Dear HLT Readers,

Welcome to the July issue; some of you may be on summer holiday, some in the middle of winter. Whatever the weather and season, I hope you will find the time to read this jam packed issue of HLT.

The first group of articles in this issue relates to classroom practice and methods in general. In major article 1: Investigating English Teachers' Materials Adaptation, Chunmei Yan analyses how teachers adapt materials for their lessons, why they make the changes and to how their adaptations influence their teaching. In her article Motivation and Reading in the EFL Classroom - Why don't Advanced Learners Enjoy Reading?, Stephanie Davis explores the true meaning of the word 'reading', considers the importance of reading and the reasons why reading in class tends to be unpopular and finally offers some solutions. In Testing Speaking in Large Classes, Barry O'Sullivan shares with us his ideas on how to test the students' oral performance, presents the basic design of such a test, the possible tasks and a scoring system. Finally he evaluates the whole experience. In How Can Teachers Reduce Test Anxiety of L2 Learners?, Selami Aydin looks at the problem of testing from the point of view of anxiety which can have a negative effect in foreign or second language learning. The author defines some general terms related to test anxiety, summarizes some research results and offers ideas on what teachers can do to prevent test anxiety. In his article The Heart of the Matter: On Noticing, Lou Spaventa, who is a regular contributor to HLT, appears in a new role. This time he does not present a case study of a teacher he has met but he himself is the subject of a case study. He comments on his observations relating to the differences between learning a language abroad and then being exposed to the language in the/a country in which it is spoken. In her article Teaching Polish as a Foreign language: Changes and Challenges, Mariola Bogucka outlines the changes that have taken place in the perception of Polish among foreigners and native speakers during the two years of Polish membership of the European Union. She highlights the challenges that Polish language teachers have to face in order to meet the requirements of general language learning objectives, taking on board various issues springing from learning and teaching English as a foreign language. Hall Houston in his series Off the Beaten Path introduces us to the world of Open Space Technology which is an alternative way of holding meetings, and considers it as a possible alternative for organising a class. In the Jokes section Khoram Balaee shares with us some anecdotes from his classroom. It would be great if more HLT readers could share their personal stories like those in Funny Things May Happen.

There are also very many practical ideas for the classroom in the Lesson Outlines section. In Feeling Poetry: the Power of Praise, Jane Spiro presents a creative writing idea which she developed over a number of years and which works with groups of all shapes, sizes and demographies. Also Georgeta Stoenescu shares with us her adventure with creative writing and offers some more ideas on the subject of creativity in her article Creative Writing. In her article This Jack's Built House Is, Alice Svendson, writes about left branching pattern in relative clauses, which is the kind of syntax used in, for example, Japanese and Korean. As an adult learner of Japanese she finds it one of the most difficult challenges of the language and she concludes that as teachers, we must do our best to be aware of our students' L1 syntax among others regarding nouns and modifiers. In her article Analogies Monica Hoogstad, who is a regular contributor to HLT, looks at the role of allegories, comparisons, similes, parables and metaphors in the process of brainstorming. In It's not how smart you, but how you're smart: lessons from experience, Antonio García Gómez shares with us some of his experience on teaching YL in a bilingual classroom and shows that the intrapersonal intelligence is the right way to channel the activation and strengthening of the remaining intelligences. The ideas are accompanied by some useful activities that have proved to activate the remaining intelligences through the presence of the intrapersonal intelligence. More ideas for lessons come from Mario Rinvolucri who in the Book preview section in his article The Alternative Way: Greenline 2 Klett, offers a wealth of alternative ways of dealing with the texts in this book, just as did he did for Greenline 1, and who in the An old exercise section: Who and what is worst reminds us of an exercise in the style of Challenge to Think activities, by Christine Frank et al, OUP, but some may find Mario's choice of the topic controversial and unsuitable for some teaching environments. Last not least in the Corpora ideas section Simon Mumford offers ideas for using the corpus in class - Exercises from Companion to Cambridge Grammar of English. The Cambridge Grammar of English (CGE) has revealed some interesting details about the grammar of spoken English and this corpus based grammar shows that features such as ellipsis, use of headers and tails and fronting are standard forms in native speaker language. The author offers some suggestions for the productive teaching of spoken grammatical forms such as ellipsis and fronting.

