Dr Valentina Gosetti
During Friday’s 19th Century Studies Symposium, School of Arts French lecturer Dr Valentina Gosetti launched “Aloysius Bertrand’s Gaspard de la Nuit”, published as part of Routledge’s “Legenda” series.
The work proposes a reassessment of Bertrand’s prose poem—the inspiration for a Ravel piano work of the same name—and of the young poet himself. Most of the commentary on Bertrand’s 1842 work contrasts his dark Paris against the monumental reconstruction of the city by Georges-Eugene Haussmann that began a decade later.
Dr Gosetti, who believes that “there is no such thing as a minor author”, resets Bertrand in his context, where she finds him engaged in creating a mythology around the old city.
“He describes an ‘old Paris’ that maybe didn’t really exist, but is a Paris that is a repository of dark emotions. It challenges the notion that rationality is the only way of interpreting reality.”
More: www.routledge.com
Dr Gosetti’s website on poetry and translation: valentinagosetti.wordpress.com
A/Prof. Elizabeth Ellis
On Monday, Associate Professor Elizabeth Ellis of the School of Behavioural, Cognitive and Social Sciences launched “The Plurilingual TESOL Teacher”, published by linguistics specialist De Gruyter Mouton.
Why, Dr Ellis asks, are most TESOL (Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages) themselves only trained in English? And what changes when the teacher is plurilingual?
“Learners are in the process of becoming plurilingual, and this book argues that they are best served by a teacher who has experience of plurilingualism,” she says.
On the other hand, “Those teachers who identify as monolingual almost invariably have some language learning experience, but it was low-level, short-lived and unsuccessful.”
As well as Dr Ellis’s extensive work in the area, the book draws on three studies involving 115 TESOL from eight countries, including Australia.
She writes that plurilingual experiences are largely ignored in the teaching of English, but exposure to other languages strongly inform individual beliefs about language learning and teaching that underpin good practice.