My name is Heather. I am a native Brit, and I have been an English as a Foreign Language teacher since 1996.
I started out volunteering as a teaching assistant in Moscow. Having discovered to my complete surprise I really liked teaching, I got qualified in EFL instruction, moved to Russia full time and never looked back. Except that time I taught History to teenagers.
Since then I have worked in both Russia and the UK, in private language schools and the state sector, as a teacher, an academic manager and a teacher trainer.
One of my claims to fame is that I have run over 100 CELTA or CELTA-analogue courses, offline and online.
Currently I am a Director of Studies for Teacher Training, running CELTAs, CELTA-analogues; Delta preparation for modules 1 and 2; specialised short courses in areas such as online teaching, teaching pronunciation, teaching speaking and writing and so on and so forth; and also a longer course on advanced methodology looking ahead to Delta, but interesting in its own right.
I am particularly proud of the course I designed and also run on teacher training skills, covering putting together seminars and training sessions, assisted lesson planning, the obervation process, giving feedback and fostering long term development.
I also present at conferences and other events. Hopefully this list of topics serves to show that I am, basically, interested in everything when it comes to teaching English as a foreign language:
- Towards effective error correction
- How to develop speaking and not just practice it
- Connecting real life speaking and exam tasks
- Athentic texts, authentic contexts, authentic tasks
- Bottom up listening skills
- Mediating the English language classroom
- From pedagogical grammar to real life
- Working with mixed abilities
- Interaction patterns, monitoring and feedback for the online environment
- Fostering digital literacy
- Harnessing the power of AI for the EFL classroom
- Using Telegram (or WhatsApp) for communicative homework practice
- Rocking the EFL classtoom
- Using classical music to teach English
- Learner autonomy and teenagers
- Becoming a reflective practitioner
- Professional development and action research
- The misunderstood passive
- Noun phrases in academic English
- How to criticise politely in English
- Selling academic English
- Academic blogging as a genre
- Language lessons from online English
This blog isn’t really about that though. It’s my love letter to discourse analysis, social media and online communication.
What discourse analysis is can be quite hard to define. Whole books have been written on the topic, but let’s have a stab, shall we?
Discourse analysis is the study of language at text level, with text being defined much more widely than neatly complete written articles in newspapers or whole novels. It’s a fairly interdisciplinary sort of field involving everyone from linguists, the language teaching profession, sociologists, anthropologists, to computer scientists trying to programme AI, and that’s not even an exhaustive list.
To me, it’s interesting because it’s where sentences or words stop and communication begins. It’s about the choice of phrasing. What intonation does to the message. It’s about the aspects of language which cannot be described by a grammar reference book. And it’s about the nature of how we cope with trying to construct utterances in real time, and what happens when we can wield words with more consideration.
And it’s about why it all goes wrong and we have cut all ties with Auntie Vera because of the way she used ‘well’ on WhatsApp.
I will mostly be writing about whatever I have last been reading on the topic, possibly illustrated with stuff people have said on social media. I love online communication. I happen to think that because it is an interesting blend of spoken and written language, it has turned us all into discourse analysts. Moves that people might have got away with in ephemeral speaking get clocked much more easily by casual onlookers on the Internet. Plus, of course, some of the gloves are off in a medium which transcends the need to get along with your neighbour for the foreseeable future.
I wanted to call the blog WEAPONISING DISCOURSE ANALYSIS ON SOCIAL MEDIA, in fact.
But I couldn’t figure out how to fit that neatly into a URL. Or come up with a version of the name that would not get me an immediate reputation on Twitter X Bluesky.
So Those Sharp Words it is. Thanks to my friend who is much better at snappy titles than I am. Wish I could employ her to help with conference talk titles. Altgoiugh I am quite proud that the bottom up listening skills one is subtitled ‘It’s Chewsday, innit?’. And the one about pedagogical grammar is also called ‘The honourable profession of lying to students’.
I am highly unlikely to have an original thought on this topic. I am not going to be doing formal discourse analysis myself. But I hope there are other people out there who find this as interesting as I do, and I am looking forward to connecting with them, and everyone else.
PS Since I started the blog, AI has put in an appearance. It’s just possible that this may also become a bit of an obsession too.