Are you tall enough to learn English? Have you ever reflected on the relationship between height and language learning? Well, I haven’t, and I’ve been in language teaching and learning…
Have you ever felt a wall of textbooks around you, obstructing your vision and thinking, rather than widening your horizon? That’s how one of my research participants, let’s call him…
My 88-year-old grandma, my mamanjoon, is the most wonderful nana anyone could have and I am very close to her. She has played a significant role in my development. (more…)
Earlier this term I intercepted a note my 7-year-old had written to her teacher: “Ger Ger Ger; Don’t be so rude.” She was objecting to a reading comprehension exercise about…
The latest issue of Cross-Cultural Studies (published by the Center for Cross Cultural Studies, Kyung Hee University, Korea) includes an article about the dark side of TESOL authored by Ingrid Piller,…
The monolingual myth This critique has been an important one but it runs into a problem when we consider the idea of monolingualism itself. At the same time that this…
Persian version of my recent blog post about the (over-)consumption of English language learning. Translated by زهره قرایی (Zohreh Gharaei) حدود ده سال پیش یک دانشجوی خارجی که از کره ی…
About ten years ago an overseas student from South Korea who was about to fail a unit I was teaching left a suicide note under my office door. She described…
If you could choose to learn a foreign language, which one would it be? And why? Such choices are usually constrained by what is on offer. However, someone must choose…
For the last so many years I have been feeling sorry for Tourism Australia. Since their Paul Hogan (our one and only Crocodile Dundee) mega hit tourism campaign in the…
Muslims around the world were celebrating the holy month of Ramadan recently and the greeting de jour here in Abu Dhabi was Ramadan Kareem!, which literally translates as “Ramadan is generous.” Ramadan…
You know you live in a truly multilingual and multicultural place when your local church does not only advertise their times of worship but also the languages in which the…