The language advisor’s role : identifying and responding to needs

Tertiary institutions increasingly offer language advisory sessions for second language students and staff. Advisors help students to identify language and learning needs, they recommend resources and strategies, and they provide feedback and encouragement. Especially in the first few sessions, identifying and prioritising needs is arguably among the most important goals, but there are few guidelines for advisors on how to elicit information from students or how to respond to learners’ self-reported needs. In fact, little is known about the processes through which advisors and students come to an agreed set of needs and solutions. This article reports a two-stage professional development project between an adviser and two other researchers. At the first stage the adviser recorded three initial sessions with one student. This was followed by a transcription and analysis of the sessions and discussion with the other two researchers. One of the main outcomes was that the advisor felt she had to be more directive. The second stage involved a session with a different student. Here the adviser’s aim was to be more specific and guiding, while encouraging the student to initiate topics and ideas. The findings from the two stages are analysed and compared

Innovation in language support : the provision of technology in self-access

Self-access centres are sometimes portrayed as being at the forefront of pedagogical innovation. They are also said to be technology-rich language learning environments. In practice, however, the application of technology in a self-access environment has proven to be a challenge. This article focuses on 10 self-access centres that were found to be the most intensive users of technology out of a total of 45 centres investigated worldwide. The article describes the range of technologies used by these centres and the types of administrative procedures and student learning supported. It also compares these centres with the other 35 in the study to identify how they differ in the way they make use of technology

Imagining Northern Norway: Visual configurations of the North in the art of Kaare Espolin Johnson and Bjarne Holst.

The formative processes of collective identity and belonging inspired Benedict Anderson to write his ground-breaking Imagined Communities (1983). His emphasis on imagination and sodality in these processes also resonates in contemporary artistic presentations of life in northern Norway. A rereading of Anderson’s thesis in relation to the arts in northern Norway, in particular the visual arts, may offer some new insights, both into the blind spots of Anderson’s analyses, and into the ways in which people of the North have recently imagined themselves. This article is the first to relate the art of Bjarne Holst (1944–1993) and Kaare Espolin Johnson (1907–1994) to Anderson’s theories of imagined communities. These reflections are also among the very first to focus in depth on Holst’s art, and to conduct a critical analysis of these artists’ work. The two artists complement and contrast each other in subject matter and in their idiosyncratic stylistics of scraping to light from soot (Espolin) and colourful anthropomorph-icing