TESOL REFLECTIONS

  Whenever my motivation for teaching is running low, or worse, when I feel I’m heading for burnout, my go-to YouTube video for some inspiration is Rita Pierson’s Every kid needs a champion . Even though her context is different from mine, I believe there are underlying principles of the teaching/learning dynamic that are universal.  Relationships Rita tells us that teaching and learning is about human connections. No matter how much thought we’ve put into our curriculum and courses, or how great our materials and tasks are, if we cannot build that all-important rapport with our students, it’s likely that not much learning will take place. To me, this relationship between the teacher and students is more than just about being liked, although that is a good base to establish. It’s also about building trust and showing empathy. This is especially important with those students who seem most resistant to us. Rita reminds us to seek first to understand rather than to be understood....

  All students at English-medium universities encounter a variety of challenges. However, non-native speakers of English, in particular, will be presented with a unique set of challenges largely due to a lack of linguistic competence and possible educational and cultural differences. In this post, I highlight just a few of these challenges and suggest ways in which lecturers might help students overcome them.  Key graduate attributes Many of these challenges might be directly linked to the key graduate attributes of scholarship as outlined by Alexander, Argent & Spencer, 2018 (Fig. 1). Each of these comes with its own set of conventions and demands that might be new and alien to students from a different educational and cultural background. For example, the concept of autonomy, which is complex and perhaps not always clearly defined, might give rise to conflicting ideas and even resistance in some students. That said, students do need to be exposed to carefully designed ch...

  Critical thinking is a key attribute of scholarship, and in order for students to be successful in higher education (HE), it is imperative that they understand and use it effectively (Alexander, Argent, & Spencer, 2018). Davies and Barnett concur, but also take a wider view stating that 'critical thinking is a necessary part of the formation of critical citizens’ (2015, p. 1). However, it is a concept or term that is not easily defined, or rather, not easily defined in a comprehensive and universally accepted way (Alexander et al., 2018; Hitchcock, 2019). Naturally, there have been numerous attempts over the years to define it as definitively as possible. In fact, Davies and Barnett remind us that in 1990 the American Philosophical Association brought together ‘an authoritative panel of forty-six noted experts on the subject to produce a definitive account of the concept.’ However, Davies and Barnett are of the opinion that the resulting definition of critical thinking produc...

  The CARS model In his seminal work on genre analysis published in 1990, John Swales introduced the revised version of his Create a Research Space (CARS) model. Adika (2014, p. 58) explains that this model  'describes the rhetorical moves that researchers utilize to claim research space in their disciplines in a highly competitive environment.' Specifically, the CARS model pertains to the introduction section of research articles (RA). Swales (1990) points out that introductions can be difficult to write. This is because RA authors have an array of options at their disposal for how they might approach the opening paragraphs.  The CARS model comprises 3 rhetorical moves, each with particular steps (See Table 1). Hyland (2006, p. 50) defines a rhetorical move as ‘a distinct communicative act designed to achieve a particular communicative function’. Put another way, a rhetorical move is a stretch of text anywhere from a phrase to a paragraph with a particular job (Rienecker...

  Lev Vygotsky In education, scaffolding as a term and notion was first introduced by Wood, Bruner, and Ross in 1976 (Deng, Chan, & Zhang, 2014). However, it is an approach and practice widely associated with the Russian psychologist, Lev Vygotsky (Gibbons, 2015; Hyland, 2006; Langford, 2005). Vygotsky’s theories about the psychology of learning are primarily concerned with how children learn and develop. He was a social progressivist, and as such, asserted that learning is social. This perspective on learning and development, 'broadly termed sociocultural,'  is a departure from 'earlier Western psychological theories'. In essence, sociocultural theory as it relates to human development, emphasises social interaction over the purely individualistic, taking into account an individual’s 'social, historical, and cultural experiences,' (Gibbons, 2015, p. 13). Pure social progressivism asserts that the child’s development is a self-guiding process. Vygotsky,...

 Introduction The term ideology, coined by the French philosopher Antoine Destutt de Tracy in 1796, could be said, according to Nana (2016, p. 168), to refer to: 'the very habits of mind, beliefs, assumptions, expectations, which govern the life of an individual and a group and which often are superimposed on the world in order to give it structure or meaning'. Given this description, as I see it, ideology might be viewed as a way of projecting the inner workings of the mind, whether consciously or unconsciously, to create external structure/s or realities, as well as the projection itself. In other words, ideology encompasses the thought, the action, and the outcome. Nana (2016) argues that the relationship between language and ideology is one that includes concepts related to the social and linguistic, and accompanying interests of a moral and political nature. One incarnation of language ideology is “the ‘one nation, one language’ model of language and identity that dev...