Dear HLT Readers,

Welcome to the new issue. First I would like to tell you about a few things I am really thrilled about. The first is the fantastic news that our colleagues and friends in publishing and teacher training have won two major awards. Duncan Foord’s book ‘The Developing Teacher’ has won Duke of Edinburgh English Speaking Union award for best book for teachers, 2009, and Luke Meddings and Scott Thornbury’s book ‘Teaching Unplugged’ has won the British Council ELT award, 2010.

These were the first two books in the new Delta Teacher Development Series and both have won awards. Not bad for a small publisher! It just shows that publishing does not like vacuum. OUP has closed the Teacher Resource Book series and before too much time has passed our befriended publisher is having a major impact on the ELT scene. ‘Befriended’ is the right word as you will have noticed that HLT has a regular link to their website as Pilgrims trainers publish books there.

Also there is Chaz Pugliese’s new book on creativity. In fact Chaz is hosting the development blog on the Delta Publishing site to coincide with the release of his new book - congratulations Chaz on the new book. It would be great if you could take 5 minutes of your time to go visit his blog and add to the discussions about creativity and motivation - here's the link - www.deltapublishing.co.uk/development-blog . Mario's Rinvolucri will be hosting the blog in April so be sure to go back in April too. Mario’s and Gill Johnson’s new book is called “Culture in our Classrooms”. I can’t wait for our (Paul Davis and Hania Kryszewska) new book to be published in DELTA soonish.

There is also another publisher you may want to look out for: Crown House Publishing Limited. In the article Short Book Reviews, you can read reviews of their two books: ‘Teaching Poetry in the Primary Classroom’ and ‘Happy Kids, Happy You: Using NLP to bring out the best in ourselves and the children we care for’. I really enjoyed reading the books and reviewing them. I got massively inspire. Here is another publisher who is making impact on our teaching practices.

The second piece of great news is that HLT is launching a new cooperation project with the British Council. Thank you Phil Dexter for your involvement. From now on look out for the British Council logo and BC contributions. In this issue it is major article by Fitch O'Connell: Reading Beyond the Lines: Extensive, Extended or Creative Reading? More great stuff to come in the next issues of HLT.

As for the other articles in this issue. There is a strong Pilgrims presence and you can see how much inspiration Pilgrims teacher training courses offer. In the corpora ideas section you can find out about the brilliant ideas the teachers on the last year’s spoken grammar course have come up with: Activities For Practising Spoken English. In Different Strokes for Different Folk, Bonnie Tsai writes about the her NLP course. In the Course Outline section Mario Rinvolucri writes about the culture course at Pilgrims: British Life, Language and Culture. Bear in mind Mario’s and Gill’s new book with DELTA I was writing about earlier.

As I write this editorial 44th IATEFL Annual Conference at Harrogate 2010 is nigh. In this issue there is a number of articles by contributors I contacted at the previous IATEFL conference: Stories in Language Teaching by Andrew Wright, Memories from IATEFL: Cardiff in Spring and My Drama Ideas by Elena Kashina, Creativity Assessment by Marinela Cojocariu, and Some Ideas on How to Make Pronunciation More Fun by Emine Oguz. If you are around at IATEFL and you want to chat about publishing in HLT get hold of me. I will be around.

As for the articles in this issue I will be brief. Don’t miss the two major articles: Can Translation Be Taught? By Lucía I. Llorente and Mary Fitzhugh Parra and The Case of a Reading Apprentice by Noosha Mehdian. Very inspiring!

And there is plenty more on Humanism in the classroom: ideas for the 21st century classroom in Using Fun Web Publishing Resources for Project and Task-based Work by Ann Foreman, some psychological aspects of languages teaching in Emotional Intelligence and English Teaching by Candy Fresacher, Music and Storytelling in the EFL Classroom by Roberta King, and Fun with Vocabulary Learning and Paraphrase by Mohammed Arroub.

Two articles focus on the dilemma native versus non native: The Native Rules by Radhika Iyer-O’Sullivan and Should English Language Tests Conform to Native Speaker Standards Only? by Celina Wyppich.

There are three articles on teaching and learning in various parts of the globe: Teaching English in Japan by Ken Jackson, The Heart of the Matter: The Third Time Around by Lou Spaventa and The further Adventures of Dr Usher by Robin Usher.

You will get a lot of practical ideas for your lessons from: Cat Tales by Michael Berman, and Get Moving! by Simon Mumford and I, Me and Myself by Monica Hoogstad. Monica’s text makes me think of an old Beatles song: I Me Mine. Check it out on YouTube!. I believe this song would go really well with Monica’s ideas and would reinforce the point she makes.

For your entertainment there is a nice humorous piece: Dear White Fella, found on the Internet by Cécile Marit, and poems: Three Poems by Neil Macbeath, and Language Teachers for Non-killing: A Plea by Francisco Gomes de Matos.

Enjoy the issue
Hania Kryszewska
HLT editor
hania.kryszewska@pilgrims.co.uk