The definition of Official Development Assistance (ODA), stewarded by the Development Assistance Committee (DAC), just experienced its largest crisis since the early 1970s. Historically, ODA assessed the subsidy element of aid loans using a discount rate of 10 per cent. Low borrowing interest rates for donor governments enabled them to lend at rates low enough to qualify as ODA, yet high enou…

Conditions in trade finance markets have returned to normality along the main global routes after the global financial crisis of 2008�9. The structural difficulties of poor countries in accessing trade finance have, however, not disappeared�and might have been worsened. Trade finance markets are characterized by a greater selectivity in risk-taking, flight to �quality� custo…

In this series, we explore technology-related themes and topics. The series aims to discuss and demystify what may be new areas for some readers and to consider their relevance to English language teachers.

Teacher-led collaborative modelling is a type of scaffolded instruction in which the teacher and learners compose and edit an academic text in a process that involves negotiation and shared responsibility. This study examined observed episodes of collaborative modelling of summaries, paraphrases, and other text types in pre-university and university academic writing courses. In interview statem…

This article makes a case for bilingual learners’ dictionaries. These dictionaries are very different from traditional bilingual dictionaries, being attuned to the productive needs of learners who are speakers of a specific L1. Although they have been around for some time now, teachers of English remain largely unaware of their benefits (or, possibly, their existence), continuing to promote t…

Research in general education suggests that relationship-building is at the core of quality learning experiences. Yet relationship-building has not received the attention, it deserves from researchers in the field of TESOL where teacher–student relationships of various types are a central component in successful teaching and learning. This article examines the perspectives of three experien…

On 30 April 1815, Napoleon surprisingly called municipal elections in all communes with a population of under 5000. These elections have been little written about and less researched. Yet, as the most inclusive and extensive elections between the 1790s and 1848, they offer a unique vantage point for the observation of mass electoral behaviour. In the absence of summary results, they can only be…

This article seeks to explore the impact of new voting technologies—machines from 1970–90, followed by screens from 1990–2010—on electoral practice in France. It begins by showing how the arguments deployed by advocates of the new technologies largely resembled one another, despite the fact that the two devices were based on rather different technical processes: hand-operated machines a…

The three plebiscites conducted by Louis-Napoleon between 1851 and 1870 do not seem worthy of too much scholarly attention, since the overwhelmingly positive verdict they returned for the regime was entirely predictable. However, there is an unfamiliar aspect to these exercises in authoritarian democracy, which reveals a great deal about a subversive facet of voting and electoral culture in Fra…

Towards the end of the seventeenth century, two disputed elections, which were contested by Jansenists and Jesuits, shook the religious establishment at Louvain. Somewhat banal at first sight, these elections actually brought to light the principles and issues at stake in operating the electoral process under the ancien régime. This did not involve choosing the best candidates among those comp…