We are happy to report that the NNEST of the Month blog has two
new members: Geeta Aneja and Madhukar, K. C. Geeta is a third-year PhD
candidate in educational linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania.
Madhukar is an English instructor for English the Access
Microscholarship Program, a U.S. Department of State/U.S. Embassy
program implemented in partnership with Nepal English Language Teachers’
Association (NELTA). You can get to know Geeta and Madhukar better by
reading interviews of them in the May, 2014 (Geeta) and June, 2014
(Madhukar) blogs at http://nnest.blog.com/
We are also at present updating the face of the NNEST of the
Month blog website and revamping the visuals. We welcome volunteers to
help us with this project.
The work of this blog is a group effort. Each month one of us
is responsible for creating and posting an interview. But we welcome
suggestions on who to interview, and we would be happy for any readers
to send us questions for interviewees. And, of course, we invite all
readers to send comments after they have read the interviews.
If you are new to the NNEST Interest Section of TESOL, you
might not know about the purpose and the history of the NNEST of the
Month blog. The purpose of this blog is to provide another way for
people interested in NNEST, World English, and English as an
international language (EIL) issues to read about these issues as
discussed by professors and advanced graduate students who are doing
research and teaching classes related to these issues, or administrators
who are sensitive to NNEST applicants of positions for teaching
English. Guessing that many of our readers are young NNESTs or nonnative
MA TESOL students, we ask questions which encourage the interviewees to
explain how they dealt with problems of confidence and identity when
they were younger and establishing themselves as teachers or professors.
Reading our blog interviews is also a way for young scholars and
teachers of all ages to learn about the latest research related to
NNEST, World English, and EIL issues, so we ask interviewees questions
to elicit information about their recent research and to provide
references to the latest research. However, we try not to make our
interviews too academically heavy, so we try to keep a balance between
questions about interviewees’ research and those about their everyday
lives.
The NNEST of the Month blog is 9 years old. This June, we
posted our 100th interview! Amir’s interview of Enric Llurda was the
very first interview, posted on 25 August 2005. Chia-Ying took over the
role of interviewer in May 2006, and she posted interviews for the next
year. Then Ana Wu took over the duties of the blog, and she transformed
our blog into the state-of-the-art form you see today. Not only did Ana
begin to interview such leaders in the field of linguistics and applied
linguistics as Noam Chomsky, Henry Widdowson, Claire Kramsch, Robert
Phillipson, Tove Skuttnab-Kangas, George Braine, and Suresh Canagarajah,
but Ana also started to ask very insightful questions based on the
interviewees’ published articles and books.
For 4 years, from April 2007 to March 2011, Ana did all the
work of the blog including searching for interviewees, reading the
published work of these interviewees, writing insightful and perceptive
questions, editing and proofreading the interviews, and finally posting
them. She did this each month for 4 years without missing a single
month! That’s 47 straight months without a break! After a perusal of
these interviews, you can see that their quality is indeed very
high.
Our procedure for choosing new interviewers is rather formal.
People who want to volunteer are asked to submit a sample of their
writing, such as a published article or a paper written for a class.
Then we have a group “interview” using Skype with the applicants.
The next edition of the NNEST Newsletter
will feature articles by the interviewers of the NNEST of the Month
blog. We hope you will be interested in learning more about our blog
then.
Terry Doyle was an ESL instructor at City College of
San Francisco for over four decades. After retiring to Oregon in 2013,
he remains interested in NNEST and EIL issues and hopes to contribute
more to these fields. He has been an NNEST of the Month blog team member
since 2008. |