Humanising Language Teaching
Year 3; Issue 5; September 2001
Welcome to Humanising Language Teaching Issue 5, September 2001.
This issue carries a strong focus on the topic of coursebooks. In the first piece under Major Article, Brian Tomlinson describes the scene in Liverpool, some decades ago, when he and the students went to their upper floor classroom windows and threw their coursbooks out of the window, yes, physically jettisoned them. Since then Brian has been involved in many coursebook writing projects! His stand on these matters is coherent and to find out how, click across now to Major Article.
If you go to Short article at number 8 you will find COURSEBOOKS: The roaring in the Chimney, in which Thornbury and Meddings give you a much fuller idea of the Dogme group's thinking about how to free students from the yoke of textbooks than I was able to give you in the July 2001 HLT Editorial. In Readers' letters Angus Head explains the upsides and the downsides of the practical task of teaching coursebook-less in a private language school in Spain. He is very open about the mixed nature of student reaction to throwing out the coursebook.
Silent Way thinking is strongly represented in this issue with Claire Oezel Thomas's piece entitled Give me Mistakes, the second Major article, and Rosalyn Young's Silent Way and getting Low intermediate students to speak, which you will find under Short article. As far as I can see, both these writers assume a coursebook-free classroom environment.
In Lesson Outlines you have five activities for 8-9 years olds from Anna Sofie Pedersen, Denmark, and in An Old Exercise, there is a Japanese exercise from the 10th century AD.
There are some Multiple Intelligence exercises by Puchta and Rinvolucri to be found in Teachers' Resource Book Preview, and Debbie Smith's Ideas for warmers, under Short Article also draws inspiration from Howard Gardner's work.
Maybe HLT, over the past three years, has not carried enough about how second language learners of English feel about the bizarre code they have to grapple with. Silvia Stephan and Suzy Semenza remedy this in this issue with their respective pieces, What makes me, as a very advanced speaker, feel different from a native, and I feel free in a foreign language, both in Short article.
For some HLT readers there may be a wariness of NLP- if this is your case have a look at A Head Teacher talks to parents in school, Short Article, in which you will find a quiet description of how NLP has helped a no-nonsense, both-feet-on-the-ground head mistress in Austria.
Traditionally the last issue of each year is created by a guest editorial group. The November 2001 issue of HLT will come to you from a Durham University ( UK) editorial group. If you remember, last year the November HLT arose from the waters of the Rio de Plata, fished together by an Uruguayan editorial board.
Good Reading! Good Writing!
Message from Tessa Woodward, editor of The Teacher Trainer
The Teacher Trainer now has a brand new website.
You will find us at: www.tttjournal.co.uk
We are building up an archive of full length articles, "golden oldies" from early issues that, now 15 years on, are quite hard to come by. The website is a beautiful shade of blue and has information on the journal, how to subscribe to it and how to advertise. Come and visit us… often….browse the articles, see who's in the guest book and make use of the bibliography.
Tessa.
