in 2018 co-edited two special editions of the Journal of Writing in Creative Practice which showcase work in that area. She has authored three books: the monograph on the affordances of genres, Student Writing and Genre: Reconfiguring academic knowledge, and two books with Tim Marr which focus on promoting linguistics as a core field of social and educational relevance: Why Do Linguistics? Reflective linguistics and the study of language and their most recent book Rethinking TESOL in Diverse Settings: The language and the teacher in a time of change, all published by Bloomsbury.

Dr Tim Marr has been teaching, consulting and researching in languages and applied linguistics for more than 30 years. He has spent substantial periods living and working in Peru, France, Thailand and Colombia, along with shorter periods in many other countries, including Cuba, China, Portugal, Vietnam, Uzbekistan and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Tim was founder and then for 14 years director of the MA TESOL programme at London Metropolitan University, where he worked closely with Fiona English. Since 2014 he has been a visiting professor in the department of languages at Universidad Icesi in Cali, Colombia, teaching linguistics to MA and BEd students and developing a linguistically-focused programme of professional development for teachers in bilingual schools. He works regularly as a consultant teacher trainer at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University in Suzhou, China, where he is also external examiner for Spanish programmes. His current focus is on the applications of the study of language to ELT, to language education, and to education more broadly.

Together, Tim and Fiona are the authors of Why Do Linguistics? (Bloomsbury, 2015) and Rethinking TESOL in Diverse Global Settings (Bloomsbury, 2019), which was shortlisted for the BAAL Book Prize 2020.

 

Please join this talk online using this Collaborate link on 23 October at 18:00. 

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