Who: PhD (Institute of Education, London); MA TEFL; 28 years at ESADE Barcelona; co-ran an MA TESOL; author of Theory Construction in SLA (2004), with Long of English Language Teaching: Now and How It Could Be (2022), and with Gray of “We need to talk about coursebooks” (ELTJ 2020). Teaches a TBLT course (SLB Cooperative).
What: “A critique of ELT teacher trainers”: long polemics against coursebook-driven PPP and named figures (Ur, Harmer, Dellar, Anderson, Holliday, Kiczkowiak), arguing from instructed-SLA research.
Read critically: Often personal and aggressive, which commenters criticise. His strongest value is the SLA research he cites. The best counter-voices are in his comment threads (Thornbury, Gregg). He defends the NS/NNS distinction (citing Long 2007; Birdsong 1992) against critics of native-speakerism.
Processed notes
- Check trainers’ SLA claims against primary sources
- Interlanguage - teaching changes the rate, not the route
- Long’s TBLT as the alternative to coursebook PPP
- Research mediators vs craft knowledge - the Penny Ur debate
- Schmidt’s Noticing Hypothesis - strong and weak versions
- Teacher trainers should teach the research on interlanguage
- Translanguaging as theory - a critique of Li Wei
Next to process
- Deeper pass done. Next: SLA Part 6: Pienemann’s Processability Theory and the other “How we learn an L2” parts.