Roger Charles Nunn

ESBB is all about sharing alternative and stimulating voices for me. We can easily get bored after years in academic life (46 years of non-stop teaching and researching in my case). ESBB is there to challenge routine and to stimulate us into creativity. Each member has a story to tell which is different and which can inspire others to create.  To mention just two ESBB members, my former colleague Sivakumar Sivasubramaniam helped me understand that voice and agency go far beyond systemic grammar, holistic as this approach to language may be. He presents these as educational and human values and he lives by them without compromise inside and outside the classroom. I don’t think I can match our co-member John Unger’s gift for the expression of a lived philosophy of academia – and of our authorship of our lives, as he puts it on his profile page. John’s life is rather like a novel to me, and we can all draw energy and inspiration from it and try to express ourselves academically with a more natural voice – there is no writing that is stranger than academic writing. John Foncha, Sivakumar Sivasubramaniam, John Adamson and I  collaborated on a book project that started with John Foncha’s doctoral research – Investigating the Role of Language in the Identity Construction of Scholars Coming to Terms with Intercultural  Communicative Competence.. We believe this collaboration across 3 continents on this particular theme which is close to our hearts reflects the essence of what ESBB is about.

 Academic Experience

I have recently retired (Summer 2022) from my final position as Head of English at the American University of Sharjah. Previously I worked at the Petroleum Institute (now Khalifa University) in Abu Dhabi till 2017, at Kochi University in Japan till 2006, at Qatar University, till 1995. Earlier I worked in secondary education in Qatar, Ethiopia, German, England and France. A global academic nomad now back in Yorkshire after 46 years as a teacher and researcher.  I think I have been incredibly lucky in my career, as it has allowed me to travel all over the world, especially in Asia, including  academic visits to India, the Philippines, Taiwan, Oman, Turkey, Thailand and China.

Speaking in Pune

I still have contacts with academics all over the world and have acted as an MA and PhD supervisor, examiner or as a consultant for a number of universities around the world.

My first academic interest was French literature. I started my full-time teaching career in England in 1976 as a teacher of French and have worked non-stop since then, although I haven’t taught French since 1979. I recently downloaded the complete works of Balzac onto my kindle book reader and have apparently only read 1% so far. I had originally intended to be an itinerant guitarist, singer – songwriter in the late 1960s, singing and composing songs mainly in English but in the French style,  instead I got into teaching during my year in France and gradually became an itinerant academic.

English was what employers wanted but I have never lost my love of French literature, cinema and song.

To recap, I first spent around 14 years in schools in five different countries and have spent the last 32 years in universities. I worked in France as an English Assistant from 1973-74, graduated and taught French for 3 years in England. Since 1979, I have taught in Germany, Ethiopia, Qatar, Japan and the UAE. Before coming to the American University of Sharjah in 2017, I was a professor at the Petroleum Institute (now part of Khalifa University) in Abu Dhabi in from 2006, I was a Professor in the Department of International Studies at the University of Kochi in Southern Japan for 11 years before that. As someone who believes in holism as a philosophy of lifelong education, I have taught a very wide range of language, applied linguistic and literature-related subjects. I am incapable of repeating the same lesson twice and I don’t think it matters if my students are graduate or undergraduate, potential English teachers, specialists in literature or future petroleum engineers – adapting to new situations is what makes life interesting and that is what holism means for me.

 Holistic Teaching Philosophy

Holism is a way of thinking that goes beyond education. Teachers need to have a life beyond a narrow educational setting. I don’t believe in narrow disciplinary constraints or define myself exclusively as an academic. In education, holism involves engaging the ‘whole person’ beyond narrow disciplinary constraints. Students live and will work in  society at large and help shape our future. The future is multi-cultural. We share the climate, viruses, but also information with our different views of the ‘truth’. Our students and colleagues all need creativity and a broad educational background to help solve some of the problems previous generations have created.

As a lifelong expatriate, intercultural adaptation and embracing an international identity apply to life at work and beyond work –expatriates can’t easily separate the two. The American University of Sharjah tops the only really important ranking, that of international diversity, both in our student and faculty populations. This means respecting and adapting to, but not being totally absorbed by the local context, in order to make an original and valuable local and international contribution. Interaction and interdisciplinary communication are important values closely linked to holism.

In 2013 I finally made more effort to get some of my arguments for holism together in writing  – they had been developing for around 20 years – in two editorial opinion pieces (March and June Issues of the Asian EFL Journal, 2013 http://asian-efl-journal.com/quarterly-editions/).  To summarize, definitions of ‘holism’ in applied language studies need to remain broad enough to allow for true epistemological diversity and reject prematurely coherent impermeable systems that do not reflect the present state of knowledge in our narrow academic fields. In the first piece, I focus on definitional issues arguing that the atomistic parts of any whole are related within a complex, but fluid, organic system and are more easily understood in relationship to other parts of that system. After considering the relationship between holistic and atomistic phenomena, I argue that ecological studies (Van Lier, 2002), while providing ground-breaking new insights into the holistic nature of applied language study, appear to exclude context-independence as a legitimate perspective. My definition is therefore more closely associated with Pappamihiel and Walser’s (2009) characterization of complexity theory. Epistemological diversity and complexity lead us to accept dynamism, unpredictability and instability as natural conditions of our field which cannot be ignored. (This kind of unpredictability and instability is certainly an aspect of expatriate life.)

