Letter 1

Dear HLT,

I latched on to Joan Foster's article from the September issue straight away - "Getting Them to Read and Write in English" - and would like to use the methodology described to teach the class of 11 years olds which I'm starting soon in Hamburg. It's a class at the German equivalent of a British comprehensive school.

My question is for Joan Foster directly: Dear Joan Foster, at the end of the second section of your article titled "Activities" you write "see images". If I've understood you rightly, you wanted to insert at this point a hyperlink to the images which you used with this teaching sequence. As you might already know, it is however not possible to click here to view / print out these images.

If you have the images available, and wanted to share them with the international teaching community, could you communicate with Hania Kryszewska to activate this link? I'd certainly be grateful for anything that's there - I've currently no other idea about how to acquire the 10 large scale images which accompany this story-telling teaching sequence, and don't have the abilities to draw / paint the images to an acceptable standard to be used in the classroom. Of course there are library books with images from the example story of Little Red Riding Hood - but very few editions with more than 2 or 3 illustrations covering this story.

In any case, I'll try and mail HLT Reader's Letters to give some feedback about how it was getting "German" kids in Hamburg - less than half the class have German citizenship and I love the internationalism - to read and write English through Little Red Riding Hood. Will Newcastle be enriched by the coal I can bring her?

Thanks in advance for any help you can give with the images,

Yours

Henry Holland

Letter 2

Dear Hania,

Thank you very much for your letter. I have visited your website and I found it extremely interesting and very unusual. By unusual I mean that it is unusual for Russian teachers to share their experience via the Internet. I am sure English language teachers from Togliatti will be excited to write articles for HLT. I will distribute the information to school teachers this week. I think that even those who don't take a challenge to write an article will find the on-line magazine very helpful and will visit it in the future.

As I work for a university, I wonder whether articles written by university and college teachers will be good for the magazine. Would you please let me know if I should invite university teachers, most of whom teach specialized English (for engineers, economists, lawyers), to write articles for HLT.

Warmest regards,

Elena

Letter 3

Dear Colleagues,

Two weeks ago, I interviewed more than fifty students who were very poor. I asked them where they come from. Only two students were able to answer the questions. All of them were matriculation qualified but they were poor having a remote and backward base. Globalish is not a solution for such kind of students. Esperanto is also not suitable in such conditions because people are totally unaware these languages but it does not mean that the English language is hope for such kind of people. English should be modified for the poor communities.

Imagine where there is no library, no English speaking communities, no person is available to interact in English how children can learn English. As my experience shows they can only learn with grammar. Last year I researched in the class that the poor and remote students have serious problems in learning English. I analyzed that 80 percent errors are related to grammar so I developed a grammar course. I developed a new theory to teach grammar. I taught them spoken language after giving the awareness of grammar first in local language and then in English. I used some easy to learn new models. I created some poems and songs:

Oh Mister Brown
What is Noun?
Me and place
Things in the town
All called Noun

The students were confident more than ever before. Modern scholars do emphasize direct method but direct method is totally failed in remote areas. Language has six basic pillars--- vocabulary grammar listening reading and speaking. All should be included in curriculum.

Many children leave schools in Pakistan because they think that English is too much difficult and they can't cope with it. A language must be a hope. So a new kind of hopo- linguistics should be come into being for the poor and that must be derived from English Language. No other language than English can be used for international communication. The poor are deprived of this basic need. They are tongue less people. All the Exchange programs all the scholarships are only available to those who are already fluent in English. Consequently they can't become the part of world peace because they can't speak, read and listen how the modern world functions. They cannot travel to inner circle or BANA countries because of their limited circumstances and are not able to see how people live together with tolerance and peace as my cousin Zakria tells me:
We usually purchase our meet from Jews shops in New York because their religion is very like to Muslims and slaughtering system is the same and they also buy things from Muslims stores. I saw that synagogue and our mosque both are at the same place and the Jews and Muslims never fight there.

Muhammad Iqbal

Letter 4 a

Dear Hania,

(…) There's just one suggestion: If HLT could be called a journal (instead of a magazine), it'd give us people teaching in college more credits. Would you please consider this possibility?

Cordially,
Caroline

Letter 4 b

Dear Caroline

thank you for your e-mail
I see your point regarding the word magazine vs. journal
well the TTTJ our sister magazine is a journal
HLT wants to be more mainstream and invite ordinary teachers to publish not only academics. The former might be discouraged or frightened by the word journal

Also please ask Mario Rinvolucri the founding father and previous editor of HLT
He may express his views on the subject of journal versus magazine

Many greetings
Hania