On the Road with Gary in…Armenia

‘Fly in, fly out’ trainers and important local knowledge

Earlier this month I was flying in to and then out of Yerevan in Armenia—my 6oth country on my travels for the Press (as we call Cambridge University Press in-house)— and it got me thinking about, well, ‘fly in, fly out’ trainers such as myself.

Gary's talk in Yerevan

I imagine you’ve run across that term before and have taken part in one-hour presentations, half-day workshops or perhaps even one- or two- day training sessions given by trainers from outside your country who, let’s be honest, often at the beginning don’t really know that much about the challenges (yes) and joys (hopefully) of your specific teaching situation. Now, there’s probably something to be said for international trainers from abroad: a wider scope, better knowledge of the materials that they are talking about, wide experience of teaching cultures etc. But there are of course equally or more important things for us to learn from you and your colleagues as local experts who know your own country, language, learners, Ministry of Education or in-house institutional requirements.

Anyway, back to Yerevan: The events took place in the ball room of a hotel which had been converted into a conference room with a small, low stage in the middle of the room for me and my computer, with chairs around on all sides for the teachers and with two screens on the larger walls of the room for my PowerPoint slides. My first experience of presenting in a ‘theatre-in-the-round’ set-up! I gave four talks over two days on Cambridge English exams, ESP courses, on English in Mind for teaching teenagers and English Unlimited for teaching adults.

And as always it was nice after the talks when teachers came up to thank me and, as often happens, say that ‘it’s so nice to hear a native speaker’. But nicer still is when they/you ask questions, agree or disagree with certain points, or comment on their/your own individual teaching situations. Like one teacher in Yerevan whose university language programme is equipped with Interactive Whiteboards and is changing coursebooks and who asked me to explain more about English Unlimited Classware and how it works.

So, please, when you ever attend one of my (or another trainer’s from abroad) presentations, do speak out or come up and share your important local knowledge.

Off to Kazakhstan this week to a Young Learners conference in Astana to present the local version of Primary Colours—and where I’ll have a full day to interact with the teachers and get to know them and their local conditions and specific teaching situation better before I, well, fly out.

What important piece of local knowledge would you give me if I were visiting your country? 

Gary Anderson, Cambridge ELT International Teacher Trainer

Too young to learn English? At what age can/should kids start learning a foreign language?

‘On the road with Gary…in Bratislava and Prague’

I was on a long train journey last month between events for primary school teachers in the capitals of Slovakia and the Czech Republic reflecting on my talks on ‘Teaching Kids Inside—and Outside—the Box’ and ‘Ways to Play—and Learn—in English’ (on Kid’s Box and Playway to English courses and on supplementary materials for teaching Young Learners – see a recommended reading list at the bottom of this blog) but also thinking about teaching languages to young children in general and particularly about something that happened at my wife’s school at the beginning of this school year.

My wife teaches in a French primary school in the centre of Paris—right next to the Place des Vosges in the 3rd arrondissement, if you know Paris—and at the beginning of September her school was inundated with publicity from organisations such as ‘Babylangues’ and ‘Baby-speaking’ to be put on the school announcement board and made available to parents about English classes for young learners from…0 years old!

Now, I know there may still be some conflicting views, but the recent articles and research I’ve read seem to agree that in general the earlier the exposure to foreign language input, the more beneficial for the child down the line. (Although some Ministries of Education—and teachers and parents—prefer postponing reading and writing in the foreign language until after children have learnt to read and write in their mother tongue). And when I was in charge of the language program at the former American Center in Paris, we had classes for children, including one for very young learners called ‘Tiny Tots’—but the infants had to be toddlers and potty-trained at least! I also remember doing some market research a few years ago with our primary ELT editor for the pre-school course Hippo and Friends and visiting classes given by a private teacher in her apartment in Paris and it was wonderful watching the kids leave their parents or caretakers and gather to sing songs, play with puppets, listen to stories et al. But starting classes at a very young age!? Before the children are even one-year-old!?

Of course when I read the publicity more closely and looked on the websites, I saw that for very young learners the offer was mainly more for bilingual babysitting and childcare than for real teaching or language classes—and that sounds reasonable and right-headed to me. In fact, I was recently visiting friends in the country whose daughter has had her first child who’s now six months old. And as I picked the baby up and started to take him walking around the garden, the parents heard me speaking French and said ‘Gary, why don’t you speak English to him?’ Indeed, why not? ‘OK,’ I said, ‘Look Edgar, three trees!’ etc. In fact, that’s what I plan on doing with my own grandchildren if/when they come. Of course, that’ll be their parents’— i.e. my kids’—decision…

Do you teach pre-school children? How old is your youngest student and what would be your advice to other teachers of young learners, and indeed young parents?

