Thirty Years Later: How GURT 1983 reframed ELT teacher education and what we’ve learned in the process

Abstract

This talk weaves together two stories. The first has its origins in the 1983 Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics (known as GURT). It is the story of how thinking about ELT teachers and their learning has changed over the last 30 years. The story starts from a GURT 1983 paper by Jack C. Richards and Nobuyuki Hino. This paper, while not groundbreaking at the time, seeded several key issues that I argue have become the central drivers in teacher education in ELT. These include how we understand professional learning in ELT, what defines ‘usefulness’, and who defines it. My talk will trace how my own thinking developed in relation to these issues, and a bit about the role SIT played in the process. The intent is to draw together these two threads to examine how thinking about ELT and teacher education has shifted over the last 30 years, and where – in my estimation – we now stand.