Big Questions in ELT

For two years now I’ve been regularly blogging about ELT-related issues that have caught my attention. The topics have been loosely organized around the format of an encyclopedic dictionary I’d published previously, called An A-Z of ELT. Like many things online, the blog has started to become a little unwieldy, especially for new visitors, so I figured it was time to condense some of the issues and some of the questions into a friendlier format, taking a handful of the original entries as my starting point, re-working them a little to take into account the conversations that evolved online, and presenting them in the form of Big Questions. Each Big Question, therefore, has been generated from one of the original blog posts (and I’ve thrown in a couple of new ones for good measure) and each entry is rounded off by a number of subsidiary questions – the offspring, if you like, of the Big Questions. These questions are designed as an aid to reflection (for the individual listener), or, in a training context, as a way of framing a discussion or workshop. In a sense, they are a means of re-activating, and continuing, the online conversations that the original blog posts triggered.

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