On the Road with Gary in…Turkey

Make your Teacher’s Book thine own when teaching a new course

I was in Turkey last month: in the east, at Erzurum at the foot of Palandöken Mountain (with the best ski slopes in Turkey, so they say), and in the south in Adana and its surrounding region. I was mostly doing post-adoption training for teachers who have adopted a Cambridge English course for the new academic year: courses such as Kid’s Box and Super Minds for primary and More!, Your Space and Interactive for secondary.

Now I only had an hour or so for each session with different groups of teachers and you can’t do much in-depth training in that limited amount of time. So we talked about the underlying methodology of the course, and looked at the overall course structure and how (and why) a unit is put together. Of course we discussed ideas for teaching a lesson, including supplementing the coursebook with downloadables available on the different Teacher’s Zones at http://www.cambridge.org/elt, for example. We also talked about sharing the wealth of ideas and experience by adding activities drawn from colleagues, or even your own, because you teach the class, not just the coursebook, right?

But I insisted that we also look at the teacher’s books accompanying each course. Why? Because I know that whenever I started teaching a new coursebook, I would always use the teacher’s book for its wealth of information and ideas. I’d take a good look at its answers (a time-saver and to avoid trouble-makers), and its suggested groupings and timings for each exercise. I’d run through its ideas for warm-up and extension activities, and advice on teaching mixed-ability classes – after all, every class is a mixed-ability class, isn’t it? I’d even work my way through the tape- and video-scripts all the way through to the supplementary photocopiable activities in the back!

I pointed out to the teachers in Turkey that there’s almost always a lot of white space on the pages of teacher’s books. You can use that space to customize and make the teacher’s book your own. You can write in comments and add Post-its next to individual activities as reminders of what worked or didn’t. You can remind yourself of how much more or less time an activity took than the guess-estimate given. You can add ideas on what to supplement the activity or lesson with, and with advice and reminders on what to do differently – or the same – the next time you teach that activity or lesson.

All this personalising the textbook takes us back to the title of this post, and in particular to a word that may have been unfamiliar to you: ‘thine’. Older forms of English used to have two different forms of the second person possessive: ‘your’ for the ‘plural’, and ‘thy’ for the singular (or ‘thine’ when used in front of a vowel).  My suggestions for personalizing your teacher’s books can be understood as a way of making ‘your’ teacher’s book (that is, the one everyone uses) into ‘thine own’ individual, personal and on-going teaching document!

What about you?  Do you look at and use the teacher’s books, especially when starting with a new coursebook? How do you personalise your teacher’s book(s)? Looking forward to seeing your votes in the above poll and to reading and replying to your comments.

Gary Anderson, Cambridge ELT International Teacher Trainer

On the Road with Gary…in Iceland

Moving from informal to formal English (or ‘street smart’ vs. ‘book smart’)

Went to Reykjavik last month for the national conference of FEKI (the Icelandic acronym for their Association of Teachers of English) in lovely Iceland, a country the size of Kentucky with a population of only 320,000—plus 80,000 Icelandic horses. (Don’t call them ‘ponies’ or you’ll insult Icelanders.) Did you know that since the crash of the Icelandic banking system (remember?), the country has made an official national effort to promote itself as a natural reserve to visit and now there are 500,000 (half a million!) tourists visiting Iceland each year? That’s more than the native population!

Presenting in Iceland

All those visitors speaking the international language is one reason that Icelanders speak such excellent English. Another is that almost all Icelanders have family and relatives living and visiting from abroad. In fact, in his conference talk Professor Samuel Lefever (a fellow Kansan) of the University of Iceland demonstrated—by testing local kids with exams tasks similar to those found on the Cambridge Young Learners Exams—that Icelandic children incidentally ‘pick up’ quite a lot of English even before they start learning English officially at school. The contingent from neighbouring (sort of) Norway and myself were very impressed.

