Humanising Language Teaching
Year 1; Issue 5; August 1999

by Paul Davis, Barbara Garside and Mario Rinvolucri.

Cambridge University Press

The book's blurb says: "Ways of Doing is a collection of over l00 activities which help students discover how they do things, both inside and outside the classroom. Based largely on humanistic principles, the activities in this book are designed to encourage students to find out a lot more about themselves as people, as learners, as foreign language learners and as members of a group."

Here are excerpts from the Contents page:

1. Everyday process

   1. Daydreaming
   2. I didn't know that a year ago.
   3. Excellence in others
   4. Headaches
   5. Lifeline
   6. Pizzas
   7. Responsibility
   8. These stressful things
   9. The tempo of time
   10. Transitions
   11. Weariness

   12. Yes, I was special

2. Language and learning processes

3. Group dynamics

4. Students' relationship to the course book and the people behind it.

   1. Absent friend(s)
   2. Students analyse their coursebook
   3. Analysing a coursebook unit
   4. Book babies
   5. Book fair
   6. Coursebook quiz
   7. Humanising the coursebook
   8. Role-play the coursebook
   9. Self-accessing the coursebook
   10. Students teach each other

   11. The wrong book at the wrong level.

5. Overall learning strategies, drawn from NLP, Gardner Multiple Intelligence thinking and from the work of Antoine de la Garanderie.

6. Mysteries of correction

7. Teacher to teacher relationships

   1. Blow your colleague's trumpet
   2. Change five things
   3. Creative listening, or: everyone has their own solution
   4. Displaced feedback
   5. Getting labelled
   6. Remembering names
   7. Sharing a class
   8. Students love teachers
   9. Teacher mapping
   10. Time management

The book has a l3 page introduction which might be useful to you if you are on a discursive teacher training course but which, as a practising teacher, you would do well to skip or only read after your own students have shown you the value of some of the exercises.

The Oxford and Cambridge Presses demand that resource book authors write what the editors call "meaty" introductions. Only 25% of teachers ever read such introductions, according to a 1980's Longman survey, but resource book authors are forced to go on churning them out. Penny Ur, current CUP Teacher Handbooks general editor , has let it be known that she judges a new Handbook proposal 50% on the quality of the introduction.

This is academicising absurdity and is similar to judging a five course meal on the shape of the bottle the aperitif comes in. The worth of a book of classroom scenarios derives uniquely from the degree to which the activities draw the best out of a given group of learners.

This, dear editors, is also what makes a book sell initially and then gives it a long shelf life.

You can get Ways of Doing by visiting the Pilgrims on-line bookshop.