Claudia Mónica Ferradas
About
About
Who is she?
Based in her home town Buenos Aires, Argentina, Claudia Ferradas is a multifaceted practitioner with a long and varied involvement in ELT. She is a prolific writer, poet, singer, podcaster, teacher, teacher educator and ELT consultant and researcher with extensive international experience.
Professional life
Claudia Ferradas graduated as a teacher of English and holds an MA in Education and Professional Development from the University of East Anglia. She also holds a PhD in English Studies from the University of Nottingham.
Together with a friend and colleague, she opened a language school in the suburbs of Buenos Aires, which they ran for more than 20 years. Claudia has had a lasting impact in the field of teacher training, working in parallel in Argentina and the UK through her work with the British Council, OUP and NILE, where she has been a trainer for more than 20 years on professional development courses and on the MA in Professional Development for Language Education. She is an Affiliate Trainer with NILE and a member of NILE’s Advisory Board, and she frequently works as a consultant for Oxford University Press, the British Council and Trinity College London.
Claudia was a teacher of language and literature for many years at the Instituto de Enseñanza Superior en Lenguas Vivas “Juan Ramón Fernández”, Buenos Aires, one of the most prestigious teaching training college in Argentina, where she retired as Academic Secretary. At present, she teaches on the MA programme in foreign languages, National University of Luján. In the UK, Claudia has been a Visiting Fellow and research supervisor at the School of Languages, Leeds Metropolitan University. She co-chaired the Oxford Conference on the Teaching of Literature (2002-2006) and also worked as Project Manager for the Penguin Active Readers Teacher Support Programme. She is a member of the editorial board of the CLELE journal (Children’s Literature in English Language Education). Claudia has also taught on the MA programme in TEFL at the Universidad de Alcalá de Henares, Spain.
Interests
Her main areas of interest are literature and the arts in ELT, intercultural communication and the relationship between language and identity. The aspect of HLT she is most interested in is interculturalism (or transculturalism) and she finds the shaping and sharing of multiple identities a fascinating challenge in humanism.
Apart from writing poetry in Spanish and English, she likes to sing tango and ballads in shows where she also reads her own poetry. She has published three poetry collections and has contributed to several anthologies in Argentina, the UK, Puerto Rico and Spain. (source)
Social Profiles
Claudia Mónica Ferradas
Recommended books
Literature with a Small ‘l’.
John McRae.
A watershed in my career. It provided a way to articulate my interest in including literature in language teaching without contradicting the aims of the communicative approach.
Hypertext: the Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology.
George P. Landow.
A fascinating new way of looking at language and literature though the introduction of what was then a completely new technology. Now outdated, but still valid in its critical consideration of the interface between literature and technology.
Context and Culture in Language Teaching.
Claire Kramsch.
The book which made me rethink my practice and integrate cultural studies into my teaching and research. I still quote from it again and again, especially focusing on the idea that the central aim of language education is to address "the problem of wanting to express one world view through the language normally used to express another society’s world views".
Teaching and Assessing Intercultural Communicative Competence.
Michael Byram.
A thorough look into the implications of an intercultural approach, offering a theoretical framework which is still highly influential.
An Intercultural Approach to English Language Teaching.
John Corbett.
Classroom activities and projects to put an intercultural approach into practice.
Place in HLT
I first encountered Claudia when she was a student on the Masters course in Professional Development for Language Education run by NILE with the University of East Anglia. In a particularly strong group, she stood out as a practitioner whose work was already distinguished by an avid intellectual curiosity and a profound commitment to professional learning and personal development. The Masters course was modular, so we only coincided for part of the programme, but in the years that followed, we became close colleagues, finding common ground in our shared beliefs about the value of literature and its role in promoting intercultural understanding. We continued to collaborate, on successive trips to Argentina, where she organised talks and workshops for me and introduced me to tango (watching, not dancing!); then in the early years of the British Council’s Brit Lit project, working with groups of teacher-writers from APPI, the Portuguese teacher association; teaching together on a Masters course at the University of Alcalá de Henares; and most memorably, for five years as co-chairs of the British Council Oxford Conference on the Teaching of Literature. Claudia’s interest in the intercultural experience, whether at the macro-level of immigrant communities or the small cultures of the classroom, her concern with the representation of cultural identity through literary voices, and her own personal exploration of voice through poetry and song, have combined to make it a particular pleasure to work alongside her for the past twenty-five years. Claudia’s work is always characterised by her engagement with texts and what they tell us about human experience, and with ways to inspire learners, whether students or teachers, to become part of an intercultural dialogue.
