TEFLology Podcast TEFL Interviews 24: Victoria Murphy on Bilingual Education

(TEFLology Podcast)

So there's a new episode of TEFLology online.  Listen to it here.

Or hit play below

Listen to our latest episode with Victoria Murphy by hitting the play button. https://t.co/Dt8FN6QBVg via @acast

— TEFLology Podcast (@TEFLology) November 10, 2016

I'm a week behind in my review again.  (If you've been reading this blog, then you know I've been distracted by several other things this week.)

As with my last TEFLology review, I'm going to try to deliberately keep this review short and sweet.  There's a lot of stuff in this episode, and I have a lot of thoughts, stories, anecdotes and experiences connected with some of the stuff they talk about.   But I'm not going to try to write everything down in my head today.  I'll just make some brief general comments.

* I've often said before that although the regular episodes of TEFLology are of mixed quality, the interview episodes are really good.
This episode as well was really good.  Really interesting to listen to.  Victoria Murphy had a lot of interesting things to say, and the TEFLologists asked a lot of great questions.  Anyone who listens to this episode will find it interesting.

* Typically TEFLology podcast episodes are only interesting to those of us in the TEFL profession.  But I think this episode is of general interest.  After all, most of us were at one time students of some foreign language.  Many parents have questions about Bilingual acquisition.  And furthermore, Bilingual Education is a political issue in many places (something that gets touched on in the podcast).
So, dare I say it, this episode will be of interest to anyone and everyone.  Go ahead and hit play and give it a listen.

* Actually, speaking of the politics of Bilingual Education: In the lead-up to the election, Krashen recently on his blog had been writing a lot about supporting ballot measures in California for Bilingual education.  Much of what Krashen wrote about the benefits of bilingual education supports what Victoria Murphy said.
(I've been following Krashen on Twitter and on his blog.  This is indirectly a result of TEFLology.  From TEFLology I learned there was a TEFL online community, and from that online community I found Krashen's blog and twitter feed.)

* As part of my Masters program, I took one course in Bilingualism.  Much of what Victoria Murphy says in this interview agrees with what I learned on that course.  And much of it was new to me.  (And in the interest of keeping this review short and sweet, I'll just leave it at that and  move on.)

* When talking about Brexit, Victoria Murphy had the following to say:

It's [Brexit] has made it [the state of Bilingual Education in the UK] worse in the sense that there's been very sadly many instances of what can only really be described as racist abuse and attacks against people of different ethnic backgrounds.  It [Brexit] seems to have given a certain group of society a carte blanche to express their racist and xenophobic views.

Unfortunately this same thing is happening now in the US.