HLT Magazine (January 2002)

Humanising Language Teaching
Year 4; Issue 1; January 2002

Why Humanising Language Teaching?

Let me first welcome you to the first Issue of our Fourth Year ( Jan 2002), and suggest that you may find things of even greater interest to you in past issues than in this present one. HLT is gradually becoming a sine qua non for those interested in wholistic teaching, in humanistic learning.

Why did Pilgrims start this magazine? There are many answers to this question and some are commercial:

to give people who teach languages some stimulating food for thought that might attract them across to the Pilgrims main site, from where they could buy a training course.
to add to our "authority" in the field – Pilgrims offers the EFL community two publications : The Teacher Trainer and HLT. Both publications carry our name to places we do not even know about.

To come now to the technical and intellectual answers to the question above:

We started HLT to provide a well for language teachers who are attracted to humanistic ideas to draw water from.
We started HLT to provide vanguard teachers with ideas and techniques they may not always find in ELT magazines that are dedicated to appealing to "middle-of-the- road" teachers.

We started HLT with the the hope that it would be written by people from every corner of the globe, not just by a handful of self-exporting Brits. This issue has writers who are natives of these countries:

Some past issues of HLT, have hardly had a British or North American writer in sight: viz the November 2000 Issue, that was guest-edited from Montevideo and that sounds and feels fully Latin American, ( Southern Cone).

I wanted to publish plenty of people who had never written before and this has happened over the past three years: one third of the magazine is written by well-known people and two thirds by first-timers.

HLT must be doing something right since the reader sessions per week have gone up from around 300 in our first year to around 1500 to 2000+ at the end of 2001.
The average HLT reader spends 7 minutes on the site and could be doing all sorts of different things in that time, including, of course, staring out of the window!

What is missing from HLT that you would like to see in it?

Please e-mail with your thoughts on this and, if possible, send me an article to cover the gaps you perceive!

The contents of this Issue

The first major article The Intelligent Body: the Non-local mind is a medical doctor's view of the total interconnection of Spirit, Brain and Body and is set in the context of treating cancer patients. We are not alone in wanting to work wholistically in our own technical area. Dr Rosy Daniel does precisely this in treating cancer patients.

Sharing the Power is the first major piece that HLT has carried on the area of testing. Christoph's article explores the reality of "co-evaluation" ( students as well as teachers) in the German secondary context.

In Paralessons Richard Kiely explores the work of EAP teachers in direct contact with students before and after lessons. I wish there were more anthropologically minded people like Richard in our field.

If you go to Short Article and click on My passion for my Students you will see how a humanistic heart and mind works with bored and indifferent rural students in North West Spain in a State Secondary context.. Does working with a Cdrom on a screen have to be dry and without human content? In A Christmas Story Andrew Stokes shows primary aged kids teaching each other how to use a Cdrom. No lack of human contact there!

In Getting past Barriers and the role of Positive Beliefs in Teaching Ann Price explains how dealing with her own epilepsy, and dealing with the scarey side effects of six brain operations, gave her a golden key to working with late teenagers with special needs.

Student Voices this time brings you the thoughts of a refugee learning English in London and the voices of four teachers describing the refugee in their classes it has been the greatest honour to teach.

Have you heard of The Laughlab Project? A major web-based research project into why tweaky little stories make us guffaw.

If you are a fan of Seth's Column, you will find that this time he has written a major piece on immigrants- should they stay distinct or should they merge into the host community? ( isn't host a marvellous euphemism in this context/)

Have a good read!