ARLE continues the IAIMTE Mission
In 1996 Gert Rijlaarsdam (NL) and Ken Watson (Australia) founded the IAIMTE, the International Association for the Improvement of Mother Tongue Education – our predecessor. Just as ARLE now, the aims of IAIMTE were to care for the quality of teaching and learning of education languages, invest in international exchange and cooperation as contributions to the improvement of the work developed at a local or regional level. Particularly via the bi-annual conferences since 1997, IAIMTE worked towards the consolidation of sound scientific foundations associated with the teaching and learning of languages, literature and literacies. It set up the international peer reviewed journal L1 Educational Studies in Language and Literature in 2000 (online since 2006). Continuing the work of IAIMTE, we founded the ARLE in November 2014. The notion of Mother Tongue was transferred into the notion of L1: put language(s) first.
In Memoriam: Dr Ken Watson (1931-2021)
Renowned English educator and co-founder of ARLE, Dr Ken Watson, died on the 13th of March this year, aged 90. Ken had been an English teacher from 1952 to 1970 in high schools in New South Wales (NSW) and the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) in Australia, as well as in the UK. From 1971 until his retirement in 1990, Ken taught in the Diploma of Education program at Sydney University, as co-ordinator of English Curriculum from 1972 and Senior Lecturer from 1980. It was here that he gained an outstanding reputation as a teacher educator and as a teacher himself in university classrooms. (Please click here to continue reading.)