CILTER Newsletter 1(13) is published!
Dear IELLI Staff and Students, and Friends of CILTER,
Welcome to a brand-new academic year! I hope you’ve all had a chance to recharge over the summer and are feeling ready for the opportunities and connections that the year ahead will bring. As always, I’m excited to see the innovative work that our community will generate in the months ahead.
Before diving into this issue’s highlights, a final reminder that the Edu-X Research Fund application closes on Friday, 12 September 2025. As shared before, the fund supports up to four innovative, practice-led projects (up to £1,000 each), with £2,000 ring-fenced for proposals led by professional services colleagues and postgraduate students. This is a fantastic opportunity to test new teaching tools, produce resources, or collaborate across teams. If you haven’t submitted your application yet, now’s the time.
This issue celebrates the incredible work happening across IELLI including Dr Blair Matthews and Mohamed Peer Sitheeque Mohamed’s contribution on generative AI and ethics, Dr Xuan Minh Ngo’s article on teacher assessment literacy, and Jenny Taylorson’s commentary on EAP teachers’ professional identity. It’s also wonderful to see Sheng Jin (Leo), one of our DProf students, presenting his work on teacher resilience in China at the International TESOL Union Conference 2025. This is a great example of our community’s global engagement. Closer to home, Dr Aylin Unaldi delivered an excellent presentation at the BAAL Testing, Evaluation and Assessment SIG conference in Reading, exploring student performance in academic reading across sentence, textual, and multi-text levels.
We’re also sharing several exciting opportunities. TESOLgraphics is recruiting an infographic designer. This is a fantastic role for MSc and DProf students who want to gain experience in research communication. Plus, the upcoming CILTER Educational Assessment Thematic Hub online event on 25 September promises to be insightful, featuring talks by David Coniam and Leda Lampropoulou on large-scale language assessment practices.
Finally, I’d like to celebrate a few of our community’s recent achievements: Ruimei Jiang has secured a fully funded PhD studentship at the University of Aberdeen, and Zainab Teraif’s innovative work on integrating AI into English foundation programmes has been accepted into Innovation in Language Learning and Teaching, a top-ranked Q1 journal.
I hope this issue inspires you. Here’s to a year filled with collaboration, discovery, and impact.
Best regards,
Sin-Wang
CILTER Director, IELLI Director of Research and Director of Impact and Innovation