I am astounded by the implications that the coronavirus is bringing not just to our profession but to society in general. Of course, I am only qualified to speak about our profession, but I do feel that for every bad thing that happens in the world, 99 good things will also happen. They will just arrive slower.
In that regard, I am working on a rather lengthy article (requested by Teacher’s Discovery) on the future of language teaching. So I am going to take a break for a few weeks from posting here and suggest that the reader read from the wealth of information going back 15 years here.
I’ll keep posting the next installment of the Invisibles book here, of course, because the Invisibles is going to play its part in the new pedagogy, but I think that it would be wise – given that there are almost 9,000 posts here going back 15 years with almost 70,000 comments – that the reader use the search bar or the archives to read any article that catches their eye here with the thought of mastering anything in their CI teaching wheelhouse that they want.
There is just too much gold to be mined, and now is the time to get out the pickaxe and start digging. I will post the article on how IMHO all this is going to change. It’s not going to change overnight. It might take 50 years and not arrive until our careers are over. I mentioned something I learned from Greg earlier this week about the term “blended” language instruction (basically using the internet a lot more in language instruction) and that is the subject of my inquiry.
Change is going to happen. The old days of sitting in a classroom, in the long term, are over. No more being able to control kids and force them to learn. We’re going to actually have to know what we’re doing now. It’ll all be in the article. It’s kind of blowing my mind, so I have to write it out now.