Humanising Language Teaching
Year 5; Issue 3; May 03

Conferences

You go to a conference, you attend loads of sessions, you get very tired. After the conference you chat with a friend who was also there and you ask her " Go to anything good? After the April IATEFL conference I did just this with Tessa Woodward, editor of The Teacher Trainer, and she goes *:
I went to a session by Jill Cosh from Cambridge. She came up with a really simple, beautiful peer observation idea:
I go to observe your lesson with the unique aim of reflecting on my own teaching. In the feedback session I tell you what I have learnt about my own teaching from watching your lesson. How about that for humanising peer observation?

Speaking of conferences, don't forget the Hungary SEAL Conference in Budapest, 6-9th of June, www.emk.hu/seal_seminar.html. This will allow to you to really get into a couple of areas in depth and also to hear plenaries by all the workshop leaders.

At the University of Keele, UK, on June 19th –22nd SEAL International holds its two yearly Conference www.seal.org.uk.
People have often asked What are the SEAL approaches and how do I start? You will find the answer to this is a new book, out in June, Inspirational Teaching and Transformational Learning- an Introduction to SEAL Approaches. People going to the Conference will get a free copy and HLT readers can get a copy for 10 UK pounds (two quid off) by emailing: seal@seal.org.uk

The September 1-5th 2003 HLT-Pilgrims
Grammar and Correction course

The website statistics show that, through April, around 400 HLT readers read the course description.

There are still some places on the course.

If you want to come on it, the time to book yourself a place is NOW.

What's in this May 2003 Issue?

Reader's Letters shows that more and more people are doing their MA dissertations around the themes of humanising language teaching but that they have problems harmonising what they need and want to say with the demands of academia and the bizarre, pseudo-scientificism of some MA and PHD courses.

On the practical side you have a varied feast of exercises, this time mainly for upper intermediate and advanced , secondary and adult learners, with titles like
Compliments and Corrections
Individualising Correction
Mid-Course Feedback
Starting and ending a Course, all of this in Teacher's Resource Book Preview

An Old Exercise brings you some brilliant 1930's activities from A.R.Orage's On Love and Psychological Exercises. How can we innovate without knowing what our heritage is?

A quarter of humanity lives in China and in Major Article 1 Bob Adams looks at 60 years of curriculum development in China liberated from the the Western Powers, from Japan and from feudalism, that is to say post- 1948 China.

If you feel that cultural things are central to foreign language learning then don't miss Major article 2, in which a Canadian tells of her 7 year struggle with Japanese values and the language of that beautiful archipelago Short article 2 shows you the frustrations of a Westerner dealing with the Chinese University World.

HLT would dearly love to publish texts by people from round the world describing how they suffer when they find they have to cope with the cultural oddity and extremism of Western society. I am thinking, for example, of the dangerous tendency to plant bushes right around dwellings, which we do in the West, oblivious of the way this attracts snakes right into our living quarters. No rural Indonesian in their right mind could conceive of such aberrant behaviour.

Why do we have submit to the tyranny of linear, uni-directional text? Isn't reading, instead, an extraordinary navigational act? To answer these questions have a look at Claudia Ferradas Moi' s Hyper-reading, Hyper-Writing- explorations in non-linear Literacy.

Tessa Woodward, in Major article 4, describes a workshop in which she got participants to analyse current EFL textbooks from a gender perspective. Her article may make you want to get your students doing this sort of analysis of the textbooks they are learning English from.

The Art of Listening (Short Article 3) and Paying real Attention to Students (Short Article 9) both describe a teacher attitude that allows her real, consensual power in her teaching, that makes her bigger than she would be if she were to teach autistically, as some teachers, sadly, do.

Did you enjoy Lindstromberg's frontal attack on the Lexical Approach in the March issue of HLT? He's at it again in this issue's Seth Column.

I hope you enjoy parts of the May issue. If you enjoy all of it then I am editing the magazine too narrowly!

Talk to you again in July.