On the Road with Gary in…Moscow

  

Talks to teachers, university students and VIPs—plus a (short) presentation technique/tip

Spent a week in winter-y Moscow at the end of last month before coming home to spring-y Paris for a week before heading off to, hopefully, summer-y Opatija on the Adriatic coast of Croatia for the national HUPE conference there.

I always like going to Russia because, for one reason, my colleagues there in addition to having me speak to teachers also always seem to organise a couple of presentations to university students and it reminds me of when I was teaching at UMKC (University of Missouri at Kansas City) in the States and at one of the elite engineering grandes écoles here in Paris, ESIEE (but I won’t bother you with the French that those letters stand for).

Anyway, this time in Moscow I was presenting to students—and their teachers—at both the prestigious Financial Academy and equally prestigious Russian Economics Academy on ‘Teaching and Learning English in(to) the Digital Age’ and on ‘B2 or not B2? Is that the question?: Balancing professional and academic exam preparation with real learner needs’ on preparing and taking Cambridge ESOL exams such as BEC, ICFE and IELTS.

Let’s see, I also did a talk to university and PLS teachers on ‘Teaching adults ‘real’ English’ with English Unlimited at the British Council on the left bank of the Moscova and near one of the 49 bridges that cross that river in Moscow and as well two talks to secondary teachers at a special Cambridge English Day in collaboration with our sister organisation Cambridge ESOL.

But the big event was at MISiS, the National University of Science and Technology, where last spring I had done an initial training for their teachers on using Touchstone. This time was for the launch of the ‘Touchstone @ MISiS’ partnership project to an audience of 100 university teachers from around Moscow and Russia and invited VIP guests who, before champagne and cake and my talk on ‘Profiling English Profile’, gathered to hear short, simultaneously translated speeches by first the Russian Minister of Education (!) and the Rector of MISiS, and then representatives of the US and UK Embassies, the Director of the British Council in Russia, Natasha Bochorishvili, Cambridge ELT Sales Manager for Russia, and, finally, yours truly also representing the Press.

I don’t often speak at such high profile events and was a little nervous beforehand about what to say in my five-minute talk. So I used a technique taught to me by my old Parisian friend Richard Cooper who worked for Pilgrims and NILE and is now based in Bombay from where he does presentation and communication training around the world to high-flying international business people and government, UN and NGO officials. Rick’s coaches them that when they have only a few minutes for a talk or, say, are going to be interviewed for the radio or television to make sure that all their main points, ’sound bites’ if you will, fit on the back of their business card. So I made sure my main points (highlighted) fit on the back of my business card:

• Honoured to represent Cambridge University Press, the oldest continuously publishing house in the world, which has published Newton (think Gravity), Darwin (think Evolution), Chomsky (think Language Acquisition Device), Murphy (think Grammar) and now McCarthy, McCarten and Sandiford (think Touchstone).
• ‘Touchstone ‘the word means an established standard by which something is judged, like a benchmark.
• Touchtone the course offers a total blended learning solution of print material and online independent practice and self-study so teachers and students can spend valuable face-to-face class time on the all-important skills of speaking and listening…
• …especially the unique ‘Conversation Strategies’ strand of the course to help learners prepare to communicate in English and interact successfully…
• …so that they can help all of us ‘Live, thrive and survive’ in our world where English (for the moment) is the International Language.

Voilà. Rick’s technique/tip worked for me! You might try it if you ever have to make a short formal speech or the next time you want to make sure your remarks at an upcoming teachers’ meeting, community event etc. are clear and succinct. And if you don’t have a business card, well, just jot down your main points on a Post It.

P.S. If you read Russian and/or just want to see some pictures of the ‘Touchstone @ MISiS’ event, have a look at http://www.misis.ru/ru/ctl/Details/mid/3539/ItemID/5205 And if you’d like to see some video clips of me presenting in Moscow, you can go to http://www.youtube.com/CambridgeUPELT.

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…Paris

A ‘Dynamic Breakfast’ (!) and some dynamic presentations (?)

My first trip this new year 2011 was in and around my hometown, Paris. (I guess I can call Paris my hometown now as I have lived here longer than I did in either Kansas City where I grew up, or Boston where I studied.) Paris, by the way, as you may know or remember if you’ve been here, is made up of 20 arrondissements, or districts, with the 1st in the city centre (think: Notre Dame de Paris, kilometre zero and from where distances to and from the French capital are measured) and with the other arrondissements radiating outwards and around, sort of like a snail’s shell, from the older, inner parts of the city to the newer, outer parts.

