ELTOC Chapter 09 October 2024

Matthew Blacker is an experienced educator with years of experience teaching primary school students in Vietnam and the UK. He has a background in psychology and experience teaching ESL in public schools, private schools, and language centres. In 2021, he was invited as a guest speaker to the International Conference on Innovation in Learning Instruction and Teacher Education in Hanoi to share his ideas on developing critical thinking and collaborative learning in Asian classrooms. He enjoys learning about innovative approaches to language instruction and reflecting on how we can strive to create meaningful communication between students. He prefers to take a hands-on approach to professional development, encouraging teachers to understand and reflect on pedagogical concepts but also providing them with a clear outline of how these can be applied to their teaching practice.

Esra Ezici is an English Language Teaching professional with a bachelor's degree from Hacettepe University. Her career, which began in 2000, includes diverse roles such as teacher, foreign languages coordinator, and teacher trainer. Esra has delivered training sessions globally, both online and face-to-face, on a range of ELT topics. Currently, she is a Senior Professional Development Consultant and teacher trainer for Turkey, North Africa, and Central Asia at Oxford University Press, and she also trains internationally for the Oxford Teachers' Academy.

Judit Kormos is a Professor of Second Language Acquisition at Lancaster University. She was a key partner in the award-winning DysTEFL and Comics for Inclusive Language Learning projects sponsored by the European Commission. She is the lead educator of the Dyslexia and Foreign Language Teaching massive open online learning course offered by FutureLearn. She is the co-author of the book Teaching Languages to Students with Specific Learning Differences with Anne Margaret Smith. She has published widely on the effect of dyslexia on learning additional languages and is the author of multiple research papers that investigate the role of cognitive factors in second language acquisition.

Nik Peachey is the Director of Pedagogy at PeacheyPublications, an independent digital publishing company that specialises in the design of digital learning materials. He has been involved in Education since 1990 and has more than 25 years experience of working specifically with online and blended learning environments. He has worked all over the world training teachers and developing innovative and creative products and is a two-time British Council Innovations award winner.

Professor Christopher Korten is an American academic with a passion for history, language, and education. He studied History at Oxford and Cambridge Universities before embarking on a career as a university professor. His passion for the English language and teaching has resulted in over 850,000 followers on Instagram (@professor_korten). His account is dedicated to exploring all aspects of the English language, offering valuable insights and resources for learners and educators alike. Professor Korten's unique blend of expertise and communication skills has made him an influential figure in academia and social media.

Eduardo Whitlam is a passionate teacher with over 15 years of experience working as an English teacher in different countries around the world including Japan, Hong Kong and Colombia. Throughout this time he has had the opportunity to develop his own teaching style that is focused on building students' confidence and helping them to implement learning strategies so that English can become part of their lives and a tool to extend their abilities to communicate for all necessities. He is now based in Sydney Australia where he continues to teach English and is also working as a High school Health and Physical Education teacher.

Carla Marschall brings a distinguished career as an educator and school leader and is currently serving in the role of Director at Dresden International School. Prior, she acted as Director of Teaching and Learning at UWC South East Asia, East Campus in Singapore. During her seven years at UWC South East Asia, she co-authored two books, Concept-Based Inquiry in Action (2018) and Worldwise Learning: A Teacher’s Guide to Shaping a Just, Sustainable Future (2021), which focus on concept-based learning and issues-based learning across the K-12 continuum. Carla has held other international school leadership roles in Switzerland, Hong Kong and Germany and served as a classroom teacher both in the United States and Germany. Fluent in English and German, Carla is a multilingual leader, who values and models the importance of language learning. Carla holds a Masters in Elementary Education from Teachers College, Columbia University and a Masters in Educational Leadership and Management from the Institute of Education, University of London.

Fiona Beddall has been writing ELT materials for 20 years. Her work includes new high-level primary course, Blue Dot, secondary courses Insight and Oxford Discover Futures, and more than thirty graded readers. Several of these have won or been shortlisted for ELTons and Language Learner Literature awards. Her recent courses incorporate lots of practical ways to develop students’ critical thinking and social and emotional skills, and encourage them to be independent, confident changemakers with a global outlook. She has taught in schools in Britain, France and Spain, and is currently involved in supporting the language needs of asylum seekers in her local town in Britain.

Gordon Stobart is Emeritus Professor of Education at University College London and an Honorary Research Fellow at Oxford University. Having worked as a secondary school teacher and an educational psychologist, he spent twenty years as a senior policy researcher, firstly as head of research at an examination board, then at government education agencies. He was a founder member of the Assessment Reform Group which has promoted classroom Assessment for Learning (AfL) internationally. He has written on both assessment (Testing Times: The uses and abuses of assessment, Routledge) and learning (The Expert Learner: Challenging the myth of ability, McGraw-Hill). He continues to write on how we learn and how we develop skills. He is a former editor of the international journal Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy and Practice.