Posts by people called Scott
Scott Alexander (Astral Codex Ten), Scott Thornbury,
Scott Aaronson and Scott Galloway
https://scottthornbury.wordpress.com/
Best posts:
“An enthusiasm for compartmentalization, inherited from grammars of classical languages, has given rise to the elaborate architecture of the so-called tense system – including such grammar McNuggets as the future-in-the-past, and the past perfect continuous, not to mention the conditionals, first, second and third – features of the language that have little or no linguistic, let alone psychological, reality. While attempts have been made to restore authenticity to grammar, such attempts have generally fallen on deaf ears. If some more recent coursebooks are anything to go by, grammar syllabuses are becoming less innovative and even more derivative”.
https://scottthornbury.wordpress.com/2010/09/18/g-is-for-grammar-mcnuggets/
“Teaching, in this paradigm, is less about navigating the container-ship of the class through the narrow canal of the coursebook/syllabus than about shepherding a motley flotilla of little boats, in all weathers, across the open sea, in whatever direction and at whatever speed they have elected to go.”
https://scottthornbury.wordpress.com/2012/05/13/p-is-for-postmodern-method/
https://scottthornbury.wordpress.com/2017/06/25/m-is-for-manifesto/
Scott adds some more- I particularly agree with investment.
https://scottthornbury.wordpress.com/2010/08/15/c-is-for-communicative/
https://scottthornbury.wordpress.com/2011/01/23/c-is-for-coursebook-writing/
and great quotes: “accuracy has to be judged in terms of its appropriacy in context.”
https://scottthornbury.wordpress.com/2015/05/31/a-is-for-accuracy/
https://scottthornbury.wordpress.com/2013/06/02/v-is-for-vocabulary-teaching/
https://scottthornbury.wordpress.com/2010/05/09/e-is-for-error/
https://scottthornbury.wordpress.com/2017/11/05/c-is-for-core-vocabulary/
Out of interest there are 595 examples of going to go in the online British National Corpus (courtesy Mark Davies’ Brigham Young University site at http://corpus.byu.edu/bnc/x.asp) of which the majority (339) are in the spoken language section of the corpus.
https://scottthornbury.wordpress.com/2010/01/10/c-is-for-corpus/
https://scottthornbury.wordpress.com/2009/12/12/a-is-for-articles-1/
https://scottthornbury.wordpress.com/2011/12/26/v-is-for-visualization/
https://scottthornbury.wordpress.com/2010/01/24/a-is-for-articles-2/
“From his bunker somewhere in Catalonia, Geoff Jordan lambasts IATEFL and all it stands for: “The IATEFL conference is about self-promotion, it’s held to justify IATEFL’s existence and to give the huge commercial concerns that run the ELT industry a chance to flog their shoddy goods.”
Whether you agree or not, this – like the other issues I have touched on – is clearly an issue of power: whose interests does IATEFL really serve? Does it kowtow to the publishers? What discourses does it privilege, e.g. those of professional development, or of social justice or of big business?
And, taking the wider view, is ELT still tainted with its colonial past? Does the centre still hold? Is it really all about ‘the English Man’? In short, how cognizant are we (to borrow Johnston’s phrase) “of the sociopolitical contexts in which ELT is conducted”? How is power distributed in these contexts? How could it be distributed more equitably?”
https://scottthornbury.wordpress.com/2015/04/26/p-is-for-power/
https://scottthornbury.wordpress.com/2011/07/03/q-is-for-queer/
https://scottthornbury.wordpress.com/2010/03/14/c-is-for-conditional-the-third/
see also the roaring in the chimney here
http://old.hltmag.co.uk/sep01/sart8.htm
and more Scotts to come shortly