If you’re interested in the psychology of learning languages by young children, you may find the article by Professor Paul Bloom of Yale University on How Children Learn the Meaning of Words interesting.

Other recommended reading:

‘The Bilingual Family Second edition’ by Edith Harding-Esch and Philip Riley, Cambridge University Press

Teaching Children English by David Vale and Anne Feunteun, Cambridge University Press

Teaching Languages to Young Learners by Lynne Cameron, Cambridge University Press

Very Young Learners by Vanessa Reilly and Sheila Ward, Oxford University Press

Recommended resources:

‘Primary Communication Box’ from the photocopiable Cambridge Copy Collection

Primary i-Dictionaries

Cambridge Young Readers Storybooks and Factbooks

Gary Anderson, Cambridge ELT International Teacher Trainer

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…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… 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

On the Road with Gary in… Lithuania and Hungary

ELT into the Digital Age

I did talks on the above theme at two different conferences last month: in mid May at the Language Teachers’ Association of Lithuania (LKPA) conference in lively Kaunas (where there was a street festival going on with a concert one evening by an Irish band doing Beatles golden oldies followed by fireworks) and at the end of the month in Hungary at a Cambridge conference on Digital Materials in beautiful Budapest (Buda with the castle and old city is on the hilly right bank of the Danube, while Pest is on the more modern and flat left bank).

Now I don’t know if you are a ‘digital immigrant’ like me, i.e. I didn’t grow up with computers as my two kids did, but rather migrated into the digital world. Yes, I remember life before computers, before mobile phones; why I even remember suitcases without wheels! But probably most of your students will be ‘digital natives’. BTW: How do you tell a digital native from a digital immigrant? Well, one way to think about the difference as mentioned by Marc Prensky (who apparently coined the terms) during his plenary session at IATEFL UK 2009 in Cardiff is this: Do you print out your emails? If so, you’re probably not a digital native.

During my talks in Lithuania and Hungary, we looked at the evolution of what used to be called multimedia but is now of course called IT, or better, at least in our field, ITC (Information and Communication Technology): from CD-ROMs and DVD-ROMs, for self-study and independent, autonomous learning, to the web. Both Web 1.0 (course nobody called it that back then at the beginning of the intranet) which was sort of like a tap that you turned on and downloaded stuff — but couldn’t put anything back up the pipe. And Web 2.0 with social networking tools so you can now not only download things but upload things to share (think Facebook, YouTube, Twitter  et al) sort of like an interactive, sharing teachers’ room. The Cambridge ELT site www.cambridge.org/elt lets you do it all: with dedicated Facebook, YouTube and Twitter links as well as both Student and Teacher Resource Zones for materials to download and interactive activities including various blogs such as this one by yours truly.

We also looked at the exciting new English360 platform (a joint venture involving Cambridge University Press) which lets teachers create their own courses by choosing and downloading activities from selected Cambridge ELT materials and other teachers’ materials as well as uploading their own materials in order to create bespoke courses — and then, if they want, share their materials with colleagues in their institutions or indeed with teachers around the world (you can even request copyright on materials you upload and maybe get some royalties back). Have a look at www.english360.com – it’s free for teachers/educators and when your students/learners enrol, they then each pay a modest fee.

We also talked about blended learning — which in fact has existed since Plato wrote down Socrates’ dialogues (the latter as you know believed exclusively in face-to-face tuition) but  has evolved with technology from books through radio and television to audio and video cassettes (and mustn’t forget the old, friendly photocopier) and CDs and DVDs to CD-/DVD-ROMs to online materials. Of course when we talk about blended learning now we mean (ready for a long definition?): instruction through a blend of delivery modes mixing face-to-face instruction with significant online self-study where the self-study element is conducted via a computer through a Learning Management System (LMS) providing tracking and reporting tools for teachers and learners. (Whew!) As an example I mentioned the flexible Cambridge Financial English blended-learning course; if interested, have a look at http://www.financialenglish.org/.

And we discussed ‘Freemium’ and ‘Premium’ and the idea that, although most everything at least at the beginning of the web was free, the present challenge for, say, the newspaper as well as the publishing industries is to have users pay a little to access more than just the basic free site.  Have a look at the free Cambridge Dictionaries Online dictionary.cambridge.org to see what I mean. (And you don’t have to look at the Google ads; I usually don’t notice them on that site or others — then of course I’m not a digital native…

So, ‘ELT into the Digital World’: maybe a lot of us ain’t completely there yet, but, hey, we’re — i.e. you’re — necessarily on the way.

