Letter 1

Hello Hania, how is everything? I could not see Blended Learning on the list in Pilgrims course list. What courses are you going to give this year? I will do my best to get the grant and come to Kent.

Ilcan

Letter 2

Dear Hanna,

Congratulations on getting HLT onto European Eltecs! Well done!

M

PS. Seth says that he is seeing more and more refs to HLT in the heavy journals her reads.

Letter 3

Dear Hania

I would like to send you lots of wishes for the New Year and thank you for informing about the 2009 programmes at Pilgrims. It really helps to make me feel part of a very large family whose links continue even when I am at home. All the best !!!

Leda

Letter 4

(…) "The Net of Indra is a profound and subtle metaphor for the structure of reality. Imagine a vast net; at each crossing point there is a jewel; each jewel is perfectly clear and reflects all the other jewels in the net, the way two mirrors placed opposite each other will reflect an image ad infinitum.

"The jewel in this metaphor stands for an individual being, or an individual consciousness. Every jewel is intimately connected with all other jewels in the universe, and a change in one jewel means a change, however slight, in every other jewel."

Stephen Mitchell, The Enlightened Mind

Miles of smiles from Munich,

Catherine Bryden

Letter 5

Colleagues!

Attached is the December issue of The Bridge, your bimonthly ezine to link your English teaching with upcoming events.

Please send in your announcements for future events, photos of recent ones, viewpoints and opinions on published works, ideas for classroom activities…

Nevin Siders
Director of Studies
Bridges ESL
www.bridgesesl.com.mx
bridgesesl@prodigy.net.mx

Letter 6

Hi Hanna,

Have you seriously thought of the advantages of Author review as opposed to peer review. The great pluses are:

1. the author really knows the book inside out
2. by having it reviewed at all HLT is approving of the book.
3. authors like Ron Carter have written stunning self-reviews....... ( I will send you Carter's) old.hltmag.co.uk/jan05/idea02.htm

(…) I have rarely seen such a brilliant editorial riposte to a reader's grumble as the perfect hypertexting out from my letter.

1. it puts me in my place
2. it brilliantly acknowledges the validity of my point
3. it is wordless!!!!!!

Mario...in wonderment

PS. That Morgan piece is really important.

Letter 7

Hi Mrs Kryszewska,

I want to thank you ever so much for keeping me posted about what is going on with the magazine of which you are the editor. Let me express my congratulations on your contribution to enriching the ELT field (…)

Jack

Letter 8

Dear Hania

I am working independently in Tripoli, Libya. At present, I have a contract to teach all the employees at a very busy Architectural Engineering Company, the most cutting edge one here, currently involved in the massive rebuilding programme happening in this city. I work onsite and I find that my students bring with them into the classroom all the conflicts and issues of their offices and teams. For this reason, reading about Coaching was wonderful for me, as I feel that I am already incorporating this into my work here. The skills of Conflict Resolution and Negotiation have already worked their way into the lessons, almost unconsciously.

I have also set up as a freelance Teacher Trainer / Development Facilitator, doing sessions at various English language centres. It's an amazing time to be working here. There's an enormous hunger for ELT. The many local teachers of English are using ELT materials but without the know-how to use them effectively - this creates many difficulties, and the teacher sessions I have been developing here are an attempt to address these issues.

This is just to get in touch, but I hope in the coming year to offer some ideas I've been developing as a contributor to HLT.

Meanwhile, best wishes for the festive season

Caroline Thomas

Letter 9 a

Dear Editor,

Is the Seth Lindstromberg who has just brought out a book on teaching lexical chunks with Helbling Languages and who wrote the article in the IDEAS FROM THE CORPORA section in HLT Dec 2008 the same person as the Lindstromberg who in 2003 wrote an impassioned article for HLT entitled: GOODBYE TO THE LEXICAL APPROACH? Towards the end of that article he writes of the lexical approach " Discard it!"

If he has had a St Paul-on-the-road-to-Damascus experience it would be fascinating to hear about it.

Mario

Letter 9 b

Yes, Mario, that’s me. I’ve taken a long time to make up my mind (to the extent that I have) about many other things as well. When I’m less busy perhaps I will say more about my (kind of) Damascene conversion. Meeting Frank Boers had a lot to do with it. Not that I would take back anything in my article…except for the ending.

Best, Seth