Unveiling quality language education insights: LEA Newsletter Mar 2023 Edition

Greetings on the Language Educators Assemble LEA Newsletter for Mar 2023!

I hope this post finds you doing well and thriving in your language-teaching journey. It’s already March, and I can hardly believe how time flies!

I have many exciting plans in store for the LEA website, as outlined on the resources page. However, my full-time job has been particularly busy this past month, and I haven’t been able to devote as much time to developing new resources. Nevertheless, I have launched an initiative to post thought-provoking and inspiring quotes related to language education on LEA’s social media pages. You can find these quotes on our official pages on LinkedIN, Facebook, Twitter, and Quora.

If you haven’t already, I encourage you to follow at least one of our social media pages to get the newest information on our latest updates and engage in meaningful conversations with other language educators. Nevertheless, I will also consolidate the quotes into downloadable resources and publish them on the LEA website – so that you and other language educators can download these for use anytime when required.

In the spirit of professional growth and development, I’m thrilled to share three featured articles with you this month that I believe will challenge your thinking and expand your knowledge on different approaches to language education.

First up, we have “7 Key Points on the (perhaps Unexpected) Importance of Literature in Language Learning”. As language educators these days, we may often focus on emulating authentic language tasks in communicative contexts but overlook the value of literature in language learning. In this article, I revisited the definition of literature and deliberated on the differences between the narrow and broad unpacking of “literature”, with the hope that our language educators can embrace the more contemporary rendition of the concept. This opens up tons of possibilities that can expand the horizons of language for our learners. Do read the article to have a better understanding of the seven reasons why literature can be such a powerful enabler.

Next up, we have “18 Awesome Tips from 3 Action Areas to Boost Your Productivity in Lesson Planning”. Lesson planning can be overwhelming and time-consuming, but it doesn’t have to be. At different phases of our careers, we developed different habits of lesson planning that can be counter-productive at times. In this article, I share 18 practical tips from three broad areas – Reframing Mindsets, Adopting Effective Practices, and Leveraging Tools and Networks – to help you boost your productivity and create effective lesson plans. Tip 4, 11, and 18 may surprise you!

Finally, we have “9 Cringeworthy issues of a controversial and loathsome concept in applied linguistics and language education: the Native Speaker”. As language educators, the term “native speaker” can be rather ubiquitous – we encounter them in research, we talk about them in some of our professional work and we may even have to deal with many requests pertaining to them. It seems that the concept is crystal clear and unambiguous. Or is it so? This article tackles this controversial and loathsome concept by revisiting its definition and a comprehensive discussion of nine thought-provoking issues that come with it. At the end of the article, I also share some other alternative concepts proposed by scholars. These may be helpful to you, no matter which side of the camp you are in.

Beyond that, I will also like to share one of the short musings which I have published. That is more of a response to a webinar I have watched and thought it to be extremely useful for fellow language educators. The topic is just the hottest one in town these days: ChatGPT. In this webinar, Scott Thornbury facilitated professional sharings by two language educators on how they have used the tool to supercharge their lesson planning and materials curation. Do not miss out on this, alongside some useful resources shared within the article.

As always, I strive to provide valuable resources and articles for language educators, and I hope these new articles will inspire and inform you. You will also find some of the content ideas I have in the pipeline. However, they are not cast in stone. If you do have any burning ideas that you hope to be explored earlier, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me.

Thank you for your continued support and readership. Please share this newsletter with fellow language educators so that we can all grow together professionally. Till our next newsletter!

Warm Regards,

Chin Yew KIEU

Founder, Language Educators Assemble.