What Pilgrims People Write

Mario Rinvolucri, UK

In this issue we are not going to talk to you about our July and August ( Northern Hemisphere) Summer Courses as they are full to bursting and with hefty waiting lists. This time I want to make you aware of the major writing effort that has brought the words, thoughts, teaching experiences and imaginations of 50 or so Pilgrims trainers/writers to many people around the language teaching globe.

For just over twenty years now, Tessa Woodward has edited the The Teacher Trainer and thus provided a forum for people in this tier of EFL work. She has published the work of major thinkers in the area, like Bernard Dufeu, Rod Bolitho, Adrian Underhill, Alan Maley, John Fanselow etc…..as well as the writing of people who have just come timidly into the area of training. To taste some of the Journal’s best articles go to the website: www.tttjournal.co.uk, where Tessa has made some of the major articles freely available. To subscribe to the print version of the Journal you pay a tiny subscription …something like £25 per year, and you will have noticed that in the last three months the UK pound has lost a quarter of its value; as a result TTT now cost peanuts.

Since 1999 Pilgrims has published Humanising Language Teaching which stands as a formidable and plethoric archive of student-centred teacher thought. The magazine has grown with the growth of the internet and with the growth of our teacher training work across Europe and in Canterbury each summer. We offer this major service to you free of charge, not because we are saints, but because HLT attracts some 50 people a year to our expensive and excellent TT courses.

In the 1990’s Pilgrims collaborated with Longman and the result of this were 16 teacher Resource books edited by Seth Lindstromberg and written by people like Sheelagh Deller, Lessons from the Learners, Herbert Puchta, Teaching Teenagers, Paul Davis, The Confidence Book, Tessa Woodward, Ways of Training, Peter Grundy, Teaching Literature, Bonnie Tsai, Teaching Business English and many others….around 25 authors. Though these major books were put of print by the end of their decade, after lukewarm marketing by Longman, you can still get them via the Internet.

Some Resource books by Pilgrims authors have sold large numbers. So John Morgan’s Vocabulary, with OUP, has sold over 40,000 over a period of 20 years and Rinvolucri’s Grammar Games has sold just under 134,000 copies over a similar period. These authors have done their publishers proud in terms of surplus value!

What about books currently on the stocks? Here are some that Pilgrims-connected people are hoping to see appear in the next 18 months:

• Chaz Pugliese: a book for Delta Publishing on Creativity in language teaching
• Hanna Kryszewska and Paul Davis: a text on how to teach using the lexical approach in preparation for Delta Publishing
• Gill Johnson: a collection of culture awareness exercises for Delta Publising
• Herbert Puchta ‘s MI in EFL is shortly due to be published in German for people teaching German as an FL. The English version is with Helbling and CUP while the German version will be with Hueber.

The final category I want to talk to you about is RESURRECTED BOOKS

Just such a Lazarus book will be published in late June by the Brighton Bookshop and this is Challenge to Think, Christine Frank et. al., a title that used to belong to OUP with whom the book sold well and had a good life. You need this book if you are teaching a lot of students who love logical-mathematical thinking. Incidentally, last year Christine produced Creative Writing, 2007, that came out with Helbling Languages

If you live on the island of Sachalin in East Russia ( 8 time zones from Moscow), If you live in a remote part of Tierra del Fuego, if you work in the Danish Faroe islands, or if you are teaching in a refugee camp in the Western Sahara you may find it hard to come and do a two week TT course with us in Canterbury!

That’s why we write: so we can share ideas with you wherever you are.