With the shadow of Covid-19 still hanging over us, people are already starting to assess its effects on our profession. In our main feature, Keith Copley reports on the results of a survey he undertook on the impact of the Covid lockdown on teachers around the world – many of whose jobs were somewhat precarious even before the crisis began. On a hopeful note, he found that recent problems have done little to dent the overall positive view that teachers have of ELT.

Nick Baguley investigated how teachers were achieving a return to the classroom. He interviewed two teachers in very different contexts to find out what measures they were taking to make their return to school successful.

Fari Greenaway has advice for academic managers on how best to avoid being overwhelmed by the amount of work they have on their ‘to do’ lists – which are undoubtedly longer and more complicated, as a consequence of recent troubles.

One of the effects of online teaching has surely been that students (or at least the most diligent of them) have had to take more responsibility for their learning and do a lot more self-study. This is reflected in several articles in this issue, which look at ways of encouraging greater autonomy amongst our students. Lara Statham finds that getting her learners to fill in a wheel with the things they want to work on, together with an assessment of the standard they have already achieved in these areas, is a good motivator for those who might otherwise not do any work outside the classroom.

Riccardo Chiappini has ten tips for ways to get your students to take more responsibility for their own learning, while James Heal finds that getting his students to create and bring their own materials goes some way towards fostering greater independence and enhanced engagement.

One way in which students can be persuaded to do their own linguistic research is to introduce them to corpora and the corpora tools that will enable them to mine these valuable resources for lexical gold. This treasure comes in the form of examples of how words are used in sentences, and the combinations in which they commonly occur. Sharon Hartle focuses on two digital interfaces and explains how to use them to find lexical information.

With very best wishes for the coming months.

Helena Gomm

Editor

Email: helena.gomm@pavpub.com

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