Gary Anderson, Cambridge ELT International Teacher Trainer

On the Road with Gary in… Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia and Russia

Tools for Teachers, or ‘Fitting round pegs into square holes’

Well (to paraphrase a Bob Dylan song) I got ‘stuck inside of Moscow with the Paris blues again’ for five days last month due to the Icelandic volcanic ash cloud and the crippled European air space situation. Ever seen the movie Groundhog Day with Bill Murray about a guy who wakes up to the same day, day after day after day…? Well, it was like that for me in Moscow: a big late breakfast in the hotel followed by a visit to either the airport or the Lufthansa office or to get my Russian visa extended followed by a late lunch/early dinner — and then a similar scenario the next day and the next…

Anyway, this came right at the end of almost back-to-back tours in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia and then Russia where I was doing entre autres a workshop entitled ‘Tools for Teachers’ about using materials to supplement courses such as More! for tween-agers and English in Mind for teenagers. Let’s see, in Bosnia I went (on long car journeys) from Banja Luka to Bijeljina to Tuzla to Mostar and back to Banja Luka and then on to Slavonski Brod and Osijek in the Slavonia region in the interior eastern end of Croatia. And in Russia I went from Moscow to Nizhni Novgorod (late evening planes) to Saratov (overnight trains) — and then back to Moscow (for an extra five days).

Gary answering teachers' questions in Russia

But let me explain the running title of the workshop and of this post. (Believe I might have already written about this in a previous post so apologies to any regular readers of this blog but, well, recycling/review is good, right?  And, hopefully, there are some new readers…). I was touring in Belgium a few years ago with Mario Rinvolucri who was working on Ways of Doing in the Cambridge Handbooks for Language Teachers series and Mario tried out an activity on me to activate my ‘metaphoric’ verbal-linguistic intelligence. It’s called ‘proverb reversal’: You take a proverb, reverse the words and think of a context. For example, ‘Necessity is the mother of invention’ becomes ‘Invention is the mother of necessity’ and the context could be, well, could you live without your mobile phone? If you take ‘Look before you leap’ and then reverse it, you get ‘Leap before you look’ as the parachute instructor told me when he saw I was scared before I jumped. (Some people think you should ‘leap before you look’ in love…of course then you might end up at Lover’s Leap.)

So the proverb ‘As difficult as fitting square pegs into round holes’ becomes ‘As difficult as fitting round pegs into square holes’. For teachers, the context would be trying to fit a class into a coursebook or any individual student into a class. To do that successfully you need ‘tools for teachers’, i.e. supplementary materials from publishers plus your own activities. Because you don’t, of course, teach just the coursebook; you teach the class! During the workshop, we tried out activities from various Cambridge ELT materials to supplement courses: titles in the secondary Cambridge Copy Collection, including Teen World; the Cambridge School Dictionary for those students interested in also knowing words in English for other school subjects and their future careers; and Cambridge Discovery Readers for extensive ‘pleasure’ reading for tween-agers and teenagers—as well as a couple of activities of my own that I used to use with French teenagers when I taught the ‘Teen Talk’ class at the former American Center here in Paris before I started working for Cambridge ELT.

My theme song for the ‘Tools for Teachers’ workshop was ‘Keep on Working’ by Peter Townshend of The Who from one of his solo albums about a man working in his garden — for which he needs various tools. Teachers also need (different) tools. In this case, published supplementary materials and activities of their own and friendly colleagues. Good luck fitting your students (the round pegs) into their coursebooks and classes (the square holes) and… keep on working!  

Gary Anderson, Cambridge ELT International Teacher Trainer

On the road with Gary in… Poland

Teaching adults: Are you experienced? — Well, they are…

Gave my first talk on English Unlimited, the brand-new Cambridge ELT course for teaching adults, last month at the Polish English Language Teachers annual Spring PELT conference in Rzeszow in the southeast corner of Poland (near Ukraine).  Spring? Well, it was a few years ago when I first presented at this conference — but this year it was…snowing! Still, I was thinking as I was walking through the old city centre to the big kino (cinema) where the conference takes place, Rzeszow is a lovely little city even under the snow. I presented to about 300 upper-secondary, university and Private Language School teachers on the second day of the conference. (Cambridge Kid’s Box co-author Michael Tomlinson gave a talk on CLIL for younger learners on the first day of the conference for primary and lower-secondary school teachers with the nice title ‘Children Love Interesting Learning’. Will have to write about CLIL in future posts.)

