Hugh Nicoll's Blog

Presenting in a forum with Joe Tomei, Ken Ikeda, and John Herbert at PanSIG13 on Sunday, 19 May. We’ll be discussing the pleasures and puzzles of advising students enrolled in senior seminars who write their graduation theses in English. For anyone interested, I’ve uploaded my handout for downloading.

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The end of the term provokes reflection. What have I done well with my classes? Where did I go wrong? In what ways do I need to change my approach to the teaching of writing, design of assignments, construction of more useful learning environments for my students? Toward those ends, I began to take a […]

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My American Studies seminar students finished their graduation thesis presentations yesterday. I am very proud of what they achieved. Their topics included Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Toni Morrison – Sula and Beloved, Ellison’s Invisible Man and Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Fitzgerald’s […]

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Reading Jerome McGann on Clark Coolidge : wandering Copenhagen, journeying to Manchester via Frankfurt… The twinned experiences of reading and thinking about poetry and poetics within the multilingual flow of heard languages in travel has got me thinking about language, language use, and language learning and teaching in new ways. It also has me wondering […]

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Pennycooks’ “Critical moments in a TESOL praxicum” is fascinating on several levels: 1. It takes one episode in the life of a teacher trainer, and seeks within the whole of that experience, including the train journey from Sydney to an outlying Asian majority suburb, as its primary subject. 2. The essay is framed by the […]

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