The first stage of combinatorial speech is better described as variable than uniform. Talk of variants obscures two different aspects of language (knowledge and use) and two different aspects of language development -- acquisition of the grammar (competence) and deployment of the grammar in speaking and listening (performance). Null subjects and…

At a time of great dynamism among publishers of scientific publications, with the inevitability of Open Access and the ease of publishing online at low cost, it is possible to find publications with different levels of scientific respectability. In this context, the improvement of the quality of scholarly publications emerges as a critical element…

This essay explores the broader implications for education of the COVID-19 pandemic. It asks: What can COVID teach us? The case is made that COVID is inviting us to consider a relational universe, and what a pedagogy of presence would look like. It takes a futures perspective and is therefore, unabashedly speculative. It draws on the author's many…

The following interview was conducted with Catherine Elder in spring of 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic. Cathie has had a varied career in language testing, including work at universities in Australia and New Zealand and at the Language Testing Resource Center in Melbourne. In this interview, Cathie shares some highlights of her somewhat…

This paper argues that the political can respond to that which exceeds it without reducing it to the same, and that public education is one of the most important places where this can happen. I present a rationale for public education to assist that which exceeds the political: singularity, solitude and difference. What I maintain is that the…

In this commentary, we describe the English language placement adaptations we were required to make due to the world-wide COVID-19 pandemic. It includes a brief description of our placement test battery which was adapted to address our institution's move to a remote teaching/learning mode. A discussion of the major challenges we experienced, their…

Within the English language teaching (ELT) profession, Donald Freeman is well known for his research in teacher education, teacher knowledge, and teacher learning. He was an invited guest for the XI Seminar of Applied Linguistics at the University of Guanajuato in May 2020. This interview of Professor Freeman examines how he started out in the…

This commentary is a response to those of Hall (2016) and Winebrenner (2016), which in turn were responses to the article the authors wrote on modality preferences and learning styles (Lodge, Hansen, & Cottrell, 2016). There are several key points the authors wish to address in this reply. Most importantly, and aligned with the aims and focus…

In this article, author Ernest Boyer comes to the conclusion that scholarship of engagement has meaning at two levels: (1) connecting the university's rich resources to the most pressing social, civic, and ethical problems, making it the staging ground for action; and (2) creating a climate in which academic and civic cultures communicate more…

School suspension is the most widely used disciplinary practice in U.S. schools. It is a programmatic regularity, as Seymour would say. He would also say "programmatic regularities have implicit or explicit outcomes." Like Seymour, the author is concerned about what he describes as the "frequent discrepancy between regularities and…

In this paper, we offer personal accounts along the Educator Track from Instructor to Associate Professor as members of an English Language Centre at a leading research-intensive university in Asia. The Educator Track is a career pathway growing in significance and status and now boasts a full professorial grade. Our narratives provide an overview…

With the publication of Bold Beginnings, Reception teachers and educationists felt their principles and practices were under attack. The main focus of the debate that ensued targeted the formality of learning, and especially teaching writing sitting at desks. The comments about the mathematics practices of the good schools incorporating Year 1…

In envisioning literacy at a crossroads, we ask what may be the potential of a different, intense, possible love, a love we may scarcely know and may yet discern--what we think of as a cosmic love, an explosive love. Such stance-taking in literacy research provokes new possibilities for research, teaching, and learning. We share brief narrative…

In the spring of 2017, the "Harvard Educational Review" ("HER") published the first part of a symposium on the intersection of incarceration and education. That collection of articles offers scholarly perspectives on the purpose, challenges, and potential of education in carceral settings, as well as the origins and…

This paper is a response to the previous articles on potentialism. It draws attention to the particular nature of the stance taken by potentialism. Although the project of potentialism is not a simple matter of establishing another discipline in education, it wavers at the junction between the prescriptive ("what education should be…