Letter 1

Hi Hania,

new issue looks good, a nice range of opinion and expertise. I thought good idea to review VIŠNJA ANIĆ’s book TEACHING IS LIFE IS A GAME because few will indeed ever hear of it outside Croatia. The question remains how to order it, since my experience is smaller publishers have little distribution. This link could be put with your review: http://tinyurl.com/yj448wu There’s an on-line price of 134,10 kuna, which is about US$27. So I guess it can be ordered But the site is in Croatian, as is the review there.

One option is to try to get a larger publisher like DELTA to reissue or distribute the book under their name. Sometimes possible depending on how copyright can be handled or negotiated. Just a thought for the author or the publisher Skolska Knjiga.

We have a great book for activities written by my former colleague Prof. Hyacinth Gaudart and published here in Kuala Lumpur earlier this year, LIVELY LANGUAGE LEARNING. Maybe I could do a short review for HLT. Hyacinth's work is brilliant, book selling here to students and teachers at 5 Euros, much in demand. But its publisher has no real distribution, I know that.

Oodles of good books appear and most we don’t hear about, or only see a publisher’s blurb [not an honest review]. For example, my colleagues at Shumen U in Bulgaria are bringing out a collection of papers with Faber Publishers in Veliko Turnovo, from an ESL conference held in Varna last October. That book needs somehow to appear reviewed somewhere or the profession outside of Bulgaria will never hear of it.

I reviewed an excellent book for intermediate-level students on human rights issues from Romania a few years ago, Rights in deed (Bucarest, 2002), on Dennis Newson’s site EFLTU: www.efltu.org/reviews/rights.htm Dennis has some other reviews there as well.

It would be good to encourage readers of HLT to send in short 225-300 word reviews of new books relevant to ELT so as to expand the review section.

Bill Templer
Faculty of Education
U Malaya
Kuala Lumpur

Letter 2

Dear All,

Hope you are well. I just got this from Hania Kryszewska who published it in HUMANISING LANGUAGE TEACHING which is an e-zine published in the UK and popular with teachers round the world. She likes the book, but doesn't like the title. I know it is kind of awkward, but I've always been into pathetic messages trying to change the worldand remind people of true values & priorities... :-(

As long as she likes the contents, the message and the image of the book - fine with me! :-) Visnja

Letter 3

Dear Madam,

A Happy New Year ! Did you have the great holidays ? I really appreciate your kindness so far. Many Japanese, French, Spanish and Chinese people visited HLT magazine last October. Thanks to you, I got many complements from them !!! I'll do my best to contribute my work to Pilgrims!!!! Please tell me about your mailing address.

I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Angela Noriko

Letter 4

Dear Hania

My name is Lauren Damas and I am a teacher at BC Porto, Portugal.
(…) Thank you very much for the great materials on the Pilgrims website!

My very best wishes

Lauren Damas

Letter 5

Hi Hania

Okay, no prob...do you want a printed copy or an e-book? Have you taught any of it?

Re: size of the project...well, we started in 2001 and we have conservatively taught the TD (Teacher delivered) materials for around 250,000 hours prior to publication. As we went we changed and re-wrote and edited then taught again. We then created the Self-study and One to One materials from the TD materials, added MP3s for listenings etc. and some translated instructions for the two lower levels. It has been a long and difficult journey to be honest, fraught with many challenges, but I think that we are leading the way by providing original and interactive materials that will enable any English learner anywhere (including teachers) to enjoy the benefit of focused fluent and native speaker contact time as an integral part of each lesson, and for a lot less money than they would normally have to pay.

The whole native speaker 'debate' is an interesting one, I don't know how you or your magazine feel about it? For years, and it continues, organisations have been flying native speaker UK and US qualified expert teachers all over the world to show the non-native speakers 'how it is done'. Many students pay a premium for lessons with native speaker English teachers (British Council teaching centres) but there are lots of academics and publishers who are speaking about and promoting courses and training to do with 'world Englishes' and ELF (English as a Lingua Franca), taught by 'qualified' teachers.

David Graddol's work has no doubt been influential in drawing their attention to the growth changes of English teaching and speaking peoples around the world but I think the politically correct crowd are engaged in an effort to preserve the status quo, i.e. their power base, by deflecting and creating further specialisations and acronyms, created, promoted and sold by...them.

In my simple mind English is English and we learn to speak it by listening to people who speak it well and then conversing with them in a focused and pedagogically supported way (with a teacher, non-native speaker or native speaker, guiding and supporting, if necesssary, or if we prefer).

Our materials have caused some of the old guard to get a bit huffy in the past, as they seem to fear free fluent and native speaker contact time for students as being the start of the end for their cash cow (especially if taught by non-native speaker teachers). Which it probably is. There are lots of fluent and native speakers who are happy to help others learn the language and make friends at the same time and our materials seek to unlock that potential for everyone who is interested. As with any fading empire the weakening power-brokers of the ancient regime will defend their position to the hilt. I have been accused of 'dumbing down' the teaching of English by a respected and powerful figure in UK ELT in the past. The crux of his and the old guard's argument seemed to be was that the only person any learner of English can learn anything from is a native speaker teacher qualified with a CELTA or DELTA teaching materials produced by established UK publishers...now to include courses called things like 'Global' incorporating world 'Englishes'. Which anyone with any knowledge of language and language learning will know to be complete rubbish.