The theme of the conference was ‘Making Sense Through Writing’ and since Iceland has such a reading culture (‘Go barefoot before bookless’ is the translation of one Icelandic proverb), I presented two talks on writing: ‘Tools for Teaching Kids Writing Inside—and Outside—the Box’ and ‘Reading, Writing and CLIL’. Both talks focused on how intensive reading, cross-curricular and project work activities in coursebooks for such as Kid’s Box, More! and English in Mind as well as extensive ‘pleasure’ reading with graded, and ungraded, readers in the Cambridge Readers series can serve as springboards to higher-level writing skills. By the way, I can recommend Emma Heyderman’s excellent presentations on writing skills (though this particular video is in relation to the PET exam preparation).

But the buzz of the conference among Icelandic teachers was their new National Curriculum to be implemented in the next school years. It aims to move students in the 35 upper-secondary schools from their good informal English to better formal language, especially academic and professional writing and spoken production, in order for them to achieve a B2/C1 level by matriculation and be ready for tertiary education—because apparently 90% of study materials in Icelandic universities are in English! Or, as I said in my comments at the conference’s closing panel discussion, from being ‘street smart’ to becoming ‘book smart’.

What about you? How do you take your learners from being ‘street smart’ to becoming ‘book smart’—or vice-versa? Looking forward to hearing about your experience.

Gary Anderson, Cambridge ELT International Teacher Trainer

On the Road with Gary in…Belgium and the Balkans

Teaching ‘tween-agers’ and teenagers

I was in the middle of back-to-back trips to Belgium (just Brussels) and the Balkans (just Skopje in Macedonia and Podgorica in Montenegro) where I was giving various workshops, including on teaching tween-agers with More! and Messages and on teaching teenagers with English in Mind and Interactive. It got me thinking about, well, tween-agers and teenagers.

Now first of all, if you haven’t come across the term ‘tween-agers’ before, it’s fairly self-explanatory. Tween-agers are pre-adolescent children who are ‘in between’ ages; they’re no longer infants in primary school (so language classes are no longer mainly fun and games and songs) but also not yet teenagers (with all the challenges they pose; think teenage crisis, rebellion, puberty et al) in secondary school. Tween-agers are in between the imaginative, fairy tale world of Father Christmas and unicorns and the real world, coming out of infancy and going into a different psychological — and biological — realm.

I remember — and used as examples in my talks — my kids as tween-agers: My son would still cuddle on my lap with me, but he (alas) wouldn’t do that when he became a teenager. And when she was a tween-ager, my daughter still had all her stuffed animals on her bed while at the same time had her bedroom walls full of posters of the singer Anastasia and the Spice Girls.

My daughter Googled ‘tween-agers’ and came up with this first reference from The Guardian back in March 2001: If you think teenagers are growing up quickly, take a look at their younger siblings, the 9- to 12- year-olds the marketing industry has branded as “tween-agers”. (In fact, as you probably know, ‘teenagers’ was also originally a marketing term coined in the US back in the 50s to sell to the post World War II so-called ‘baby-boomers’.)

9 to 12, 8 to 13, 10 to 14 or whatever; the ages don’t exactly really matter — it’s the principle that does. And in most countries, there is in fact an educational divide between primary school and secondary school, called different things in different countries: upper primary, middle school, junior high school, lower secondary… whatever.

Anyway, I was trying to make the point during my talks that there’s a difference between teaching tween-agers and teenagers. Because with tween-agers you can still deal with the affective side while also being effective by starting to teach them grammar rules, lexical formation, perhaps some phonetic symbols, etc. But with most teenagers, you have to be quite careful on the emotional side, while of course preparing them for their school-leaving exams and/or Cambridge English for Schools exams and for using English in their future studies and careers.

What about you? Do you teach tween-agers and/or teenagers? Do you think there’s a difference between teaching ‘tweens and ‘teens? Is the educational distinction made in your country and, if so, at what ages? Looking forward to reading — and replying to — your comments.