The Holistic Education Network of Australia http://www.hent.org/ sums up some principles I share:

• Holism actively engages students in the teaching/learning process  and encourages  personal and collective responsibility.
• Its aim is to nurture a “sense of wholeness” in enquiring people who can learn whatever they need to know in any new context.
• It encourages the transfer of learning across separate academic disciplines.
• It explores the relationship between diversity and unity, not rejecting the group, but equally valuing diversity, variety and uniqueness.
• It is ‘negotiated, not preordained’, ‘and created not found’.
• It promotes learning and understanding through dialogue. 

The global and holistic nature of competence has important consequences for education. I have tried to write about this in detail since 2005. One place to access these pieces is in the EIL Journal, a sister journal of the Asian EFL Journal http://www.eilj.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=100&Itemid=145

I argue that no one culture and no individual within a culture can demonstrate more than a partial knowledge of competence. This means that all users will need to use their strengths to compensate for inevitable limitations. This has important consequences for learners, teachers and assessors. Compensation for the problems created by partial knowledge is an important skill that all even competent students need to develop. Assessment needs to take this need for compensation into account by providing space for students to display their competence on their own terms. We are there to support their development, not to limit it through a narrow testing mentality.

Five Characteristics of ICC

Academic Interests

A holistic philosophy does not lend itself to maintaining a narrow focus or specialization. I try to maintain a broad range of interests include Holistic Learning, Academic Competence, EIL, Classroom Methodology and Evaluation, Task-Based and Project-based Learning, Curriculum Development, Intercultural Communication, Discourse Analysis/Pragmatics, Classroom Interaction, Holistic Assessment, Materials Design, Critical Reasoning/Argumentation in Academic Writing, the Language of International Media, French poetry and the novels of Jane Austen, Graham Greene and Agatha Christy. Perhaps this just makes me a ‘jack-of-all trades’ and master of none, but it is what stimulates me and has worked well for me over the years. I am currently researching into reflective activity in relation social-action-based project-based learning,  I originally did a lot of single-authored papers and solo presentations, but recently my research and my editing work have involved teams. I often research with students as we are teaching research skills.

It is no accident that I spent 8 years as Chief Editor of the Asian EFL Journal as this is a journal that promotes alternative voices. ESBB member, John Adamson has taken over that role. I then took over the Chief Editor role of the Asian ESP Journal. Our aim is to promote agency of authors and avoid a deterministic view of academic genre in journal article writing. I am also a Senior Advisor of the EIL Journal, the Asian Linguistics Journal and several other international journals. I am interested in journals that promote the expression of alternative and original international voices in the increasingly diverse field of English education ESP, EFL and applied linguistics. I dislike formulaic approaches to academic writing although my editorial experience has led me to the (sad!) conclusion that conformity does appear to help authors get through review more easily. The problem is we don’t learn much from conformist voices. In my own writing I aim more and more to find my own voice among all those other voices that we read and cite. In my teaching I focus on helping students to develop their own voice through project-based learning and am still learning to use a constructivist approach to interacting with students.

My recent publications reflect my holistic philosophy and my aim to publish in a broad variety of journals across Asia. Many of my publications are available to download free at:http://pi.academia.edu/RogerNunn/

Nunn, R. From Defining to Developing Competence in EIL and Intercultural Communication. The Agricultural Development Trust of India International EFL Conference co-hosted by the Asian EFL Journal Group at Shardabai Pawar College for Girls, Baramati, Pune, Maharashtra, India. (04.12.2011)

Nunn, R. Sivasubramaniam, S. (with 3 undergraduate students Yasmine Guefrachi, Hadeel Al Shami &  Ayesha Tariq)  Researching Competent Writing with Competent Students Student Empowerment (as students, tutors & researchers) MENAWCA International Conference: Situating, Sustaining, and Serving, the American University of Sharjah 18.02.2011.
Nunn, R. Method in Use and Holism. Plenary Presentation Asian EFL Journal – International EFL Conference: Cebu Convention Centre & Cebu Doctors University, Philippines 14.08.2010

Nunn, R. Holism and Applied Language Study (Opening Plenary Address) Asian EFL Journal – International EFL Conference: Cebu Convention Centre & Cebu Doctors University, Philippines 13.08.2010

Nunn, R. Examining Your Own Classroom Method in Use. Keynote workshop Asian EFL Journal – International EFL Conference: Cebu Convention Centre & Cebu Doctors University, Philippines 12.08.2010

Nunn, R. Writing Journal Articles. (Keynote invited workshop) Asian EFL Annual International conference, Providence University, Taiwan, 25.04.2010

 Nunn, R. The Benefits and Challenges of Holistic Language Learning and Assessment. (Keynote address) Asian EFL Annual International conference, Providence University, Taiwan, 23.04.2010

Nunn, R. Key Aspects of a Modal for Analyzing Competent Academic Texts Across Scientific Genres. (Keynote Address) Asian ESP Conference Chongqing University, China, 31.10.09

Nunn, R. “Comparing Teachers’ Method-in-use across Cultures.” (Keynote Address) English as an International Language Conference hosted by the English as an International Language Journal and Dokuz Eylül University, Izmir, Turkey:  (October 2009)

Nunn, R. “Designing Holistic Tasks Units for Teaching and Assessment” The 3^rd Biennial TBLT (Task-based Learning and Teaching) Association International Conference, Lancaster University, UK (September 2009)

Nunn, R. Keynote Address: “Is the Method Concept Obsolete?  Redefining Method as a Teacher-Friendly Concept.”  Presented at the Asian EFL Conference, Pusan, South Korea (10 April 2009)

Adamson, J. and R. Nunn. “Alternative Voice: Towards a New Protocol.” Presented at the Asian EFL Conference, Pusan, South Korea (10 April, 2009)

 Academic Degrees:

Professional Teaching Qualifications: