Humanising Language Teaching
Year 2; Issue 6; November 2000

Welcome to HLT 2000 Issue 6, the November Issue that comes from the Southern Cone of Latin America.

If you have not been to places like Argentina and Brazil, you may well not know how much brilliant language teaching is going on there, predominantly in the private sector. The English language level of the private sector teachers in places like Montevideo, Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro is, in my opinion, as good or better than you will find among EFL non-native teachers in countries like Sweden and Holland.

The reason you may not know about the excellence of our profession in the Cono Sur, is that our colleagues there are hard working and modest folk who teach a lot more than they write. One of the reasons of asking for a guest edition of HLT from the shores of the Rio de Plata ( River of Silver) was to help give people from the area a strong international voice. ( At the end of last year, the guest edition of HLT came from Gdansk in Poland).

This issue's long article contributes to the " Native" and "Non-Native " debate and encourages you to read the book by Peter Medgyes on this topic.

The Jokes section has a quite different flavour from any previous set of jokes we have published and deals with the difficulties of marriage. Are too many of the jokes anti-male?

Ana Maria Bergel's On Grammar Grading and other Myths makes the point that teacher planning is often not subordinated to the student learning reality. As a result a lot of teacher planning is wide of the student mark and this is made worse by both teacher and students following a sequence dreamed up by the course book writer who knew nothing about either.

Silvia Scarpa de Lareo offers you an article on Values Education in secondary school backed up by a multi-stage lesson plan : Values Lesson : Friendship.

In The Wonderful WORLD of English, the writers of Wonderland, Heinemann, 2000, enunciate a set of principles they feel primary English should be based around. These principles would make a pretty good charter for humanistic teaching to students of any age.

I think the article by Matilde Leites and Adriana Butureira on Self-directed Learning as a growing trend in in-company EFL is the first time HLT has dealt with the area of learner autonomy. I hope this will interest many, but especially Scandinavian and Dutch readers.

This issue carries two articles on teaching business English, another area we have so far neglected in HLT.

Getting together an issue of HLT is quite strenuous work and we have to thank

Gustavo Rodriguez and his editorial team at GRB Language Services
25 de Mayo 626 Piso 6
Montevideo
Uruguay

Gustavo, Adriana Butureira and Rislo Buscarons, thank you for this issue and all the best for 2001.