Letter 1

Dear Hanna

In Hall Houston's article on Emotional Intelligence he states that "The term emotional intelligence (also known as EQ) comes from Daniel Goleman's 1995 book, Emotional Intelligence." It was, however, Salovey and Maher who first coined the phrase and Goleman, a journalist, merely popularized the theory and sexed it up.

Incidentally, I'm giving a workshop at Oxford House College Teachers Club this month on Developing EQ in the ELT Classroom, which is why I was particularly interested in the above-mentioned article.

Thanks for including my book review.

With all good wishes

Michael

Letter 2

Hi Hania,

Daniel Goleman has certainly done a great job towards popularizing Emotional Intelligence. This must be said. However, I find it really weird that in the list of references Hall Houston provides at the bottom of his article on Emotional Intelligence, American psychologists Peter Savoney, Jack Mayer and Howard Gardner are ignored. They're the ones who after all first talked about E.I. and it seems to me the original theorists should get at least some of the credit.

Thanks for another juicy issue of HLT mag.

Warmest.

Chaz

Letter 3

Dear Ms Kryszewska

I wrote to you sometime ago - after I had been enthused by Mario Rinvolucri - and told you I'd be submitting to HLT. You very kindly sent me back the guidelines. I apologise for not getting back to you sooner.

I've since received your hand-out: "13 Reasons Why You Might Want To Write For HLT" which you circulated via e-mail to all the readers of HLT.

Unfortunately, as always in this exploitative industry of ours, there is no question of payment for this extra work. This is not your fault. I'm sure, as always, there is no budget for this in my school.

However, I have already produced many worksheets for my school and taken several teacher-training sessions without payment, and, to be frank, am sick and tired of not being remunerated for my time and effort. I can't feed my family by "raising my profile in the company".

As it happens, I already share creative ideas and infect my colleagues with enthusiasm on a day-to-day basis out of an feeling of basic human solidarity, which the people with their hands on the purse strings in our industry would do well to emulate. Perhaps I am harking back to a golden age of the 1970's when teachers originally set up schools as co-operatives which have since been taken over by mercenary, corporate EFL barons who place cost effectiveness over pedagogy every time.

I object to a premiership elite of pop star EFL methodologists being handsomely rewarded, while the rest of have to slum it in the lower leagues on casual contracts and insulting rates of pay, wondering whether we'll be timetabled out next week or not. With the greatest of respect to Mario Rinvolucri, whose work I admire immensely, I think it shows insensitivity and disrespect to expect others to produce for gratis what he does for love and money.

Instead of a school asking teachers to contribute for free, one sure way of avoiding the kind of de-motivation and stuck-in-a-rut-ness, would be to stop undervaluing our contribution every day of the working week by paying us a decent wage in the first place.

Yours

Letter 4

Dear Editor,

Nonsensical "scientific" methodology

In the Year 9,Issue 5 September 2007, you published an article by Shahin Vaezi and Mehdi Mirzaei on: The effect of using translation from L1 to L2.......... This 11 page article describes an "experiment" in teaching grammar structure contrastively. The authors used the wheeze of having an " experimental group" and a "control group". And here comes one of the most amazing sentences I have read yet this year:

Regarding the control group, everything was similar to that of the experimental group, except that there were no Persian sentences to be translated into English.

These two authors seem to have fallen into the normal nonsense prevalent in Western so-called "applied" linguistics of believing that you can actually have a "control" group with characteristics similar to the "experimental" group. To believe that you can even begin to enumerate the variables that need to be checked for in a human learner is an absurd vanity. There is nothing remotely scientific, reliable or commonsensical about this procedure.

In this article I see the academic imperialism of the West perverting the commonsense of colleagues from a quite other tradition, the brilliant Iranian tradition, and encouraging them to do addle-patted pseudo- "experiments" with their hapless students.

By the way, I fully agree with the authors, with Dr Luke Prodromou and with Professor Guy Cook that contrastive teaching of grammar makes eminent good sense. Deep down we all know this as teachers and as language learners.

Cordially yours,

Mario Rinvolucri,
Co-author with Sheelagh Deller of Using the Mother tongue, Delta, 2002

Letter 5

Hello Paul,

I'd like you to say "Thank you" to your girlfriend Hania, for taking care of Pilgrim's HLT Mag. Previously, it was as useful as Ferrari with its engine stolen. Now it works perfectly and I can enrich my MA with some of your articles.

Hope to see you some day,

Marcin Wolańczuk