Simon Borg
Simon Borg is a British-Maltese applied linguist, former Professor of TESOL at the University of Leeds, and now an independent consultant in language teacher education. His work has defined teacher cognition as a research area: what teachers know, believe, and think, and how those inner lives interact with what actually happens in classrooms.
Borg's 2006 book Teacher Cognition and Language Education is the field's standard reference. It did the useful work of consolidating a scattered literature into a coherent map of constructs (beliefs, knowledge, decisions, awareness) and methods (stimulated recall, narratives, observation triangulation). His later work has carried the same seriousness into teacher research, CPD evaluation, and the design of large-scale teacher education programmes, often for the British Council.
Career
- PhD from the University of Exeter
- Professor of TESOL at the University of Leeds until 2018
- Independent research and consulting career since, working extensively with the British Council and ministries of education
- Editor and consultant on teacher research projects across Asia, Africa, and Europe
Published Work
- Teacher Cognition and Language Education: Research and Practice (2006)
- Teacher Research in Language Teaching (2013)
- The Impact of In-service Teacher Education: The Case of English in Action (2015)
- Widely cited papers on teacher beliefs, grammar teaching decisions, and CPD evaluation
Influence
- Established teacher cognition as a named area of applied linguistics
- Shaped research methodology for studying what teachers think and why they do what they do
- His CPD evaluation work has informed how large donor-funded teacher development programmes are designed and assessed