Gary Anderson, Cambridge ELT International Teacher Trainer

On the Road with Gary in…the Baltics

Celebrities, ELT course books and teaching teenagers

 

Was on my way back from the Baltics last month (well, actually only went to Latvia and Lithuania this time), getting ready for IATEFL conference in Glasgow, when I came across an article in the latest IATEFL Newsletter Voices which made me stop and reflect on the talks I had been doing in the Baltics on teaching teenagers with two Cambridge ELT courses, English in Mind and Interactive.

Talk in Riga

Sara Hannam writes a regular ‘ELT under the microscope’ column in Voices and last issue she took a look at ‘the cult of celebrity in ELT’ and especially bad-mouthed course books in which rich and famous people are seemingly presented as role models. And I sort of both agreed and disagreed with her.

Of course, we don’t at all want to foster, as Sara writes, ‘an insidious ideology proposing the acquisition of money and luxurious lifestyles as the only route to happiness’ (Whew!). In fact, such celebrities are often teenagers’ role models. And not just because of their money and fame or outward ‘bling’ and notoriety. Often, underneath their ‘cult’ personalities are those more abstract qualities which they represent and that teenagers are starting to think about and desire to also somehow achieve in their lives:  excellence, creativity, talent, genius, courage, tolerance, love.

For example, during my Interactive talk I showed a page with a picture of Lady Gaga (used to discuss fashion styles and review clothes vocabulary). I also mentioned that if I were teaching from the book, I might bring in – as a follow-up – an interview with her from a recent Time magazine in which we find out that Lady Gaga is—in addition to being a crazy dresser— a philanthropist who launched the Born This Way Foundation to combat bullying.

And when I talked about project work with the teachers we looked at one of the projects in English in Mindabout a presentation of ‘a special person’. The teacher’s book reminds the teacher, as the teacher should remind the students, that this person is not at all necessarily a rich and famous celebrity but could just as well be, for example, their football or volleyball coach, or their grandparents who immigrated into the country and ran a small grocery store and raised a happy family.

Talk in Vilnius

In other words, I would hope most teachers as educators of teenagers would use any famous people presented in a course book as a springboard for their learners to, as Sara suggests, ‘comment on whether such individuals deserve so much attention…and not simply accepting these lifestyles as the norm.’

Do you think the use of celebrities in learning materials is a good or bad thing?
Has the use of celebrities in teaching materials ever caused any problems in your classes?
How have you used students’ role models to motivate their learning?

Gary Anderson, Cambridge ELT International Teacher Trainer

Personalisation—is it the same with teenagers as with adults?

 I was trying to catch up a little on my professional reading while travelling to and from events in Budapest and Strasbourg recently, and on the French TGV train I came across an article on ‘Personalisation’ by Rose Senior, which made me stop and think. The article was in July issue (yes, I am somewhat behind…) of the English Teaching Professional. 

Gary at teacher training session in Hungary

 Now, I always read the articles by ‘Dr. Rose’ (as she signs her regular column) and I usually agree with her. But this time something she wrote had me shaking my head in a slight disagreement: ‘A powerful technique for encouraging interaction is that of personalisation: giving students the opportunity to share with others aspects of themselves as people—their likes and dislikes, feelings, personal experiences, knowledge, opinions and so on.’

 Yes, of course…but, well, maybe not always. Seems to me it’s different when teaching teenagers than when teaching adults. In fact, that difference is exactly something I mentioned in my separate talks in Budapest and Strasbourg: on teaching adults with English Unlimited and on teaching teenagers with English in Mind. Let me explain and see if you agree—with me.

 In my experience, adults usually like talking about themselves and sharing their experiences. Ask an adult ‘What did you do last weekend?’ (although you might want to phrase your question as a ‘two-step question’ since data from the Cambridge English Corpus of spoken English shows that is how native speakers often ask typical questions, e.g. ‘What did you do last weekend? I mean, did you go out or stay at home or what?’) and he/she is usually ready to tell you—and the rest of the class. And, yes indeed, adults are usually ready and willing to express their opinions and share their knowledge on most matters. (Of course you must be careful bringing up topics concerning politics, religion or sexual matters…)