Anyway, I had a busy week doing seven talks on seven different topics and travelling around the big city: from the 3rd arrondissement (where I used to live) to La Grande Arche at La Defense, the business district outside Paris where all the skyscrapers are (except for the Montparnasse Tower in the 14th where I used to work) to events at Librairie Attica (conveniently located for me in the 13th arrondissement next to the 12th where I live now).

The big event at Attica attended by about 70 teachers was billed as a ‘Dynamic Breakfast’ and featured Mark Powell, author of Dynamic Presentations, the first title in the new Cambridge Business Skills series, giving, well, a dynamic presentation entitled ‘Dynamic Presentations: A Performance-based Approach’. Then, after coffee and croissants, I gave a talk on English Unlimited, the new general English course for adults now complete with six levels from Starter (A1) to Advanced (C1). And then the event finished with a champagne cocktail. (Ah, France…)

You know, I really believe when you’re giving a presentation you have to first and foremost be yourself and let your personality come through – sort of the same as you do when you’re teaching, right? Of course there are certain presentations – and teaching – techniques to learn, practise and teach your students (structuring the talk/class; having a good beginning and ending; using clear visuals, slides, board work) and good habits to make (speak naturally and remember to pitch and pause your voice) and bad habits to break (not too much hmm-ing and uh-ing). Mark was demonstrating those as well as using YouTube clips of good and bad presenters. If you’d like to see Mark in action, you can go to his YouTube site, Mark Powell, to view parts of his plenary at the last November’s BESIG conference in Germany.

I don’t know if my Parisian presentations were ‘dynamic’ – if you attended one, please comment; and if you didn’t…well, you can tell me after one of my presentations when we meet on my upcoming travels.

Gary Anderson, Cambridge ELT International Teacher Trainer

On the Road with Gary in…Paris and Budapest

 

Stars—international and local… and Happy holidays!

I was fortunate to attend two excellent events recently and re-meet, talk and spend some time with two international stars of our profession: David Crystal at the TESOL France conference in Paris on November 26–28 and Raymond Murphy at Cambridge events in Budapest, Hungary, on December 1—2 to celebrate the silver anniversary of his English Grammar in Use. I already knew Messieurs Crystal and Murphy—and even remember introducing them to each other at IATEFL UK in Liverpool in 2004.

Raymond Murphy, as I’m sure you all know, is the author of the best-selling Essential Grammar in Use and English Grammar in Use, the latter celebrating its 25^th anniversary this year. At the events in Budapest I did an interview with Ray about the ‘past, present and future’ of English Grammar in Use and…English grammar. (BTW: if you’re a fan of English Grammar in Use and fancy being in a magazine article, our colleagues in Japan—where Raymond Murphy travelled before Hungary—are working with an ELT magazine to produce a special article about English Grammar in Use, and would like appreciate your views. Have a look at the Cambridge University Press ELT facebook page  or email <aeraeigo@asahi.com> to find out more.)

Professor Crystal is the author of a multitude of books on language including the Cambridge Encyclopaedia of the English Language and the brand-new third edition of the Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Language as well as numerous other titles, including with Cambridge University Press: English as a Global Language, Language Death, Language and the Internet, Think on my Words: Exploring Shakespeare’s Language, and (my personal favourite) Pronouncing Shakespeare: The Globe Experiment about his involvement in staging Romeo and Juliet at the Globe theatre in London in its original Shakespearian pronunciation. (Maybe you also read David’s blog <david-crystal.blogspot.com>? I do.)

So those are the international stars but in this post I really want to mention (and thank!) the local stars—the organisers of the events: TESOL France President Bethany Cagnol and her team and my colleague Mariann Gyorgy, Cambridge ELT Manager in Hungary.

You know, before I started working for Cambridge I was involved with TESOL France and organising its conferences and since I joined the Press, I’ve have attended numerous Cambridge ELT and other events and I know firsthand how much time and work it takes to organise—and successfully pull off!—such events.

So the next time you attend an ELT event whether international, national or local, please be sure to thank the organisers, OK? Just tell them Gary said to do so.

And to thank you for reading my blog—especially this last one before my end-of-the-year holidays— I would like to send you all this Season’s Greetings card of a nice winter scene in Cambridge of the famous apple tree in front of the entrance to Newton College where that apple dropped (due to gravity, remember?) on Newton’s head…though not in the winter.

Happy Holidays—or, as they say here in France, Joyeuses Fêtes—and look forward to hearing from and/or maybe meeting you at an event next year (cf. Gary’s Upcoming Travels).

