Humanising Language Teaching
Year 5; Issue 2; March 03

Dear Readers,

The UK SEAL Conference June 20-22nd 2003

The University of Keele, in the NorthWest Midlands of England, hosts what is, arguably, the most important humanistic event in the World this year. If you possibly can, find three days and go to this conference. It's a wow!
This tiny sample from the SEAL workshop programme shows the breadth of work covered:

Action in Management – training through drama
The Heartmath Program- Tony Yardley Jones
Children's amazing Brains- Eva Hoffman
Suggestopaedia ( French) – Sylvain Lelarge
Non-verbal classroom management- Pearl Nitsche
The hidden Language of Music- Paul Robertson
Awakening the Body-Mind through Voice – Henk Kooij
Learning Metaphors- Penny Tompkins and James Lawley
Our common Civilisation- Jim Wingate
Falling in love with Learning- Bonnie Tsai
The Arts: great Tools for Learning, Judit Fehler, Eva Jonai , Agota Scharle
Healing with Voice- James d'Angelo
Listening: a portal to Presence and Consciousness- Adrian Underhill

And some of the plenaries:

Consciousness, bridging Science and Spirit Peter Russell

Psychosynthesis: spiritual Intelligence for the Challenges of our Time Diana Whitmore

Unleashing the Power of Pre-conscious Processing – Paul Scheele

For more information go to:

www.seal.org.uk/conf2003

Middle-Europe SEAL Conference June 6th to 9th 2003.

If, you can't get to SEAL International in Keele, UK, then how about Budapest, Hungary, in early June?

The two big advantages of the Hungarian event are a) the fees lower than in UK b) you can go into the areas you choose in much greater depth. Unlike the breathless rhythm of Keele, with an hour here and 45 minutes there, you can spend a day with the workshop leaders of your choice.

Here are the Budapest options:

Building Teams- Robert Gillan
Non-violent Communication in Schools- Inbal Kashtan
Language Learning and Creative Writing –Mario Rinvolucri
The Metaphoric Mind- Bonnie Tsai
Developing the Qualities of Life-affirming Leadership- Adrian Underhill
Re-valuing the Individual- Jim Wingate

For more information, go to:

www.emk.hu/seal.seminar.html

Grammar and Correction TT Course, September 1st to 5th. 2003

For a detailed description, click HERE.

I am delighted to be the anchor trainer on this course and to welcome Michael Rundell ( IDEAS FROM THE CORPORA) to give us a corpus linguist's view of this area. You already know Seth Lindstromberg and Sheelagh Deller from their writings in the the magazine. Sure, you know Michael, too.

If you decide to join us on our Canterbury, UK, Hilltop, looking down onto the Cathedral, you will :
a) enrich your concept of what language is
b) learn a wide range of techniques for making grammar work enjoyable to students.
c) come to think of correction and how to do it in the light of NLP findings on how self-correction of the normal, unconscious sort operates.

Hope to see you in Canterbury as the leaves start thinking of changing colour.

Thoughts about this Issue ( Year 5 , No. 2, March 2003)

The LEXICAL APPROACH figures as a major concern this month, with Paul Davis' exercises for beginners in LESSON OUTLINES backed up Hanna Kyszewska's MAJOR ARTICLE 2 : Why I won't say goodbye to the Lexical Approach. Hanna wrote her piece in response to Seth Lindstromberg's MAJOR ARTICLE 1 : My Good-bye to the Lexical Approach, a fierce, detailed attack on the ideas of Nattinger and Lewis.

You may remember a previous piece by Franz Andres Morrissey, a couple of years back ( Humanising Univeristy studies through Creative Writing) Short Article, Sep 2000), that offered a slew of exercises for creative writing. In What can Creative Writing do for Teachers? Franz looks at teachers as writers and how they react to their own creative efforts in his workshops.

Is the suffering that testing can cause your students is something you often think about?

If so, the highly practical anti-stress exercises in Short Article 8 : Ways of helping test-takers cope with Anxiety, Fear and Panic will delight you.

In a similar vein, Virginio Gracci in The burden of Over-correction pleads for classroom correction that follows the respectful rules of language help within the family. Virginio was much hurt himself as a school boy by gross over-correction. I guess he has suffered from what Earl Stevick once called " lathophobic aphasia".

Ana Robles, one of our staple writers in the early years of HLT, is back with a brilliant piece on how to teach verb tenses by linking into the students' very varied ways of internally representing time. Have a look at her How to stop students " Tense-jumping".

If you teach teenagers then visit the 13 activities that Seth Lindstromberg presents in Teacher's Resource Book Preview. If you are as bad as me at music then enjoy Old Exercise and get help from experts, Cranmer and Laroy.

NLP tells us that modelling outstanding language learners is a sure-fire way of learning how to learn better ourselves. If you feel in harmony with this way of thinking, then model Henk van Oort in his attempt at Modelling Rita ( Short Article 2)

I feel that this is a rich and varied issue- I hope that some of the 8000 people who now get our e-mail each time an issue goes up agree with me, at least in part.

I am hugely grateful to the 400 to 500 authors who have created HLT over the past 4 years. We have managed something quite exciting together.

Mario.