 But it’s a whole different ballgame with teenagers! Ask a teenager in front of the class on Monday ‘What did you do last weekend?’ or on Friday ‘What are you doing this weekend?’ and the teenager is probably first of all thinking,’ Hey teacher, it’s none of your business!’ And also ‘I don’t want him to know because he didn’t invite me to the party’ or ‘I don’t want her to know because she’s on the volleyball team and I didn’t make the cut.’ Also, some teenagers may not have informed opinions, knowledge or experience on a lot of topics. So, no need to potentially put them on the spot and in the difficult position of trying to formulate a personal response—and in a foreign language!—while they are also perhaps thinking inside ‘I don’t want everyone to look at me and see my spots (Br)/pimples (US)—or messy hair.’ Adults joke about having a ‘bad hair day’; that’s not necessarily a laughing matter with teenagers. No, there’s a lot going on in a typical teenager’s mind-set.

 Anyway, that’s my personal opinion and experience. What do you think? Can you ‘personalise’ as easily and in the same way when teaching teenagers as when teaching adults? I’d love to hear your comments.

 Gary Anderson, Cambridge ELT International Teacher Trainer

 P.S. Rose Senior has a good book on The Experience of Language Teaching in the Cambridge Language Teaching Library. And you can read her regular column in the English Teaching Professional or online at www.etprofessional.com

On the Road with Gary in… Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Romania

Well, I got back from summer holidays and immediately jumped back in the saddle…er, seat belt again with three trips before the start of the 2011/12 school year: to Serbia for a weekend with Cambridge residential summer school in Kovacica outside Belgrade; for a four-city tour around Bosnia–Herzegovina; and for the Fischer International conference in Bucharest. I was giving lots of different talks, including a new talk on Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL)which is the subject of this post.

Gary with Serbia English Language Teachers Association (ELTA) vice-president Danijela Serafijanovic

The title of my talk—CLIL Won’t Kill —alludes of course to the Quentin Tarantino films Kill Bill Parts 1 and II.  Now, although Tarantino is my son’s favourite film director, I personally am not a big fan of his: a wonderful stylist, yes, but I don’t find a lot of feeling or emotion (except violence) in his movies.

Anyway, I changed the sword to a nice bouquet of flowers that language teachers can offer to both subject teacher colleagues and to their own language students when involved in what I call either ‘real’ CLIL, i.e. teaching a subject and a foreign language together (as is happening in a lot of countries), or CLIL ‘lite’ which for me means the language teacher bringing topics and activities from other subjects in the school curriculum, e.g. geography, maths, science, history et al, into the language classroom.

Since my audiences were language teachers, we first looked at how language teachers can help their colleagues teaching a subject in a foreign language to, if you will, ‘ride a bicycle built for two’ (That very nice analogy for ‘real’ CLIL comes from a teacher in Novi Said, Serbia, who agreed to let me use it.): choosing and adapting materials, helping with assessment and techniques such as eliciting vocabulary and scaffolding language. We looked at practical examples from the forthcoming (in spring 2012) CLIL Activities in the Cambridge Handbooks for Language Teachers series.

CLIL: Activities with CD-ROM (forthcoming 2012)

For CLIL ‘lite’…Well, you know that all of your students are not going to be future English teachers (although let’s hope some of them will!) and may not be interested in languages.  But they might be interested in math or geography etc.  As an English teacher you of course are not supposed to know a lot about those other subjects. But if you bring into the language lessons some matter and materials from other subjects in the school curriculum, then those non- verbal/linguistic learners can sit up and shine—even in English class.

Good for individual motivation and also for class dynamics seems to me. We looked at examples of how this is achieved in Kid’s Box for Young Learners, More! for tween-agers and English in Mind for teenagers as well as supplementary activities from various Cambridge Copy Collection titles and, of course, extensive reading opportunities in both Cambridge Fact Books for Young Learners and ‘Fact Books’ strand of the Cambridge Discovery Readers series for tween- and teen- agers. Plus secondary school students, who are already thinking about their future university studies and professions, can well profit from a dictionary such as the Cambridge School Dictionary that offers them curriculum words in other subjects for, say, report writing and presentations or just for simple information and interest.

