Category: Research Journal

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BAAL 2014 Annual Conference, Warwick

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This is a quick post, composed between parallel sessions, about the BAAL 2014 conference which I am currently attending. Unlike many of the attendees I am no good at Live Tweeting since I am already multitasking in my own life so much that if I tried I would lose focus on what’s actually happening. However, I wanted to take the opportunity to post something as the conference is taking place, mainly regarding my own presentation which I delivered yesterday (4th September) entitled Authenticity in a Global Context: Learning, Working and Communicating with L2 teachers of English. I have uploaded the slides from the presentation, as well as the audio below for anyone who missed the session or (very unlikely) for anyone who was so entertained that they simply must listen to it again!

 

[below is the audio file]

When I return to Japan and get back to work I will be posting a full review of both the Nottingham 2014 International Conference on Motivational Dynamics and the BAAL 2014 conference. Until then please enjoy the rest of the conference, whether you are here in person or digitally auditing and come back soon for more updates.

 

 

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Research

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This site, as any regular readers will have noticed, has been a little low on fresh updates for a while. I think I did well to get an interview with Phil Benson all about autonomy up there, but the updates and posts are in no way as regular as they used to be. This is for several reasons: starting a new job in Japan has lead me down a different and more content-orientated (CLIL) path. I now am sub-coordinator for the CLIL-Japan initiative, and I maintain the blog at www.cliljapan.org. The new direction in my work has lead to a less technology focused line of inquiry for me, although I still use technology and try to keep abreast with new developments, but this has caused an identity crisis for my consultancy work and blog. Also, I’ve become a father and of course that has kept me busy. Another big thing is that I have started a PhD in Applied Linguistics at The University of Warwick under Dr. Ema Ushioda. My inquiry is an examination of authenticity and motivation from an international perspective – a ridiculously big and broad topic that is going to take a lot of battening down. So, perhaps this goes some way to explaining the lack of recent online activity here at engnet-education. I have therefore decided to create a new category of posts, and use the site as an online research journal. Some of the work I do as part of my research journal will be made public if I think it is useful – but of course I won’t be able to make everything public sadly as it might have an effect on the data collection process.