Humanising Language Teaching
Year 1; Issue 5; August 1999

Welcome to Issue 5 of the Pilgrims webzine for language teachers, August l999.

Whether you are emerging from Winter , sweltering in high Summer or peacefully living your tropical year I hope you enjoy Peter Grundy's main article which describes how he and Paul Davis make a course based around readings on EFL methodology into a full and surprising methodological experience for the students. Peter is that very rare beast in our field, a genuinely and brilliantly applied linguist. Watch what comes out of Durham University.

The short article in this issue ISN'T. In his piece, Crippling Words, Jim Wingate invites us to be aware of the marvel of dyslexic thinking. Please read to the end of the article, even if you can't find a thread.

The part of this 'zine I take most pleasure in editing is Student Voices and this time you have transcripts of feedback from the end of an intensive, humanistic, one-week immersion course in an Italian university in which the students piteously thank the trainers for not having bored them.

I am aware that HLT's review section is tiny and to help remedy this thinness you will find a short bibliography of books that may be of use to humanistic teachers at the end of this editorial. This was a list offered to participants at Jane Arnold's workshop at Spanish Tesol in Madrid in April 1999.

In terms of world EFL the people who drop by and read bits of Humanising Language Teaching are a tiny minority but I am delighted to tell you that in the week after HLT Issue 4 went up in June, there were over 1200 visits. This is up from the 800-900 visits to the first three issues in their respective first weeks up. We will begin to be satisfied when we reach the 50,000 visits a week that Dave Sperling's Café claims.

Please tell all your friends and enemies about Humanising Language Teaching, HLT for short.

Please add your e-mail address to our "subscription" list so we can let you know when each new Issue goes up.

(Issue 6 should go up on September 15th, to respect our 6 weekly periodicity, but will in fact appear early in the week starting September 20th.)

To view the bibliography discussed above, click here.

Mario Rinvolucri, Editor.