CLIL won’t kill—au contraire! Don’t you agree?

Gary Anderson, Cambridge ELT International Teacher Trainer

PS CLIL: Content and Language Integrated Learning by Do Coyle, Philip Hood and David Marsh gives a comprehensive look at the subject. And you’ll find some interesting ideas in The TKT Course: CLIL Module by Kat Bentley—even in you’re not taking the Cambridge ESOL Teaching Knowledge Test.

On the Road with Gary in … Russia; Summer Schools and Cambridge English

Forewarning: ‘Cambridge English’ in the running title above has nothing to do with William and Catherine being named by Queen Elizabeth, as you might know, Duke and Duchess of Cambridge after their recent Royal Wedding. (You know, I wonder if there is anyone in the world who didn’t view part of the ceremony?  I watched a little over lunch in a restaurant in Brno, Czech Republic with two colleagues – and okay, Olga and Leslie, yes, Kate’s dress was lovely.)

My last trip before the end of this school year (well, at least for those of us in the northern hemisphere) and before my

Gary Anderson presenting on teaching teenagers

upcoming summer holidays was to Russia for ‘summer schools’ for (mainly secondary) teachers in St Petersburg and Kazan organised by our Moscow office in collaboration with Britannia Books and the Ministries of Education.

I really like Russia and I’ve been there five or six times. This time I was doing a number of different talks: on teaching tween-agers with More!, teaching teenagers with English in Mind and Interactive, and on using supplementary materials for ‘tweens and ‘teens. I also presented  on the range of Cambridge Classware – digital course presentation software for Interactive Whiteboards or mimio® – a technological device that allows you to turn any surface into an interactive whiteboard.

But I also talked about ‘Which comes first: language development or exam preparation? The chicken or the egg?’. Or maybe you can have both—if you’re using good language development materials (for example from Cambridge ELT) which also prepare for recognised exams (for example from Cambridge ESOL), i.e. Cambridge books for Cambridge exams. (You can share your opinion on the subject by voting in our poll at the top of this page.)

And that’s the idea of ‘Cambridge English’, the new joint partnership between Cambridge ESOL and Cambridge University

Cambridge English

Press: bringing together expertise in exams and in publishing. The two ‘Cambridges’ have already been collaborating on, for example, English Profile and the Cambridge English Placement Test. You may have already seen the new ‘Cambridge English’ logo on the cover of the Cambridge ELT 2011 catalogue.

In Moscow, we have launched the Cambridge English Solution for Schools project developed through a partnership between the Cambridge University Press, Cambridge ESOL and Britannia Books. And there are plans to roll-out the project to other cities across Russia next school year.

So look out for ‘Cambridge English’ events in your country in the near future.

Have a nice relaxing and reinvigorating summer break! As I hope to do here in France before my next trips to Serbia and Bosnia in August for…summer schools and back-to-school events.

Gary Anderson, Cambridge ELT International Teacher Trainer

On the Road with Gary in … Austria and Poland

Travel = trains + cars + flowers + stars

Had back-to-back week-long tours in Austria and Poland earlier this

Gary with young learners in Lodz, Poland, March 2011

month and thought I would write in this post a little bit about my life on the road. Let’s see: in Austria (where I was talking about teaching and learning grammar as in previous trip there last November (cf. On the Road with Gary in Austria) we were getting up between 5 or 6 each morning to take a train for three, four or five hours to the next city for that day’s event. (Austrian trains are nice, clean, efficient and on time, but – how should I put this – well, not as fast as French TGVs.) Then we would do the event, check into the hotel, have dinner and … get up early the next morning for the train journey to another city. Innsbruck (great audience there!), Dornbirn, Klagenfurt, Graz and finally, the big event in the capital Vienna where I didn’t even get to have the (apparently) best and biggest schnitzel in Austria at the Figlmeueller restaurant behind St Stephen’s cathedral. Instead, I had to fly back to Paris in the evening to get ready for my next tour the following week.

