When Mario Rinvolucri proposed that I take on the role of guest editor to the November 2004 issue of Humanising Language Teaching, I felt honoured and challenged alike. OK, I had been on the editorial committee of ET (English Teaching) but we had just announced the demise of this journal (of the Flemish Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language, FATEFL/VVLE). So I wondered if I would be able to muster up and motivate a sufficient number of colleagues and former colleagues to contribute a piece.

The result of my quest I submit to your critical appraisal in this issue of HLT. I am glad that an issue with a made in Flanders (*)label eventually turned out as a finished product including contributions from the Netherlands and from Wallonia, the French-speaking half of Belgium.

Major Articles on offer are Arthur van Essen's The Rise and Role of English as an International language. Some educational consequences and Peter van Vugt's neurolinguistic perspective of C.L. Dodgson's migraine and Lewis Carroll's literary inspiration.
In Major Article 4, The Deleted Essentials Test, you will find a very useful summary of current thinking on testing together with a proposed new test.

If you go to the rubric Short Article you will find that Raf Erzeel has no simple answer to What Makes a Good Teacher but highlights the unteachable teaching instinct, absent from most manuals on teaching techniques. In Streetwise Grammar the same author is of the opinion that a living language is much like a bustling city, slowly changing its appearance over the years but remaining recognisably the same. Therefore it is better to adopt a pragmatic attitude to grammar and to take students for a walk through the city rather than teach them the grammar guidebook.
In their article Idiom Teacher- Problems in designing a CALL Package, the authors show us how to help students master a comparatively large number of English idiomatic expressions).

And then we enter cyberspace. Clément Laroy invites us for an inspection tour around My humanistic cyber classroom to see for ourselves how such a well-equipped (and functioning!) room has now made it possible (not just for him) to concentrate far more on learners' needs than ever before.
Lesson Outlines features Tom Bekers' recipe for an Internet Lesson: Travelling by Train involving roleplay. During a workshop for Flemish colleagues Ray Janssens noticed that Cloze Dictogloss was almost completely unknown. He, for one, considers it an effective teaching tool in that it reconciles the (teacher's?) interest in grammar and the need for interactive student-centred learning and the achievement of accuracy through fluency activities.

No doubt The Path Game is an Old Exercise. I do not know how old it actually is. I only remember I first did it 22 years ago. In no time it became my absolute favourite. It is highly student-centred, creative, enables practice in the four skills and is great fun. I have used it innumerable times with all sorts of classes and can testify that it 'worked' always, except once!

In Ideas from the Corpora Nick Pringle and Kris van de Poel quote John Donne to support their demonstration of three approaches to learning lexical chunks, all of which involve the use of corpora.

Student voices
Here you have a Belgian lass writing an initial email to a potential cyber-pal. She gives an excellent biopic of herself. Reading something like this may get your students going if you invite them to correspond with an unknown class the other side of the world.

Finally, in Publications, Raf Erzeel as an EFL teacher is rather in two minds as to the qualities of "Teaching and Researching Motivation" (Zoltan Dörnyei, Pearson Education, 2001).

Happy reading!

Ray Janssens
Guest editor

Mario Rinvolucri adds:

Major Article 1 in this issue has been given over to tributes from his colleagues to John Morgan, who died at the beginning of November. What these twenty people have to say about this Rogerian master teacher goes beyond a praising of his personal qualities and, I think, stands as a many-voiced, powerful and sometimes lyrical evocation of the heart of humanistic thinking and feeling

I would like to heartily thank my friend Ray Janssens from Antwerp, Flanders, Belgium, for his very successful bringing together of this issue.

(*) the Dutch-speaking half of Belgium