Gary Anderson, Cambridge ELT International Teacher Trainer

On the Road with Gary in…Austria

Using the native language in the classroom?

Money on the table! or Let me put on my baseball cap…

After the heat in the Gulf in October (see my last post) I was in much colder Austria (my first time there, by the way, and the 59^th country I’ve visited for Cambridge ELT) earlier this month, based amidst the mountains in lovely Salzburg while travelling by train to Linz and St Poelten for events in those cities as well as one in Mozart’s hometown.

I was doing a talk on teaching and learning grammar—but have already written about that in a previous post (cf. On the Road with Gary Anderson in Slovakia: Deductive/Inductive… Seductive/Productive Grammar; Cambridge Grammar and Vocabulary) so thought I would write about a matter that came up during the breaks for (strong) coffee and (delicious) pastry at the events in Austria. It’s a question that I get asked often by teachers: What about using the native language in the classroom?

For example, here’s what a teacher in Romania wrote to me after we met at a conference in Bucharest at the start of the school year: Came back from school to drink a hot tea. It was tiring today because some students were upset with me as I talked only in English and they couldn’t understand all the lesson. I refused to explain in Romanian. They know that I speak Romanian, but we were in English class! What do you think about this? Was I right?

Well, there is no ‘right’ answer as it depends on the class and also of course on you the teacher who is the manager of his/her classroom. But if you’re teaching a monolingual class—and you speak their language—you have an advantage as a speaker of the same language as your students. Still it seems to me that a teacher shouldn’t overuse the native language. However, no reason to waste, say, five minutes trying to explain a word or expression in English when you could maybe just give students an explanation in their native language—or, even perhaps better, have one of the students do it. On the other hand, you don’t want them to get into the habit of having everything explained in their native language either.

You could employ what I call the ‘baseball cap’ approach. Let me explain. I remember two of my fellow teachers at the American Center in Paris when I was running the language program there before I joined Cambridge ELT and where the classes were made up of almost strictly monolingual French speakers. Now both of these teachers spoke French. But they had different approaches to the use of the native language with their students. One of them never allowed French in the classroom and if one of the learners spoke in French then he/she had to ‘put a franc on the table’ (this was before the Euro). NB: that money was saved for the end-of-term class party.

The other teacher, from San Francisco, would allow questions and queries in French. But when the learners requested, he would put on his black and gold Giants baseball cap and answer or give an explanation (congratulations to the Giants, by the way, for winning the World Series of baseball this year!). Then when he took the cap off, the class went back into the target language, English.

So the idea is that you have a hat or some object that you put on or pick up for short periods when you talk with the students in their native language—but when you take off the hat or put down the object, then they should understand and agree that class is in English because…well, it’s an English class.

What about you? How do you dose the use of the native language in the classroom? Are you more of a ‘money on the table’ or ‘let me put on my baseball cap’ teacher?

On the road with Gary in… Saudi Arabia and the UAE

Essential skills for EAP; or, ‘No problems, only solutions.’

I was travelling in the Gulf in mid October, doing talks first in Saudi Arabia and then in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, two of the seven United Arab Emirates. I’ve been to the Kingdom a few times before and so am somewhat used to the rules there of having the ladies separated from the gentlemen in a different room or space, but usually connected via a one-way video link so they could see me and my PowerPoint slides and a two-way audio link so they could hear what I was saying and as well ask questions and give comments.

In both countries I was giving workshops on Essential Skills for EAP: Reading and Writing. And reading and writing are of course necessary basic skills for all learners studying English for Academic Purposes—but especially for those students whose native first language does not use a Roman script and who come from a more oral-aural cultural tradition.

The start of my tour in Riyadh (followed by Jeddah and Dammam) was on the day after what would have been John Lennon’s 70^th birthday and I used something he once said to focus the workshops: ‘No problems, only solutions’. So we first discussed the participants’ problems—or better, ‘challenges’ of teaching especially their lower-level EAP students and then we looked at possible solutions offered in Read This! and Writers at Work, two Cambridge ELT series which aim to serve as stepping stones to put even low-level learners on the right track for higher level study and academic activities including preparing for and taking the IELTS or TOEFL tests—and, of course, getting them ready for real life and their future careers in which English is still the International Language of research, business and the internet.

For reading, I think of my two kids who are working and studying en français in France. But my son who is a sports journalist needs to read in English for his job: accounts of Premier League British football as well as news about the NBA and other North American sports. And my daughter is studying child psychology at university where she and her fellow students have to read lots of article and even textbooks in English.

