Simon Borg

I have just returned from Islamabad where since last May I have been (face to face and on-line) facilitating teacher research with a group of teachers of English working in college and universities from around Pakistan. A report of the closing ceremony was published today here. While this report rightly emphasizes the importance of the project (which was supported by the Pakistan Higher Education Commission (HEC) and the British Council Pakistan) its emphasis on academic research obscures the most innovative feature of this initiative: that the teachers were doing research in their own contexts not for academic purposes but in order to develop a deeper understanding of their teaching and their students. Continue reading →

Getting access to relevant literature is often a challenge for teachers. Here are some free sources I have found useful.

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Those of you who attend the IATEFL conference will know that one of the events there is a debate in which two well-known ELT figures takes sides on a controversial issue. A few years back the theme was teachers and research, and although I was not there I remember being told that some of the arguments made against the value of research for teachers were unfortunately reinforcing unhelpful clichés about the fact that one can be a perfectly competent teacher without any interest in research; I seem to recall too that another argument presented against the relevance of research for teachers was that very often those teachers who are interested in research are actually not very good in the classroom. Continue reading →