Humanising Language Teaching
Year 2; Issue 1; January 2000

Welcome to Humanising Language Teaching, Year 2000, Issue 1.

This is our 1st "birthday" issue as the magazine has been running for a year now. If you haven't seen last year's eight issues, and would like to, just click on Previous Issues.

I am very happy to welcome Donald Freeman as a contributor to HLT; he will be writing a column over this year called Telling Teaching. ( Did he intend the double meaning in this title?) Donald, one of the major anthropologists of language teaching, works at SIT in Brattleboro in Vermont, perhaps the main centre in the US for the training of teachers in humanistic thinking, feeling and doing.

The second major article in this issue is one by Debora Pamplona from Brazil: The Bible as an effective source of teaching materials. In my view, what Debora describes is the ultimate in humanistic teaching: an Evangelical Christian teacher working with Evangelical Christian students and using the Bible as their coursebook. There is an identity of view and feeling that unites the students, the text and the teacher - they are all working together in absolute congruence….. and this very rare in a language classroom. Could Debora's ideas be applied by people teaching English in the International Muslim University in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, using the Holy Koran as the source of learning texts? Could her ideas be applied in any situation where a powerful belief systems binds teacher and learner together?

Over the year 2000, HLT will run articles written or edited by our secondary consultant, Ana Robles, and by our primary consultant Penelope Williams.

Ana Robles, who teaches secondary in North West Spain, opens the year with a general article about how humanistic ideas apply or don't apply in normal State secondary school classes. If you teach in this sector, I suggest you go straight to A Secondary School Teacher Perspective. Her article has several practical exercises embedded in it that you can use tomorrow.

Penelope Williams will open the primary teacher section of HLT in the March issue. I want to make HLT more tightly and focusedly relevant to the different "families" of language teachers, Primary, Secondary, Adult, Business, ESP etc…….

If you go to "Slumped in front of the telly", you will find Mike Rundell, our resident corpus linguist and lexicographer, exploring all the negative words and phrases Brits use when talking and writing about TV viewing, their major non-work occupation. Mike's piece is directly useable with your advanced students.

The letter column this time features a Polish appreciation of a class letter writing technique and a poem about the difference between the language of having and the language of being, sent to HLT by a Taiwanese reader.

Humanistic thinking is not confined to language teaching. There is a humanistic movement among lawyers specialising in family law: for years these people have tried to get divorcing couples to eschew litigation and choose mediation. There are groups of architects who believe that they should find out what kind of spaces people want to live in so they can design buildings that the future dwellers feel comfortable in. There are gynaecologists who believe that all decisions about the birth process should be taken by the mother-to-be, with the doctor as medical adviser.
All these professionals share with us humanistic language teachers the conviction that the only reasonable place for the litigants, dwellers, mothers-to-be and language students is centre stage with the professionals off to one side.
Here is a humanistic voice from the world of photography. Peter Knapp writes :

" I sincerely believe that my students have taught me more than I have given them. In a very brief period of time, teaching allows you to come close to and get to know others in ways that take years in ordinary life. You should not be the "master" whom the learners imitate, because you become a teacher of photography at an age when your work and you way of taking pictures, for which you have won recognition, already belongs to the past. So you are no longer a good example for the younger generations". ( Ides et Calendes, 1998 )

It is good to know that we are not alone in our student-centred vision of teaching.