Anyway, so one day back home to see my family and then off to Poland where the travel was just the opposite: drive for three or four hours in the evening to a new city, check into a hotel, have dinner and then in the morning get ready for and do that day’s event before driving to the next city: Wroclaw, Lodz, Warsaw, Kielce, lovely Lublin and finally Rzeszow for the weekend PELT (Polish English Language Teachers) conference where I had presented last year and was invited back.In Lodz (NB pronounced ‘Woodge’) the event happened to take place on 8th March which was International Women’s Day. Since about 90% of the audience were female state school teachers, I went out and bought six tulips, only 2zl each (in other cities I gave out chocolates). The flowers were for the six winners of my quiz on teaching teenagers while preparing Polish lower secondary students for the new gimnazjum exam with the Polish edition of English in Mind. We also talked about two forthcoming publications for Poland: Repetytorium Gimnazjalne, and the bilingual English-Polish Cambridge Learner’s Dictionary.

The event that day was held in the Grand Hotel on the main street which is lined with large, embedded golden stars as Lodz is the centre of the Polish film industry. The city is sometimes called, wait for it, ‘Holly-Woodge‘. There were stars in front of the hotel with names of the famous Polish film directors, actors and cinematographers: Wajda, Kieslowski (his The Three Colours trilogy is one of my favourite series of films), Polanski etc. But at the event we given a special performance by some younger stars: a class of local primary students using the Polish Primary Kid’s Box who sang and danced to two songs from the coursebook. The kids were treated afterwards to cakes and (unlimited!) hot chocolate and I went down to talk with them. You can see their picture taken with their teacher and me; I’m grimacing because I was trying to teach them to say ‘cheese’ as the photo was being taken.

Off to Russia this week and trust I won’t get stuck in Moscow again like last year because of another Icelandic volcanic ash cloud (cf. On the Road with Gary in Bosnia Herzegovina, Croatia and Russia).

Gary Anderson, Cambridge ELT International Teacher Trainer

On the road with Gary in … Bratislava

The 4 Skills: ‘Cooking is more difficult than eating!’, or ‘Which come first: the chicken or the egg? – Language development or Exam preparation?’

I was invited back to the annual International House Bratislava conference in Slovakia earlier this month. Last year

Gary Anderson presenting in Bratislava

at this same conference I gave the opening plenary (on the English Profile programme) and two workshops and this year I was again asked to give…the opening plenary and two workshops. Bratislava lies on the banks of the Danube River, borders both Austria and Hungary and isn’t that far from either Budapest or Vienna, the twin capitals of the former Austrian-Hungarian Empire. In fact, it’s only 60 kilometres from Vienna; they are the two closest European capitals. Anyway, last year my flight back to Paris from Bratislava was cancelled (it happens) and I had to get a shuttle bus to Vienna to catch another flight. So this year I decided to fly directly to Vienna and take the shuttle bus to Bratislava.

 As in most of the countries I visit, Cambridge English (previously Cambridge ESOL) exams are growing in popularity in Slovakia and for the opening plenary I was asked by the organisers to speak about exams. My talk was entitled—curiously? enticingly?—‘Which come first: the chicken or the egg? Language development or Exam preparation?’. We started off with what I call a ‘buzz’ activity (an open pair-work discussion) on ‘What are the most difficult skills for your learners?’. Of course it depends on the individual student or class, but, as in most cases/countries, the Slovak teachers voted for writing and speaking. This reminds me of an exchange I had with a Romanian teacher when I gave a similar talk in Bucharest last May:

Gary:   What are the most difficult skills for your students?   

Teacher: The productive ones of course!

Gary:   Why?

Teacher: Because cooking is more difficult than eating…

A nice analogy (I asked the Romanian teacher if I could use it) and I agree with her. For example, my wife cooks our evening family meals during the week, but when I’m at home in Paris for the weekend I do the shopping and am supposed to cook one of the weekend meals. And, yes, I must say that it’s easier (and better!) to eat her cooking than to cook myself.

