HLT Magazine (March 2001)

Humanising Language Teaching
Year 3; Issue 2; March 2001

Before welcoming you to HLT Year 3, Issue 2, March 2001 I want to deal with three other matters.

I am delighted to be able to congratulate a group of EFL teachers in Brighton, UK on having set up a new Teacher Development Group, along the radical lines suggested the very first issue of HLT ( Feb 1999) by Paul Davis. This is what the Evening Argus in Brighton ( 11-12-00 ) reported Julian Kenny, one of the group's founders, as saying:
" I realised teachers often want very different things out of professional development than managers thought they did. They want an element of control. The new group is a co-operative of teachers and allows them to have control of their own careers by providing workshops and training sessions on subjects they ask for. This group will give teachers a safe, secure environment where they can talk about any problems of concerns they are having and get peer assessment of their work.."
HLT wishes the new Development Group in Brighton every success.
Last May saw the British Council bring out a new Newsletter: Peacekeeping English Project. The new publication deals with the various projects aimed at teaching English to the military in a wide sweep of countries from the Baltic Republics round as far as Kazakstan, the countries that border on Russia. This branch of ESP deals with matters such as:
It is Orwellian twist-speak to reframe the above areas as " Peace-keeping". Yuk.
A major new book has just come out with Cambridge: Planning Lessons and Courses, by Tessa Woodward, editor of our sister journal, The Teacher Trainer. Tessa has spent much of the past 20 years gathering, creating and synthesising a new methodology for the training of language teachers. In this new book she comes with real help for the language teacher who does not know how to weave a coherent course cloth from the threads in hand. We hope to the review the book in the May issue of HLT.

And now to the contents of this Issue of Humanising Language Teaching.

In the first Major Article, Metaphorical intelligence and Foreign Language Teaching, Jeannette Littlemore suggests that the ability to deal happily with metaphor requires an intelligence on a par with the seven intelligences that Gardner posited in his 1986 book Frames of Mind. She makes out a powerful case for such an inclusion.

In the second Major Article Talking in the Corridor, Ana Robles argues that her and you and I humanising our individual classrooms will only improve things slightly. She proposes a radical re-think and overhaul of the way secondary schools are conceived and organised.

In the third Major Article, " A Fight can be a Celebration", Janet Braithwaite describes and analyses the groups dynamics of a music workshop, and implicitly, shows how to apply this sort of thinking to our own student groups. My feeling is that there needs to be much more attention to group process in our professional literature.

The first of the Short Articles, Yakity-yak ( please talk back), by Chris Sowton, opens a window on English teaching in Nepal. He shows how foreign money flows into helping the rich kids in the capital learn more English, and does little to help train children in remote villages, where most Nepalis live. It's a sad, realistic article and raises the general issue of how Western educational aid helps the exploiting elites round the dependent world, rather than those who are being exploited.

In Hyper-Active Students- or using hypertext in class, Dierk Andresen offers you ways of getting students usefully Web-active, while Alice Svendson in Going off-line with the chatroom, sweetly suggests that sitting in a real room , chatting with real people is just as good, or even better than chatting on line! Maybe I should try and answer the next e-mail I get with a postcard? Wow, my correspondent would then see the picture I choose to send her, she would see my odd handwriting, my crossings-out, my hesitations, my rhythm of writing. No, better not, a postcard might be too strong a message to send to an e-mail junkie!.

Musings on Guilt and Not putting Myself Down, both deal with the way some teachers use their inner monologue and dialogue to paint their world in black. Both articles analyse and suggest solutions to this amazing human tendency to catastrophise.

I have agreed to publish Pleasures and Regrets anonymously, since, were the author named, the interview would need to be heavily censored. The interview deals with the role of the EFL /ESL support teacher in the class-ridden atmosphere of a UK "Public" school. The support teacher ends up as the foreign child's protector, mediator and ambassador, and parent.

The Lesson Outlines in this issue come mainly from two groups of teachers in France who brain-stormed vocabulary revision techniques and what to do after students have drawn a group picture.

In Student Voices you will hear tiny tots from Turkey telling their teacher, Denise Ozdeniz, all about how they feel about learning English. She also wrote Puppets for Primary, in the Short Article section.

An Old Exercise draws on the deep well of Maley and Duff's work in the 70's and 80's and the Seth Column tells you about using film scripts.

Dear Readers, about 1300 of you look at HLT each week. I can only offer you marvellous things if you keep sending me marvellous things. So keep sending'em.

I am aware that some readers will have had problems accessing the January Issue of HLT. The technical glitch has been fixed and I apologise to you if you were inconvenienced by the faulty technology.