Humanising Language Teaching
Year 3; Issue 6; November 2001
Dear Editor,
I have thought of a delightful way of encouraging students to pick up a book. I have a lovely picture of my close friend Nicky and me looking very happy together, basking in the Cambridge sunshine. I started using it as a bookmark because it happened to be lying on my bedside cabinet and now I realise how contented I feel looking at it every night before I go to sleep.
Why not extend this idea to homesick students , unrequited lovers, lovesick teenagers etc..? Get them to choose a favourite photo as book mark for the English stuff they are reading ( novel? reader? magazine? maybe even a grammar book!) and they'll be delighted to pick up their book regularly , open it and, who knows, maybe even read it!
Sheila Levy
DOS, Cambridge Academy of English
Girton, Cambridge Cambridge CB3 0QD
Dear Editor,
I've been teaching English here in Hungary for about 6 years now. I'd just like raise two issues.
- Why are the coursebooks so bad? Why can't we write something more helpful? In this context I use a book of short stories with cassettes and do split listenings and comprehension quizzes etc. Together with Peter Watcyn Jones's Pairwork books, this works much better than any coursebook I know. Why can't something similar be produced in England? Why is it left to some small publisher in Hungary?
- . When I first started teaching I was appalled at the amount of time spent on teaching the tenses. I mean, I learnt French, German, Russian and now Hungarian and we never created such a brouhaha about tenses. Having said that, the rules we were given were just plain wrong or incomplete. Much better to pick up the correct usage from stories and dialogs or TV. So why spend so much time confusing the students?
Sincerely,
Julian Sefton
Julian.Sefton@britishcouncil.h