The funny thing is that control is becoming increasingly difficult for the old guard as learners go online in rapidly increasing numbers for practice using social media and new tools that support learning. And that is what we have created. Tools, in the form of our lesson plans and worksheets, that support learning and allow the user (teacher, learner...both) to work with them in a way that they choose and find most effective for them (real world, Skype, Second Life, and soon Facebook). And in this new world of teaching and learning English the motivated learners will want a different type of teacher, one that can guide and support their individual learning journeys, rather than corral and contain in a classroom with the focus on their 'teaching skills' rather than the process of acquisition and proficiency in using the language. Which is surely the primary goal of every English learner.

Sorry for biffing on, it just kind of blurted out, I do hope you don't mind and feel free to use it if you like.

Cheers

Jason

Letter 6

Dear Readers,

The "Useful sites" in the www.Laughnlearn.net website has finally been updated.

All the sites will be permanently visible on the homepage. Only the order in which they are placed will change on a weekly basis to give more emphasis to each group of sites. At present, the sites highlighted are related to health. The other sites are linked to education and learning, culture, gastronomy, bookshops which don't only sell books, cultural associations and music. Select sites at your leisure. The best sights are in our mind.

DS

Letter 7

Hi,

Page viewing stats are rather hard to come by. I'm currently waiting for the people that run our website to give me a special login to a program that will give me exact statistics for the official Pilgrims, HLT and TTJ sites. For now I can tell you how these websites rank in terms of traffic (the value being how many websites get more traffic than the target one):

TTJ - 2,782,044
Pilgrims - 1,008,354
HLT - 913,185

As you would expect HLT is well ahead. Out of interest facebook.com is ranked 2! If you're interested in website traffic, stats and demographics www.alexa.com is the company officially in charge of giving out website data. You can enter in any website and it will tell you lots of information.

Our own little corner of facebook gets on average 30-50 unique views a day. This is clearly quite small but in terms of a subscriber base of 200 people and little to no advertising it's not bad. As we roll into next year's Summer courses and gain control of the new official website, we'll be able to take advantage of the facebook page a lot more.

The Mexican clips are actually hosted on YouTube, I was merely advertising them through our facebook page. The beauty of YouTube is the unlimited free hosting of videos and the ease and accessibility of sharing and linking with other sites and programs. Here are the links to the two videos:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=ll0FkXoBDE8 www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnuaQjRG81M

By the way, I think 'sexuality in training' is an area Pilgrims has been missing out on. A paper on the subject is certainly needed and possibly a Summer course?

Regards,
Mark

Letter 8

Dear Hania,

You know I have been, and continue to be, an avid reader of HLT ( I am based in Argentina) and I am now involved in developing an on-line journal on CLIL in South America for La Sabana University, Universidad del Norte and Pearson Ed., Colombia.

Would there be any way I could request articles, research papers, book reviews, reflective pieces from your colleagues involved in CLIL?

(…)Thanks
Susan Hillyard B.Ed. (Hons.)
Educational Consultant
NILE Associate Trainer, Materials Writer, Speaker

E-mail:ssnhillyard@gmail.com

Letter 9

Dear Hania,

Thank you for your personal welcome letter and introduction to the contents of the HLT magazine. I have copied the December and October issues to my laptop. As I am going away now to the Ural region where the evenings are probably not so dark but cold enough to keep you indoors, I will do all the reading over the coming holidays.

I would like to wish you and your team Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Best regards
Faina Nizamutdinova

Letter 10

Dear Hania,

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Wish you sound health, love and happiness and a lot of luck!

Amalia from Armenia

Letter 11

Merry Christmas as a deeply Humanizing 2010. Ask your readers:

What has been the most humanizing action in your teaching career?

Describe it in ONE paragraph. Provide details. This would provide HLT with crosscultural data on HUMANIZING ACTIONS. It could be called:

THE MOST HUMANIZING ACTION IN MY LANGUAGE TEACHING EXPERIENCE.

Here is an example (one paragraph long):

One day, in teaching a class to advanced adults, there suddenly started a bitter discussion between two learners, who exchanged insults. I approached them and showed them one of my peace-promoting cards that said DIGNIFY YOUR DIALOGUE .They looked at me, rather embarrassed. I then added: Please show the class you know how to apologize each other in English. From that day on, I decided to challenge my advanced students to create their own peace-promoting posters as a group project. The idea has paid off my humanizing dividends.

Like the idea, Hania? Your magazine would contribute to a hitherto little documented aspect of the History of Humanisation in Language Teaching.

Francisco Gomes de Matos