For writing, we looked at the solution offered by the Writers at Work series which builds from Sentence to Paragraph in the lowest level to The Short Composition and The Essay in higher levels and teaches the process of writing—or ‘process writing’ if you prefer— involving pre-writing activities (getting down some ideas through brainstorming, free-writing, mind-mapping, outlining, whatever!) and then revising and editing various drafts—i.e., re-writing—until the final ‘product’ is ready.

If you have EAP students, you might want to look at those series as well as the range of other Cambridge ELT materials for English for Academic Purposes, including—for both reading and writing—the Cambridge School Dictionary for lower levels and for upper levels the Cambridge Academic Content Dictionary.

P.S. After the heat in the Gulf (constantly in the 30°s C) I went the following week to much colder Austria and something that came up there will probably be the subject of my next blog…

Gary Anderson, Cambridge ELT International Teacher Trainer

On the road with Gary in… Georgia

Decide what to adopt, then determine how to adapt

I was in Georgia last month (the 58^th country I’ve visited for Cambridge ELT) and a lovely country it is — although I was, alas, only able in the few days I was there to visit the capital of Tbilisi and its surrounding areas.

There’s a nice story about how the Georgians got their country. Seems they were late (because they had been eating, drinking and celebrating) when God was dividing the different lands among  various peoples. But the Georgians then preceded to sing and dance for God who was so pleased that He relinquished to them the land that He had been reserving for Himself — and so went to heaven instead.

I did do a little ‘heavenly’ eating and drinking and celebrating with the hospitable Georgians from CAC Books of the Caucasus Academic Centre who co-sponsored my trip. But I was mainly there in the days just before the start of the new school year to present two courses from Cambridge ELT which have been put on the Georgian Ministry of Education list of approved courses: Kid’s Box for primary schools and English in Mind for secondary schools.

In my workshops — ‘Teaching Kids Inside and Outside the Box’ for Kid’s Box and ‘Teaching with Teenagers in Mind: Method, Momentum and Motivation’ for English in Mind — I first talked with the teachers about the underlying methodologies of the courses and then we tried out various activities with ideas of how they could possibly teach those to their students.

But we also discussed how to supplement the coursebook because, as I always say (and as I believe I might have mentioned in a previous post; sorry), ‘Teach the class — not just the course book’. And of course teachers need to supplement their main coursebook with various materials: (legally) photocopiable activities from the Teacher’s Resource Packs which accompanying both courses, activities from appropriate titles in the Cambridge Copy Collection, ideas and downloadable activities available on www.cambridge.org/elt and of course the teacher’s own activities and exercises as well as those from colleagues — because I trust you’re in a teaching situation where you share expertise and ideas with your colleagues and, again as I say (although don’t believe I’ve mentioned this in a previous post), ‘Share the wealth!’ so to speak.

During the breaks and after the workshops, I also talked with the Georgian teachers about how they make adoption decisions. Well as usual, in a state school teaching situation, the course needs in the first instance to be on the Ministry of Education approved (and sometimes subsidised) list. Then teachers usually get together as a group and decide on one course (NB: not just one level) to use over several years. It’s usually a common/communal, democratic-ish decision (with often teachers with more experience and/or new-er teachers with (perhaps) fresher ideas who have the most to say) — although in some cases it might be the DOS or head teacher who has to ‘help’ everyone take the final decision.

How about your teaching situation? How do you and your colleagues make adoption decisions?

Looking forward to hearing from you and/or maybe seeing some of you during my upcoming back to back to back tours over the next few weeks in the Gulf, the UK for the big Language Show in London, and then Austria — which will be my 59^th (and counting…) country for Cambridge ELT.

Gary Anderson, Cambridge ELT International Teacher Trainer

On the road with Gary in… the Baltics

Crowds, conferences, classes and coaches

I was only back in Paris for one day after my nice long summer holidays in France (cf. my last blog post) before leaving for two back-to-back conferences in the Baltics: EATE (Estonian Association of Teachers of English) in Tartu and LATE (Latvian Association of Teachers of English) in Riga.

Both of these annual national conferences were held over two days during the first week back to work for teachers after summer holidays and prior to the September 1^st start of school in both countries. And while most of the teachers attending were from secondary schools, almost all those in my ‘Teaching adults ‘real’ English: Core, explore and more’ workshops on English Unlimited indicated that they also teach adult learners either at university, in a PLS or with private lessons for which that new Cambridge ELT course for adults would be appropriate. Maybe it’s the same for you?

