Humanising Language Teaching
Year 4; Issue 4; July 02

Mario Rinvolucri

Welcome to the July 2002 ( Year 4 Issue 4 ) edition of Humanising Language Teaching.
Over the past three years the July issue has been a bit "thinner" than the other issues and my lame excuse has been that the Northern Hemisphere is on holiday.

This is a miserable excuse for a world magazine, so this year the July issue is bumper one and is aimed mainly at people in the tropics and in the Southern Hemisphere who are half way through their academic year. Chile's next major holiday break is in January and Thailand's in March-April. Northern Hemisphere readers can catch up with HLT when they get back from the beaches in September.

Of the thirty or so writers in this issue, the majority are users of English as a second language. The four major articles are written by an Indian, two Spanish people and a Brit. The nationality breakdown among the writers in this issue is as follows:

nine British
six Spanish
three French
two US
two Indian
one Argentinian
one Romanian
one German
one Swiss
one Latvian
one Dutch

I am delighted to have this kind of mix but still feel that too few nationalities are represented. There is only one Chinese voice quoted in the whole of this issue and there are no full Chinese articles in the issue. Yet China counts nearly 500.000 EFL colleagues. I don't think HLT has yet published an Indonesian voice in the four years we have been up on the web, and yet more than 200 million people live on those massive islands. Voices from the Arab world have so far been few and far between and I cannot remember publishing anything out of Russia. And Africa?

HLT wants to publish the writing of language teachers from every corner of the globe. We are not satisfied with writers from only three continents and 10 countries.

What's in this Issue?

An important theme this time is Testing. If you look under Short Article, you will find these three pieces on the much neglected the psychological aspect of testing: Ballet Shoes and Slippers- or how to cope with exam stress

Making Oral Tests more human and less anxiety-generating

Humanising Exam Classes.

In Student Voices, half a dozen late teenagers from Germany write about their process in sitting a major English exam. Why is so little attention paid to the feelings of test-takers by the experts in EFL testing? The first Lesson Outline brings you a sensitive questionnaire from Latvia that aims to find out what candidates feel about the tests they have to undergo.

Major Article 1 is by Mrs Shakti Gattegno and offers you a powerful introduction to the thinking of Caleb Gattegno, the founder of SILENT WAY. Major Article 2 silver-trumpets the need to fully appreciate the role of the mother tongue in the second language learning process: Humanising Translation Activities - Tackling a secret Practice, by Maria Gonzalez Davies. In the third major article From Responsive Reading to Creative Writing, Joana Noguera gives us a glimpse of the texts her students have produced under the influence of literary readings.

Alan Maley, whose major article in the November 2001 issue provoked a lot of reader reaction has two pieces in this issue; have a look at Old Exercise and at the excerpts from his book The Language Teacher's Voice, under Publications. In Old Exercise you will find some brilliant logical-mathematical activities to delight your more scientifically minded students ( taken from Grellet and Maley: Mind Matters, CUP.. a million years ago)

A favourite article of mine in this issue is To be and to be, that's another Question, in which Claudia Bertini explains how hard and strange it is to go from teaching English ( to compatriots) to teaching mother tongue to foreigners, foreigners who say that aspects of mother tongue are "illogical" etc… ( Yes, of course, editors need to publish a wide range of material, but they do have their own quirky favourites!)

Under Teacher Resource Book Preview you will find nine exercises from a forthcoming book on multiple intelligences in language teaching authored by people from all over Spain, including Ana Robles, Jane Arnold and Maria Carmen Fonseca. If you are not familiar with what these three have already written for HLT, then go to our in-house search engine and look 'em up.

Do you sometimes read something in HLT and think " Oh, maybe so-and-so would be interested in this? You think the thought and then do nothing?

NOW IT'S EASY: next to each page in the magazine you have a facility to e-mail- send the article or exercise you are reading to a friend anywhere in the world. Try it, just for a lark!

Do you want to win a free copy of Humansing Your Coursebook, ETp-Delta? All you have to do is spot the three spoof letters that have appeared in HLT over the past three and half years. You can scan through all the Reader's Letters of the past 24 issues by calling them up on our search engine. Yes, spoof letters are wicked!

Talk to you again in September.