In this post, we feature three publications that the BAAL LKALE members published over the last year (30th December 2022 to 30th December 2023) before saying goodbye to 2023!
The first publication is a PhD thesis titled ‘The Beliefs and Experiences of Pre-service and Novice Teachers of ELT in the UK: a longitudinal study’ written by a BAAL LKALE member, Jane Jenvey. This PhD thesis aimed to study the trajectories of people who have done CELTA (Certificate in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) courses for a period of two years. The study followed a group of pre-service and novice teachers who had done CELTA courses in the UK and found high levels of post-course attrition, with the majority not teaching at all. An important emerging issue was the lack of interest among participants in developing explicit knowledge about language and the study recommends materials that can be incorporated into the CELTA syllabus as it is, to develop an awareness of the importance of KAL (Knowledge about Language) for English language teachers, especially first language speakers of English. You can read this interesting project, by clicking this link.
The second publication is a book titled ‘The Linguistic Challenge of the Transition to Secondary School: A Corpus Study of Academic Language’, written by Alice Deignan, Duygu Candarli (a BAAL LKALE member) and Florence Oxley. The aim of this book was to provide a unique analysis and description of the linguistic challenges faced by school students as they move from primary to secondary school, a major transition. By drawing on a bespoke corpus of 2.5 million words of written materials and transcribed classroom recordings, this work reveals differences and similarities between the academic language that school children are exposed to at primary and secondary school, comparing these with the non-academic language that they encounter outside school. The authors offer some implications for policymakers and schools looking to support students at this critical point in their schooling. You can read this open-access book on this link.
Last but not least, a recent journal article titled ‘Science Teachers’ Perceptions of the Role of Language in Pedagogic Practices in Plurilinguistic EMI Settings in India’ written by Pooja Sancheti and Sally Zacharias is published in the Language Scholar journal. This paper aimed to explore the science educators’ beliefs about the role played by the multiple registers and languages used in their teaching environments when they teach subject-specific concepts. The authors conducted this study during the COVID-19 pandemic in India and the UK, utilising four three-hour activity- and reflection-oriented online professional development workshops with 20 science educators involved with the English medium education school systems. This study revealed that the science educators showed an awareness of the language challenges faced by their learners, especially at a word level and that they had some understanding of the communicative purposes of registers, which further developed during the workshops. You can read this collaborative work, by clicking this link.
Happy reading and Happy New Year!
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Linguistics and Knowledge about Language in Education 