Had some free time in Tartu after EATE and before leaving for LATE to visit the old Toome Hill overlooking the city where I liked the statue of Kristjan Jaak Peterson, the Estonia national poet from the early 19^th century, who apparently walked (note the walking stick in the accompanying photo) for four days from his home in Latvia to Tartu for his university studies. Well, I took the coach in the opposite direction: a four-hour evening journey from Tartu to Riga.

 On the coach I was thinking about what I really wanted to write about in this post: a thought that I brought back from the start of my summer holidays when I went to the Vieilles Charrues (Old Ploughs) music festival in Brittany, the biggest summer music festival in France and apparently the second biggest in Europe after the EXIT festival in Novi Sad in Serbia. You know how these music festivals are: huge crowds shuffling from one stage to the other to listen to different groups. (At Veilles Charrues there were three stages, one called Kerouac after the American writer Jack Kerouac whose family originally came from that part of France.)

 Anyway, seemed that every group we saw (Muse, Toots and the Maytals, Indochine and a lot of other French groups and artistes) all said to us, the crowd: ‘You’re the best audience we’ve ever had!’ And maybe we were…?—at least it made us feel like we were. I decided that was a nice thought to carry into my talks as I start traveling and presenting again (and although I didn’t say it—should have!—to my groups at EATE and LATE, they were great). And I also believe that’s a nice idea to think about as you start your new school year and walk back into the classroom with new groups and classes: This class is going to be the best I’ve ever had! Tell them and/or think it—and maybe they will be…

Blue-sky (night coach) thinking maybe—but also positive thinking.

Bon courage, as the French say, pour la rentrée; i.e. Good luck going back-to-school!

Gary Anderson, Cambridge ELT International Teacher Trainer

On the Road with Gary in… France

Summer holidays and Recommended Reading

This last post before my summer holidays is not going to be about pedagogy, presentations or work, really, but about…holidays — and especially about some recommended holiday reading. Because summer holidays for me are for R ‘n R ‘n R: rest, relaxation and reading. You know, I travel so much during the year in my professional life that during my long summer vacation break I prefer just to stay around my second home/country and take advantage of la belle France. This summer we’re going to Brittany, Provence and the Riviera and I’ll be taking along a bag of books to read on the beach, by the pool, in the shade.

Some of the books will be Cambridge University Press titles — but not just ELT because, as you know of course, the Press publishes an immense range of titles in all disciplines. For example, last summer I read the Cambridge Companion to Dylan and this summer I’ll be reading the new Cambridge Companion to The Beatles; both are collections of serious scholarly essays about the artists and their the songs.

 And I also always try to re-read a classic during my holidays and this summer it’ll be the first volume of my favourite French writer Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu (I find the former translation of the title into English as Remembrance of Things Past, a line from Shakespeare no less, much smoother — memorable! — than the current stodgy, pedestrian In Search of Lost Time).

 The main ELT title in my bag will be the new Cambridge book on CLIL entitled…CLIL: Content and Language Integrated Learning by David Marsh, Phillip Hood and Do Coyle. Reviewed as ‘the first comprehensive overview of CLIL’ with ‘both critical theory and pedagogical background’. Exactly what I need for future talks! Because yes, I do do a little work while on holidays. Let’s see, last summer I made it thru most of Reading in a Second Language by William Grabe in the Cambridge Applied Linguistics series for some pedagogical background and research support for my talks on intensive/extensive reading. And this summer I’ll be taking along English for Academic Purposes by R.R. Jordan in the Cambridge Language Teaching Library as preparation for an EAP tour I’ll be doing in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates in October.

If you haven’t yet read (as I did over recent summer holidays) From Corpus to Classroom by Anne O’Keeffe, Michael McCarthy and Ronald Carter or World Englishes by Andy Kirkpatrick, you should. Both highly recommended! And if you’re (pas moi!) contemplating a career move, you might want to look into From Teacher to Manager and/or the brand-new (corpus-informed) The Language of Business Meetings, the newest title in the Cambridge Applied Linguistics series.   

OK, that’s it for me and summer reading. Apologies to those of you not in the northern hemisphere who won’t be on summer holidays the same time as me – but hope you’ll keep some of these titles in mind when your next long break rolls around.

 See you in September….!

Gary Anderson, Cambridge ELT International Teacher Trainer

P.S. By the way, you do know, right?, that you can go to www.cambridge.org/elt to get free information including the Table of Contents, Index and downloadable sample pages — usually the entire first chapter! — on any of the above titles or, indeed, on (almost) any Cambridge Methodology and Applied Linguistics title. Browse before you buy. And you can also sign up online to automatically receive e-mail updates about new printed and online material on the Applied Linguistics Resources area www.cambridge.org/elt/resources/appliedlinguistics .