Humanising Language Teaching
Year 4; Issue 6; November 02

Dear Readers,

Welcome to our guest issue : HLT Year 4, Issue 6, November 2002!

As you will see, it is mostly a Belgian one, but we're glad and proud to have contributions from as far afield as Senegal !

Being the guest editors of the November issue has been a fascinating experience for us, both because it is something of a sort we had never done before and because we want to show you a way of teaching we've been working with for quite a long time… over 20 years for us and many of our colleagues !! Some of the writers of this issue work in a school called the “I.E.P.S.C.F.”. You can read about it in under Course Outline.
Of course, we also have writers from other schools in Belgium.

This issue wouldn't exist without all the talented writers, translators, correctors and computer specialists who have so generously contributed. The list is too long but we thank them all from the bottom of our hearts.

SGAV Methodology

In this issue, reference is often made to an approach without which our way of teaching would not be what it is today. It all started in the late seventies of the last century, with, first of all, the elaboration of the “Audio-Visual Structuro-Global” (“AVSG”), or in French, the “Structuro-Global Audio-Visuel” (SGAV) theory.

And also, immediately after this there came an extraordinary coursebook that gave a new face to AVSG courses: All's Well (1 and 2), written by Dickinson, Lévêque and Sagot, and, later on, “Pourquoi Pas ?”, written by Sagot and others for teaching French as a foreign language. As Guberina puts it in his preface to “All's Well”:

“The stress is placed on the adult student's mental ability to interpret the many aspects of the pictures , to understand the listening texts little by little according to his own ability and to organize the semantic and structural content of the course….”
“The new teaching approaches derived from this material include the use of mime, note-taking, the free interpretation of pictures, while repetition has been relegated to a secondary position………"

For a fuller vision of what Sagot and his colleagues created and how it has developed, read the second Major Article in this issue Multilingualism: Its Methodological Aspects.

Since integration of the body is central to SGAV methodology, we are happy to have a Major Article, The Body in a Pedagogy of Being by Viviane Laroy.

If you go to the Student Voices section you will find some student views on SGAV methodology as experienced in learning various languages, including Arabic.

In Ideas From the Corpora, Professor Ron Carter of Nottingham University, a leading researcher into the mysteries of oral grammar, writes about the creativity of everyday conversation. It is marvellous to see how hot-off-the press corpus research justifies the language insights of Sagot and Dickenson when they wrote ALL'S WELL, more than 30 years ago.

If you go to Publications, you will find a review of a major work on metaphor, METAPHORS IN MIND. The authors, who are strong NLPers, bring you David Grove's insights into this marvellous access route to the sub-conscious.

In Teacher Resource Book Preview you have six activities from Sheelagh Deller's USING MOTHER TONGUE, a rather naughty book that cocks a snook at Direct Method orthodoxy. It certainly offends against our SGAV beliefs about language learning.

We wish you as much pleasure in reading the magazine as we took putting it together.

Claudette de Ville and Cathy Duykaerts