 We then alternated between looking at coursebook activities from the Objective and Complete series and Cambridge English exam tasks (mainly for FCE and CAE) for both receptive (reading and listening; i.e. input) and productive (writing and speaking; i.e. outcomes) skills. We finished with an ‘interactive’ speaking activity. (NB: The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages actually identifies five skills as speaking is divided into spoken ‘production’ and spoken ‘interaction’; Cambridge exams cover both parts in the speaking paper.) I gave the teachers a picture of various foods as a visual stimulus and asked them to plan a picnic together, a typical exam-type task and class/real life-like activity. Now, as one could expect (and I hoped!), some of the teachers took fried chicken on their picnics and some took boiled eggs—but they of course didn’t really care which came first (the chicken or the egg) when they were planning their picnics. Similarly—and my point—if teachers are using coursebooks such as Objective or Complete, they can both achieve their objective of developing the language skills of their learners while also satisfying what is often the (extrinsic) motivation of their students for exam training, tips and strategies. In other words: language development and exam preparation; ‘Cambridge ELT books for Cambridge English exams’; the chicken and the egg.

BTW: After my talk, a Danish English teacher in Bratislava told me that apparently some American scientists investigated the quandary of ‘Which comes first: the chicken or the egg?’ and came up with an answer. Guess I’ll have to do a Google search to see what they found…

What are the most difficult skills for your students? Are you able to develop their language while also preparing them for exams?

Gary Anderson, Cambridge ELT International Teacher Trainer

On the Road with Gary in… Belgium and the Netherlands

Training, trains, football and stuff

Well, the Cambridge ELT webmaster told me that among my recent blog posts, the most popular were those in which I wrote about ‘interesting incidents’ during my travels. She suggested that I write another one like that. So… But apologies in advance as this one will not have any gigantic, gregarious Kazaks snoring on overnight trains nor days of déjà vu while being stuck in Moscow due to an Icelandic volcanic ash cloud.

In fact, the only really semi-unusual travelling incident(s) during my tour in Belgium and the Netherlands last month was the fact that both of the high-speed Thalys trains I took (to Amsterdam and back to Paris) were late. So for the first talk of the tour, we had to rush to Pascal College (a ‘college’ can be a secondary school in the Netherlands) in Zaandam outside A’dam. But when we arrived at the school, the teachers and entire student body — dressed of course in orange, the Dutch national colour — were in the entrance hall in front of a huge screen watching the first football match of their Oranje team in the World Cup. So I sat down and watched the rest of the match (the Dutch beat the Danes 2-nil) — and then the English teachers and I had our workshop on teaching teenagers with the new edition of English in Mind.

I did have to get up quite early the next morning, too early for breakfast at the hotel — but that happens a lot when I’m travelling, so nothing unusual.  Anyway, a tram to Centraal Station for a quick coffee before taking two trains to Tilburg for two presentations at the Fontys Teacher Training University where, near the end of their academic school year, I talked to both the students and their professors about teaching teenagers and also about teaching adults with English Unlimited. You know, I do also like being able to sometimes talk to younger, pre-service trainee teachers.

Then on to Belgium for a few talks including the big event of the tour — a full day (for me!) organised by the British Council in Brussels for about 100 teachers from around Belgium and neighbouring Luxembourg. I gave four different talks: on teaching teenagers and adults again plus on the resources available on the Cambridge ELT website www.cambridge.org/elt and also on supplementary materials for teaching Business English students especially Grammar for Business and the new editions of Business Vocabulary in Use (they’ve always been quite keen on lexis and vocabulary learning in Benelux) with accompanying CD-ROMs.

And then back to Paris on the Thalys train — which was late again! So I missed the end of the France — Mexico World Cup football match which the French lost and, as everyone knows, the insufferable Bleus are now completely out of the World Cup — as are, indeed, both England and the USA. I wonder who will win….maybe the Oranje?

Gary Anderson, Cambridge ELT International Teacher Trainer