Humanising Language Teaching
Year 1; Issue 6; October 1999
"The resourceful English Teacher"
by Jonathan Chandler and and Mark Stone.
First Person Publishing Ltd
15 Baldwyn Gdns
London W3 6 HJ
United Kindgom
£12.00 plus postage and packing
Stone and Chandler offer you 200 classroom activities which is almost double the number you would typically find in an average OUP or CUP teacher's resource book. So, in a sense, you have two books for the price of one. ( I hope the publisher doesn't read this and double the price next year! )
They offer you a two page introduction, unlike the mini-MA dissertations that OUP and CUP feel they have to stick in the front of their resource books, perhaps to make them look more academically respectable. Reader surveys have shown that less than a quarter of teachers who buy and use resource books ever even glance at the introduction. They go from the Table of Contents or the index and then straight to the exercises.
A big plus for this book is that the exercise descriptions are of the briefest. This is how the authors manage to get 200 lesson plans into 95 pages. Here is a typical exercise layout from the first Section : Newspapers. Here's how it looks:
Where are the Correspondents?
Excellent practice for finding one's way around a newspaper and scanning…..
plus a copy of a different English language newspaper and a photocopied map of the world for each pair/ group of students
put the students into pairs or small groups
Give each pair/group a photocopied map of the world and a different newspaper. ( Serious newspapers generally work better for this activity)
Tell them that each newspaper has correspondents in different parts of the world; their task is to mark on their map the location of all the correspondents for the newspaper that they have been given.
At the end of the activity, all the maps and newspapers can be compared.
The lesson plans are really easy to read and you get 6 activities per double page spread.
Here is their Table of Contents:
Introduction
- Newspapers
- Articles
- Songs
- Readers
- Icebreakers and Welcoming Activities
- Dialogues
- Warmers and Fillers
- Circles
- Questionnaires
- The Word Box
- Dictionaries
- The OHP
- Computers
- The Radio
- TV and Video.
In their introduction Mark and Jonathan say that the book has arisen out of the need to recommend a single resource book to beginner teachers “.. that covers many of the areas of daily classroom practice”.
So instead of buying Peter Grundy's book on Newspapers, Murphy's book on Song, Morgan's The Q Book, on questionnaires , etc…the young teacher simply gets The resourceful English Teacher.
This is a teacher-friendly publishing idea and we'd like to congratulate First Person Publishing for offering a new outlet for teacher resource books at a time when this genre is being fiercely squeezed by the major houses.
