We are inclined to minimize their importance. But many of the texts written by academics deal with teaching, planning and management. This is also true for me. I sometimes wonder why this kind of text production receives so little visibility in the academic curriculum. Usually there is much expertise, creativity and energy invested in what is considered to be just ‘didactics’ or ‘administration’ or ‘policy’. Shouldn’t the academic community value this work more, and at least list it among its core activities and publications?
Many of my publications are dedicated to topics related to language teaching, language assessment and language policy. Some are ‘official’ publications because they were published in some kind of conference proceedings, journal or Festschrift. Others can hardly be called ‘publications’, they only had an internal nature, but they received maybe more attention, leading to more intense debate and offering direct guidance to our students in their studies. My didactic publications are of the following nature:
- book reviews and essays related to the teaching of Dutch in an international context (Nederlands als Vreemde Taal);
- language tests for the Certificaat Nederlands als Vreemde Taal;
- policy papers and reports about language teaching at Universities;
- academic coursebooks. e.g. dedicated to Dutch literature and history, Language courses for Specific Purposes, Introduction to Academic Writing, European Language Policies;
- essays on practices of English Medium Instruction;
- essays on CALL (computer assisted language learning) and the use of social media in Higher Education;
- studies in assessment;
- course evalution reports, programme revision reports;
- general essays about university teaching and academic culture.
It is neither possible nor useful to re-publish all these texts on a personal website. But I can imagine that some of them may be interesting and useful to some readers : in particular the book reviews, the studies in EMI, the coursebooks and the essays about Nederlandse taalpolitiek.