New Director to take up his position in January

Professor Anne Edwards is standing down as Director of the Department at the end of her term of office at the end of December and Professor Ernesto Macaro is taking over as Director.

Anne will continue as Director of Research in the Department.

Ernesto Macaro has a wide experience of teaching languages in secondary schools in Britain beginning his career in London and ending up as a head of faculty in Warwickshire where in the late 1980s he was asked by the local authority to organise teacher professional development workshops. This activity, together with a strong interest in research findings, was one of the motivating factors which led to his decision to go into teacher education in the higher education sector rather than to apply for a senior management role in schools. Senior management responsibility has now evidently caught up with him as he takes on the role of Director of the Department of Education.

Ernesto obtained a PhD from the University of Reading before joining the Department at Oxford in 1999. Since then he has taught on the PGCE teacher education programme and introduced Applied Linguistics to Oxford for the first time through the MSc in Applied Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition and through a growing number of research students. He has published 5 books some of which have become standard reading on second language education courses and also published research articles in most of the top second language acquisition journals. His research focuses on second language learning strategies and on the interaction between teachers and learners in second language classrooms, particularly the benefits or otherwise of teacher codeswitching.

Read more about Ernesto Macaro on his profile page.