What’s it like to teach English in Montréal?: Part 1 (by Lauren Godfrey-Smith)

Eighteen months ago, I gave up teaching English full-time at a cégep to start my doctorate at McGill. Since then, I’ve been involved in the teacher education programs at McGill and have had the chance to work with undergraduate and graduate students preparing to become language teachers in Montréal and beyond. Recently, in a class with my 4^th year B.Ed. (TESOL) students, we had a conversation about the political, cultural, and institutional factors that play a role in our teaching. Listening to these student teachers, brightly poised to enter the job market as English language teachers, I wondered: what’s it like to teach English in Montréal? The short answer is: it’s complicated. The long answer is… long. So, I’m going to explore this question over the course of my next few blog posts. In this instalment, I grapple with our nomenclature.

Field Notes: Language (mis)communication (by Michaela Salmon)

A few weeks ago, Casey wrote about her transition into the field and beginning research in Hong Kong. Closer to home, in Montreal, I have also begun this somewhat frightening but nonetheless exhilarating phase of my research: data collection.

Montréal interculturel (by Dr. Mela Sarkar)

It’s another New Year, incredibly and inexorably, which for those of us in academia means another new term with all its teaching-related and/or other scholarly tasks. We may be, and probably are, teaching undergraduates or second language students. We are also almost certainly working on research projects of some kind and thinking about how to tell people about them, through our writing or our presenting at conferences. All that presents certain funding challenges and we are dealing with them as best we may.