Recently, I had a blast from the past when my former Iranian English teacher, Mitti, kindly sent me a few of my English writings from about 17 years ago. It was both eye-opening and quite hilarious reading a very young me trying to express myself in English. First of all, let me tell you about Mitti. She had this magical quality where she encouraged us to speak English in class but never gave us the side-eye if we threw in a Persian word here and there. Looking at the youthfu

Differentiation is key to meeting teaching and learning objectives at school. Some students need extra help to reach required achievement standards, others are exceeding expectations and need to be extended, and still others need a different way of thinking about achievement standards altogether. English-as-an–additional-language (EAL) students in Australia are generally labelled as EAL because they are considered to need some kind of additional language support. It can be di

Born and raised in Vietnam, I learned and later taught English as a foreign language. My monolingual background significantly shaped my perspective, and I was particularly influenced by two key experiences during my learning and teaching journey. The first pivotal experience was being selected to attend a provincial high school where students were trained to become leaders in the province. At the welcoming ceremony, the head teacher, a renowned Russian language instructor, ad

Indonesia has more than 700 languages, with Bahasa Indonesia (or simply Bahasa) being the official one. From the westernmost Sabang in...

Bilingualism is difficult to define. We often go with a feeling more than anything. That person is bilingual. I’d like to be bilingual,...

I was born and raised during a golden era of English language education in China. By the time I was in the third grade, English had become a compulsory subject in our curriculum. However, many children were exposed to English even before that, through extracurricular classes. I was one of them. At just five years old, my parents enrolled me in a weekend English training program.   The 2008 Beijing Olympics elevated the English language to unprecedented prominence in China. ‘E

Have you ever secretly thought that people invent a term so it sounds like something new and exciting, but it’s actually no different to an existing term? Terminological confusion happens a lot when ideas become popular and people embrace them in different ways.  But I’d like to argue for a term that has been accused of this: translanguaging . The term that already exists? Code-switching .   We have had the idea of code-switching - switching between ‘codes’ or languages - for

Navigating language use in the classroom can be challenging.

In this entry, I’m going to talk about the differences between translation and translanguaging and whether or not these two notions can...

When I was young, Japanese happened to me at school. It was external to me, geographically distant. I was here and Japanese was there. I...