The ALL London Regional Branch depends on the commitment and time given by its committee members for its activities. Here are some of us at the end of the January 2023 event.
We are fortunate enough to have a wide range of members from different backgrounds with a variety of skills and expertise.
Many thanks to committee members who are providing pen portraits of themselves so that you can get to know them better. Here they are so far:
Liz Fotheringham (Secretary)
Liz is a former Head of Languages of a school in Hertfordshire with experience of
teaching French, German, EFL and also some Mandarin. She has been involved in various projects to
support the teaching and learning of languages in association with ALL, Links into Languages,
Network for Languages and the London schools’ Excellence Fund. She is the author of the BBC
Bitesize revision guides and workbooks for Edexcel and AQA GCSE French (9-1), of the teacher’s
guides to the Mission français course, and a contributor to Teachit Languages resources.
Sarah Hau (Treasurer)
Sarah is a Head of MFL, based in South-East London/Kent, with experience of teaching French, German and Spanish. She has worked in a range of schools across her career, in mixed and girls’ comprehensive and grammar schools in Wiltshire, Somerset and London. Originally training in Southampton and a graduate in Maths and French, she has also taught Maths to GCSE, quite possibly the right attributes to bring to ALL London as Treasurer! As a “Saturday morning keenie”, she enjoys trying out different ideas in the classroom, as well as learning other languages, such as Japanese.
Mary Heath
A keen linguist, Mary teaches French, German and Latin and is Head of Modern Languages at a secondary school in London.
Nick Mair (Vice Chair)
Nick Mair is a French and Spanish teacher in both an Academy and an independent school. He is the former HoD, chair of ISMLA and Vice Chair of ALL-London. He is particularly interested in CLIL projects. He is involved in the NML SCITT, a school governor and a trustee of the Chartered Institute of Linguists. He is beyond hope of any improvement for his tones in Chinese.
Helen Myers (Chair) MBE, Officier des palmes académiques
As well as being Chair of ALL London branch, Helen is an Invited Trustee of ALL’s Management Board. She has 40 years’ experience of teaching and managing in comprehensive schools, and throughout that time has always taken a great interest in curriculum and assessment developments at secondary level, sharing detailed objective analyses and resources via her blog and the variety of social media platforms to which she contributes. She has been a keen advocate of the use of technology to make language teaching effective and efficient, an aspect which came to the fore for everyone during the pandemic, prompting her to increase the number of webinars held on the ALL London Zoom platform.
As an ALL volunteer she is keen to support others in any way she can, and willing to visit ALL group member schools for free if this helps.
Antonio Marco da Silva
Dr Antonio da Silva is currently a lecturer and the Director of Admissions, Outreach, and Recruitment for Language and Linguistics at the University of Essex. He has a PGCE in Modern Languages (Spanish and French), an MRes in Modern Languages, and a PhD in Hispanic Studies. He has taught at all school levels in Brazil and at secondary and higher education in England. He has completed the Upskilling Level 3 Mandarin Course for school teachers in the UK offered by UCL, the Institute of Education, and the Confucius Institute for Schools. He is passionate about learning languages (he has learned a bit of 13 languages so far) and making language learning accessible to everyone. In 2015, he won the School of Humanities Teaching Award at the Students’ Teaching Awards for Teaching Excellence at the University of Kent.
Antonio focuses on two areas of research: cinema and linguistics. In cinema, he is interested in representations of race, social class, gender, and sexuality, which are the subjects dealt with in his first book: “The femme fatale in Brazilian Cinema” (2014), and the two following edited books: “Space and Subjectivity in Contemporary Brazilian cinema” (2017) and “Human rights, social movements and activism in contemporary Latin America cinema” (2018). In linguistics, he focuses on the uses of new technologies in language teaching, particularly Portuguese, interlanguage influence, heritage languages, registers, genres, students’ and teachers’ beliefs about language learning and teaching, web-based teaching, the integration of cinema, memes, reels, and music in language instruction, and the development of teaching materials for foreign languages. Antonio has published numerous high-impact papers and articles in academic journals in different countries. Currently, he is managing a project “Developing employability skills through language learning: a pilot project with adult learners in the Colchester area” at the University of Essex, funded by the British Academy, and a few studies based on his project “The Effect of ChatGPT on Student Writing in Multiple Languages: A Systemic Functional Linguistics Analysis”, funded through the University of Essex’s Executive Dean Funding.