Globalisation and MA TESOL programs in the UK

This article reports the results of a mixed-methods approach to investigating the association between globalisation and MATESOL in UK universities. Qualitative and quantitative data collected from academic staff through eight emails, four interviews and 41 questionnaires indicate that the globalised context of higher education have affected these programmes in a number of ways including an increasing interest in recruiting more international students and a growing awareness about the need for curriculum and content modifications. The analysis of the data suggests that although change has been an inherent characteristic of these MAs over the past decade, it has been implemented gradually and conservatively, often relying on a dialectic relationship between academic staff and universities’ policies. The results imply that factors other than globalisation have also been at work. Many of the participants contend that globalisation has not lowered the quality of these MAs or standards of good practice

Towards an Epistemology of Second Language Learning in the Wild

This chapter argues that a new epistemology for the field of SLA, rooted in sociology rather than in psychology, is taking form with radical consequences for the organization of second language practices, including learning and teaching. Central elements in this new epistemology are the following elements to be discussed in the chapter: 1.Learning is bound to participation in the life world and therefore to the personal history of each learner.2.Spoken language is the primordial mode of mundane social interaction.3.Classrooms need to feed on the everyday practices of the students and to center on support students to establish life world relations.4.In the social interactions in which language learners engage, trouble in the talk will often trigger repair practices through which new language material is offered by the co-participants. The chapter outlines the argument and methodology that lie behind this new epistemology, drawing on Ethnomethodology (EM) and Conversation Analysis (CA), thereby reformulating second language learning as an embodied, sociological project. Finally, the chapter discusses the consequences of this sociological perspective on learning for conceptualizing second language teaching in the form of the development of resources for creating social infrastructures for learning.</p