Speaker
Description
Drawing on the metaphor of ‘Head, hands and heart’ we can view language teaching (and learning) as involving thinking, doing, and feeling. While the first two of these processes are well embedded in ELT, less attention has been paid to the third – feeling. When our field has attended to emotions in ELT, it has focused on a narrow range of emotions, and notably learner anxiety. But we are seeing an ‘emotional/affective turn’ in applied linguistics (White 2018) reflected in with growing interesting in learner engagement, positive psychology, well-being, mindfulness, flow, and in understanding the full range of emotions in play in the classroom. Allied with this is increased awareness of teacher emotions and teacher burnout, an issue that was greatly heightened during the Covid pandemic.
In this talk, we will discuss our emotional labour and explore practical ways to engage more actively with the emotional life of the classroom and attend to our emotional work as language teachers, with the aim of building rather than diminishing our emotional capital.
Biography
Jonathan Newton has worked in language teaching and language teacher education for more than thirty years in both New Zealand and China, where he began his teaching career. From 2002 to 2016, he was Programme Director for the BEd (TESOL) twinning programme at Victoria University of Wellington, a role that involved working closely with Malaysian student teachers and Malaysian teacher training institutions. He is currently Programme Director for the Master of TESOL and Master of Applied Linguistics programmes. In his career in language teacher education, he has worked alongside teachers from many countries to better understand classroom language teaching and learning, especially in relation to task-based language teaching (TBLT), teaching listening and speaking, teaching vocabulary, and teaching for intercultural capabilities. He has published widely in the field, including over 80 articles and chapters and five books: Using tasks in language teaching (2021), Teaching ESL/EFL Listening and Speaking (2020), Workplace Talk in Action: An ESOL Resource (2010), Teaching English to Second Language Learners in Academic Contexts (2018), and How to teach speaking: A Guide for English Language Teachers (2021). Jonathan is book review editor for the journal Language Teaching for Young Learners (LTYL). He is particularly interested in reviews of classroom language learning textbooks as well as of academic books.
| Online Profile | https://people.wgtn.ac.nz/jonathan.newton |
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