Humanising Language Teaching
Year 6; Issue 1; January 2004

How do you use your magazine?

The statistics show that, in 2003, HLT received 183,337 visitor sessions ( excluding the last day of the year) or around 500 visitor sessions per day. (If you go to HLT twice on the same day, you are counted as ' two visitor sessions') In the same period the total number of ' page views' was just over half a million. The average visitor session lasted 6.33 minutes.

It would seem from the statistics that during a typical 'visitor session' the HLT reader will go to 2.76 different articles, documents, bits of the magazine. A sizeable minority of readers download a whole issue onto their machine or zip up a year's worth and get it on their hard disk.

We send out our email announcing each new issue of the magazine to around 8500 people every two months.

This tells you the reader, and me the editor, a tiny bit about how folk use HLT.

However, if you go to READERS LETTERS you will find out how two Turkish and one Swedish reader actually read the magazine and what place it has in their professional lives. Fascinating reading. A Big THANK YOU to these colleagues.

The Teacher Trainer website: www.tttjournal.co.uk

If you have not recently visited this website, now is the time. Each quarter the editor of the THE TEACHER TRAINER puts up more and more classically useful articles from the first ten years of her publication's life and you don't have to be a trainer to find them fascinating; here are a few:

Breaking Rules John Fanselow
Britta and Rolf, or the Unfaithful Mirror Bernard Dufeu
Images and Options in the Language Classroom, Earl Stevick
Interview with Tony Buzan
Teaching , Teacher Training and Applied Linguistics Rod Bolitho
Silent Way Workshops Caleb Gattegno

Etc…………….

Ten days of the Best Training you will get in Europe this year

You take a Ryanair or Easy Jet flight into London Stanstead on Sunday 22nd of August. You spend Monday 23rd through Friday 27th on our Hilltop in Canterbury attending the Pilgrims 30 Anniversary Conference and working with folk like Christine Frank,
Simon Marshall, Mario Rinvolucri, and Duncan Mackintosh,a dynamic new force from Africa ( Drama and storytelling).

On Saturday 28th you take a Ryanair plane from Stanstead to Ancona and spend the next four days at the LEND Humanistic Conference at Portonovo, on the shores of the Adriatic. The animation team under the cliffs includes:

Sheelagh Deller ( a Pilgrims Lead trainer)
Peter Medgyes
Adrian Underhill
Tessa Woodward ( Editor of our magazine, THE TEACHER TRAINER) etc……

To find out exactly what the eight specialists who will be animating the Portonovo event propose to do with you over the 4 days of the Adriatic Conference go to:

www.lend.it/portonovo2004

To find out yet more, email the indefatigable organiser, Valeria Gallerani: v.gallerani@dinoto.net

What is in this Issue of HLT, Year 6 Issue 1?

Let me start with the practical things, in which this issue is very rich:

Teacher's Resourcebook Preview: Bonnie Tsai has offered you six highly kinaesthetic exercises for beginners and you will find them useful whether you are a primary teacher, working with unruly teenagers or dealing with tired adults who need waking up.

Short Article 3 has Will McCulloch helping your students to re-organise their vocab notebooks, while in Short Article 8 Sheena Macdonald offers a way to get students to do happy and productive extended reading. Short Article 12 shares the delight that a secondary teacher from Alsace , in France, had in discovering how much her teenagers liked doing Origami in the English class and how it improved their feeling about English.

If you want to get your classes writing creatively about blackbirds, then have a look at Lou Spaventa's Short Article 2.

Old Exercise brings you some of Paul Davis' brilliant listening exercises ( from his CONFIDENCE BOOK, Pilgrims-Longman.

More logical mathematical puzzles? Have a look at Marie Agrell's two brain-wringers in Lesson Outline1
Do you sometimes find that guided fantasies allow your students quiet, deep time during which they soak up language? In Lesson Outline2 you will find four new ones.

The Pilgrims Hilltop courses in Canterbury do have something special about them.
Now I don't expect you to believe my colleague, Jim Wright, Head of TT, when he writes glowingly about our Easter courses in Pilgrims Course Outline. He would!
Forget about Jim and go to Student Voices to read what a Russian Canadian participant on one of our CREATIVE TEACHER last summer has to say.

Two people have written about their experiences on an NLP for Teachers course last Summer. They have also tried to explain how the course has begun to change their teaching. If you are a sworn sceptic about NLP then PLEASE DON'T click to A WALK THROUGH THE NLP FOREST Major Article 3 or to NLP: WELCOME TO THE REAL WORLD, Short Article 5.

This issue is big one and I am not going to religiously mention each article. The Contents Page speaks loud and clear

When cruel politics overshadows classroom attempts at Humanistic Teaching
An experience of Israeli Occupation Short Article 6: disempowerment in Palestine tells the story of how a trainer, invited by the British Council, was debarred by the Israelis from working with EFL teachers in the Gaza Strip. Eleanor Watts describes the systematic daily humiliations that are one small part of the savage Sharon repression of the Palestinians. It seems that UK does not have enough diplomatic clout with Jerusalem to allow her academic aid to reach the Palestinians, at least not in Gaza. Would the same thing have happened to a trainer from Bushland?