Humanising Language Teaching
Year 1; Issue 6; October 1999

Welcome to Issue 6 of the Pilgrims' webzine for EFL teachers.

The wish to come together of teachers attracted by the humanistic movement in language teaching has been met by two conferences focusing on this area. The first was in Canterbury, UK, where around 160 people came together to work with Donald Freeman, Bernard Dufeu, Peter Medgyes and others. We worked together for the whole of the last week of August. At most conferences you go to X for an hour to Y for 45 minutes and to X for half an hour. At the Pilgrims conference participants signed up for serious , 7 clock-hour workshops with the animators of their choice. This format fosters work in depth rather than hurried flight from flower to flower.

The second week-end in September brought 50 people together from all over Spain and Portugal for a two day conference at a place near Seville called El Molino. This was a more intimate event than the Pilgrims do and the participants were, to a woman, people committed to person-centred teaching. Adrian Underhill taught people about the Inner Workbench, Grethe Hooper Hanson worked on pre-conscious processing ( Norman Dixon) and Mario Rinvolucri presented some practical techniques from the work of Jacob Moreno, Willy Urbain and Bernard Dufeu. It was Jane Arnold ( Affect in Language Learning, CUP, 1999) who brought us together and kept us more or less in order!.

And while people in Kent and Andalucia were enjoying the emotional and intellectual lift they got from meeting people of like mind, Valeria Gallerani was busy planning the second Portonovo Humanistic Conference for early September 2000. Like the first one in Sept 98, it will be under the auspices of the LEND Association, and will take place near Ancona, on the Adriatic coast of Italy.

HLT rejoices at the spread of these conferences with a powerful common focus and I guess they will be an important part of the English language teaching scene in the first decade of the 21st Century.

In Issue 6 we bring you areas not yet dealt with in the 'zine.

I have managed to offer you five issues without any substantial mention of the musical intelligence. To remedy this, Libyan Labiosa has keyed a major article on how she finds multiple, well-focused uses for music in her accelerative learning classroom.

Under the rubric short article you can either read John Wilson's very practical piece on how he teaches literature to Japanese English majors or Julian Edge's humorous but passionate piece defending the role of applied linguistic Praetorian Guards at the gates to our profession.

The letters column is weighty this time, with Andrew Wright reacting to Paul Davis' article in Issue 1 on Teacher Development and Sandeha Lynch reacting to an article by Jane Arnold on person-centred ways of teaching university students ( Issue 3)

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Mario Rivolucri, Editor.