The second group of articles in this issue relates to various aspects of teacher education and teaching as a profession. In major article 2: The Importation of English to Japan: the Myth and Promotion of Native English Speaker (NES) Superiority and the False Promise of Internationalization, Damian John Rivers introduces us to the history of English tuition in Japan and sheds light on English language tuition in Japan today focusing on the superior role of the native speaker and government directives. You can read more on classroom practice in major article 3: Teaching Face to Face, in which Steve Darn, Özgür Köseoğlu and Laura Cruse offer an in depth study of the' the good teacher' or 'born teacher'. They address a recently observed trend regarding professional expertise. As institutions have become purely judged by results, teachers in general have become increasingly content to have their performance measured by examination grades and student assessments, this in turn leads to the fact that teachers become isolated and competitive in their work. A good language teacher, however, is not only someone who has helped their student get a good final grade but also someone who has prepared the learner for the competent use of the target language in real life. To do this the teacher needs methodology and technology and the personal touch. In his article TEFL for Dummies, Paul Bress brings to our attention some basic tenets of TEFL, which areas often neglected and overlooked in. In British Life Language and Culture, Marijana Budec Stanicic shares her reflections after attending a culture course at Pilgrims and talks about the need for teachers to keep informed on the changes in English language, social life, youth culture, education and many other aspects of British life as teachers of English should be able to give their students some first hand experience and knowledge on Britain today. In Broken Wings, Tandy Taylor reminds us how much power we have as teachers, and that we have an ability to influence our students long after they have left the classroom. In the Student Voices section Jane O. Davies shares with us some more of her students' opinions on bad teachers: The Worst Teacher.

At this point it seems appropriate to introduce a new teachers' organisation eltlinkup.org which already associates many ELT authors, trainers and teachers. It is being introduced to you by Tim Jones, one of its co-founders.

The funny thing about eltlinkup.org is that nobody's done it before. The World Wide Web has been around for more than 15 years and while there may not be, as someone once told me, six million people around the world earning their living teaching English, there are certainly a lot of people in ELT. The even stranger thing is that despite the plethora of conferences, workshops and what have you, the vast majority of ELT professionals never get to talk to their colleagues in other countries, never get to swap ideas or just moan at each other. The site is the result of a conversation between several of us at the Harrogate IATEFL conference in 2006. It is a collaboration between Felicity O'Dell, Tim Jones and former colleague Rosalie Kerr. We thought that what was needed was a database of teachers and other ELT professionals so that everybody could contact everybody. It would have to be free and independent of publishers, exam boards and schools. It was more difficult and took longer than we had thought but it finally came on-line properly in April 2007 and now has members in 56 countries.

Eltlinkup.org is the site you go to contact people. They may be people you've lost touch with or people you want to get in touch with because they have common interests. You might be doing research or want to talk to people with expertise in a certain field or you may just want to find out how many teachers there are in Armenia who are interested in Business English. There are other features on the site of course: there is a message board, a job vacancies page, a courses section, a CV maker and now a features page where you can publish your own short article.

Tim Jones

Coming back to HLT, the third group of articles relates to language itself. In major article 4: Synonymous Antonyms in Prepositionland?, Seth Lindstromberg, introduces us to the intricate world of prepositions and to the phenomenon that although some prepositions seem to be antonymic or contrary, for example up and down, to and from, off and on (as in on the table), in and out, and on and under, each of these prepositions may occasionally be replaceable by its opposite with no immediately noticeable change in meaning. In his article Literature on Language 2 - Impressions of English, Jonathan Marks shares with the readers two extracts from contemporary fiction in which authors convey subjective impressions of the sound of English, and the associations it evokes.

As for newly published books, in Teaching Other Subjects Through English, Judit Fehér, reviews the recently published book by two long-time Pilgrims trainers, Sheelagh Deller and Chris Price. In Publications Received, Tessa Woodward, the editor of our sister magazine The Teacher Training Journal shares with us her views of a number of publications which have recently appeared on the ELT market. In Meet Grammarman! Brian Boyd introduces us in an interview form to a website he has created himself. The Grammarman is an online publication for teaching grammar with the help of a new hero in town, and who has been created to put a stop to careless mistakes. Francisco Gomes de Matos, an applied peace linguist who has been a regular contributor of to HLT, in A pioneering book on English for Peaceful Purposes reviews Patricia Friedrich´s book - Language, Negotiation and Peace.

For your pleasure there are some lovely poems by Annamaria Mandoliti, Poems, and by Muhammad Iqbal, Sharing Poems, who started to write poetry for humanising children because he felt the world direly needs humanistic generations when disasters "are increasing double and triple in the world".

Enjoy the issue

Hania Kryszewska

HLT Editor

E-mail: hania.kryszewska@pilgrims.co.uk