Humanising Language Teaching
Year 4 Issue 2; March 02

Mario Rinvolucri

" Probably the most important scientific development of the 20th century is that economics replaced curiosity as the driving force behind research". These are the words of Kary Mullis, the Nobel Prize winning inventor of the polymerase chain reaction, quoted from " At any cost…" in the New Scientist , October 11th 2001.

Well do these words apply to the development of language corpora, the private domain of a series of universities and publishers. Suppose you are really interested in oral UK English, are CUP going to give you open access to their Cancode corpus? Methinks not. From this rich and fascinating corpus they no doubt intend to roll out a series of products in the shape of dictionaries and coursebooks over the coming years. Of course you do have limited access to the material through the books of such scholars as Mike McCarthy and Ron Carter.

And another quote from the same New Scientist article:

" Who holds the patent on this vaccine?" Jonas Salk was asked in 1955 after he had created the first polio vaccine. His reply was simple:
" The people, I should say. There's no patent. Could you patent the sun? "

Of the Portonovo Conference www.lend.it/portonovo2002/programma.htm

Valeria Gallerani invites us all to join her on the Adriatic coast of Italy from August 28th this year until the 31st to work on Humanism in Language Teaching , with speakers of this calibre:

Jane Arnold
Eva Hava Jonai
Alan Maley
Luke Prodromou
Nick Owen
Lucilla Lopriore
Adrian Underhill
Herbert Puchta
Jim Wingate ….

Why go to Portonovo?

Three reasons.

1. The quality of the participants is high
2. This is not a usual conference where you flit from room to room hour by hour. You hear all the above people in plenary sessions and you choose to work with two of the trainers for a whole day each
   Not often you can get to spend a full day with Maley around WORKING WITH STORIES or with Puchta on NLP IN THE PRIMARY CLASSROOM.
   ( Alan Maley is mostly to be found in Thailand and Herbert is everywhere, except where you happen to be!)
3. The all-in cost of the workshops, plenaries, evening program, food and lodging is very reasonable, especially from an international point of view.

Find out more on the website given above.

Of HLT improvements ……

We have had a technical face lift:

• a search facility
• a refer-a-friend facility ( if you like an article you will shortly be able to send it directly to a friend.
• a facility that allows you to view all articles of a particular type or all the contributions of a particular author
• improved code to aid search engine placement.

I very much hope that all the above developments will allow to you use the HLT archive faster and more productively. Are there more improvements you would find useful? Let me know.

Of the contents of the current issue ...

My statistics tell me that many of you go to the practical exercises. This issue if full of them. Major article 2 by Teresa Ting is full of good ideas about use of song Short Article 3 on classroom management, by Galan and Maguire, gives very clear, simple NLP advice on how to behave in the classroom to get the student response you want. In Short Article 5 Rosanna Varuzza shows you how to use literal translation to work on low level grammar.

Project on World Conflict outlines what media students in Lisbon did to hear points of view from round the world on the destruction of Afghanistan. An ingenious internet project.

Though Lesson Outlines is short this time, Old Exercise offers you 20 exercises from Paul Davis' THE CONFIDENCE BOOK. and Teacher Resource Books Preview brings you six activities from Herbert Puchta's MULTIPLE INTELLIGENCES IN EFL Seth's Column is. this time packed with black board exercises. This is the most practical issue of HLT ever!.

When I read Ian Tudor's Main Article 1, Exploring Context, I wish we had more people with an ethnographic interest in EFL.

If you think there are things to be learnt by language teachers from tennis coaching, then don't miss The Language Coach by professional tennis coach Steve Schuyler.

If you ever had to write an MA thesis which led you to abandon normal language and write applied linguistics gobbledy-gook, then you might enjoy You say tomato….

Finally I would like to introduce Lou Spaventa and his new column. Lou was a formative influence for many of us at Pilgrims back in the 70's . I would class him among my own main trainers, to whom I owe a large debt of gratitude. The Heart of the Matter is the first instalment of what I hope will build into a major series.

Of a website for mid Atlantic teachers

Some fifty miles off the Southern-most tip of Morocco, seven fists and tongues of volcanic rock and sand thrust upwards from the waves of the Atlantic. Lanzarote, Fuerteventura, Gran Canaria, Tenerife, La Palma, La Gomera, El Hierro: names perhaps familiar from the pages of holiday brochures and in-flight magazines, conjuring up images of un-freckled, peacock-blue skies hanging low over sieved ivory dunes, of wise, nodding palms, silver moons, black sands, thick green slopes clinging to the sides of a glowering volcano, and the sweet breezes of a paradise in winter. A playground for tourists and wind-surfers, retired gentlefolk and triathletes.

But for the last ten months, the Canary Islands, and in particular Tenerife, have felt the rumblings of new, non-seismic, non-tourist activity: a thriving community of TEFL teachers, with a new web-magazine – Atlantic Forum - to bring the islands together. Of course, the beauty of a web-magazine is that it's open to anyone…… We have already been lucky enough to offer articles by figures such as Mark Hancock, Adrian Underhill, Herbert Puchta, and our host here Mario Rinvolucri, as well as articles by less familiar but equally interesting contributors, classroom ideas, letters from readers, up-to-date book information (with the help of some of the leading ELT publishers), news and "The Burning Questionnaire". Why not visit us at www.atlanticls.com/ and see for yourself; who knows, you may even want to join in……we'd love to have you.

Fiona Mauchline,
Editor, Atlantic Forum.