Dear diary - or whoever it may concern,
Today, when I opened the calendar and saw my name in the “posts for the community” column, I felt a bit down. I can’t say I’ve lost motivation to write posts, but with all the restrictions-writing in English on VK, and the elephant-in-the-room issues with Telegram-it’s becoming increasingly difficult to sit, think, and write.
So today, instead of our usual educational content, I’ll simply share a few things happening in my life.
First, I’m about to dive into a completely new area-psychology. I’ve been working on my PhD thesis for quite a while, and I’ve noticed how my interests have gradually shifted from exams to something else: cognitive linguistics. I’m still working on the assessment of productive skills, but the scope is slowly moving toward the cognitive dimension of it.
Again and again, I’ve returned to the idea that language is an integral part of human cognition, focusing on mental processes. It is not autonomous, but rather rooted in embodied experience and general cognitive functions. To understand this better, I’ve had to read extensively in psychology. I started with the coursebooks we used back at university, then enrolled in a few Coursera courses, where I mostly explored conceptual metaphor theory.
All of this has led me to a somewhat unpleasant realisation: however much I think I know about general cognitive functioning, it’s still not enough to draw meaningful conclusions. So, beginning in May, I’ll be putting on an apprentice’s robes once again. This isn’t a fancy MA program (though I wish I had the resources for that), but a retraining program that will take 17 months to complete. To say I’m excited would be an understatement.
There are also a few other things in the works, mostly projects coming up in the near future. Right now, we’re https://c2pavlovich.com/webinars/punctuation: we’ve had two sessions so far, with two more to go (if you’d like to join, follow the link). Once that’s finished, I’ll be hosting a few webinars on the challenges of assessing written texts in higher-level international exams (B2–C1). This will serve as an introduction to two courses I’ll be involved in this June.
Starting on June 10, the CPD training program “ https://c2pavlovich.com/webinars/grade-like-a-pro-ielts-writing-part2-assessment” will focus on how to mark essays in IELTS. The emphasis will be on practical assessment rather than theory. We’ll work with authentic scripts, apply band descriptors, compare scores, and discuss examiner decisions in detail. There will be three webinars in total.
At the end of June, we’ll launch a 42-hour CPD course, “ https://c2pavlovich.com/training/assessment.” This is a comprehensive course on assessing productive skills in international exams, featuring 10 live, practice-focused sessions and more than 20 hours of guided independent work in the form of assessment and feedback assignments. If you’re interested, feel free to follow the https://c2pavlovich.com/training/assessment.
Well, that’s about it. This post feels like killing two birds with one stone: not only did I share a bit about my life, but I also announced the launch of new courses at AEE.
What an influencer I am. Cheers!