Gary in action in Poland

My theme song — and the allusion in the title of this post — was ‘Are you Experienced’ by Jimi Hendrix: Are you experienced? Have you ever been experienced / Well, I am…. And I referred to some of my experiences in teaching adults during my talk on ‘Teaching adults ‘real’ English: Core, Explore and More’.

First of all, adults — in contrast to say, teenagers — usually like talking about themselves and are a good resource as they are usually willing to share their experiences. And even though most adults may well have studied English before, they will in any case need to review the ‘core’ language (structure, lexis, pronunciation et al) so my image for the talk was an apple and its core (get it?). But they may come back to learning the language with negative previous experiences, so you may have some bruised apples (also had pictures of them) with what I call ‘stinking thinking’ who will need extra guidance which English Unlimited provides with activities to lead them to independent learning strategies to improve their individual language challenges.

And since we’re talking about adults who will probably be using their English to interact more with non-native speakers than with native speakers, they need opportunities to ‘explore’ the target language which English Unlimited gives with activities to develop their speaking skills as well as special ‘Across Cultures’ sections which exposes them to global intercultural matters.

The ‘more’ bit of the title of my PELT talk relates to the electronic components of the course, especially the DVD-ROM with the Student’s book which, in addition to extra ‘talking heads’ (and bodies) listening opportunities, also comes with an e-Portfolio in line with the Common European Framework — and indeed the goals-oriented, ‘can-do’ approach of English Unlimited is mapped to the CEF.

What about ‘real’ English? Well, I remember testing adult students at the American Center in Paris where I was pedagogical director before joining Cambridge ELT and asking them why they wanted to learn English. And they would reply ‘I want to understand real English.’ Great, I would say and then ask them what real English was. And you know what these French people would often say? ‘Woody Allen movies!’ Nice objective, I would say, but then try to persuade them that perhaps that’s not exactly real English: Not everyone tells a joke every 30 seconds and has life crises every 3 minutes. No, ‘real’ English is what real ordinary people speak in the street, in cafés, etc: disjointed, unplanned, with lots of fillers, repetition and paraphrasing — perhaps harder to understand when reading the tape script but easier to follow when actually listening because it’s, well, ‘real’. In English Unlimited (BTW: informed by the Cambridge International Corpus for a ‘real English guarantee’) you have real people with a variety of native and non-native accents speaking authentic English both on the class audio CDs and on the DVD-ROM to enable learners to better understand natural, global, international English.

What about you? What are your experiences with teaching experienced adults?

Gary Anderson, Cambridge ELT International Teacher Trainer

On the Road with Gary in… Kazakhstan and Romania

On the road – indeed…

Thought that for this post rather than a pedagogical subject, I would tell you a little about my life on the road, using tours last month in Kazakhstan and Romania as examples.   

Let’s start in Kazakhstan where I arrived in the capital Astana around midnight and noticed the temperature sign outside the airport read…-30°! Up the next morning at 6.00 to travel by train for two talks in Karaganda and back that evening by train for talks the next day broadcast from the state-of-the-art film studio at the Ministry of Education to teachers in 120 primary schools and 460 secondary schools in linked-up teachers’ rooms around the vast country on Primary Colours for kids in primary, Messages for tween-agers in lower secondary and English in Mind for teenagers in upper secondary, as all three courses have recently been put on the approved list of courses for Kazak state schools. Have you seen the Tim Burton film version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in which Johnny Depp as Willy Wonka often says (in his inimitable manner) ‘That’s weird!’? Well, it was somewhat weird—but an interesting experience! — talking to and training teachers I couldn’t see; my first time doing that.   

 Then off that evening by overnight sleeper train to Pavlodar (got down to -40° there, but with the sun shining!) where I gave four presentations during the day before taking another overnight sleeper train the same evening back to Astana for a final two presentations there the next day. I was talking about entre autres Cambridge ELT ‘Tools for Teaching IELTS’ as IELTS is growing in Kazakhstan with Kazak students aiming for 6.5/7.0 band scores in mainly the Academic Module to study in the UK, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia and in English-medium schools in their homeland. Anyway, nice picnics with delicious Kazak meat pies on the train with colleagues from Study Inn, our Cambridge partners in Kazakhstan, who accompanied me and organised the whole tour. But there was a big, gregarious Kazak man in my compartment on the first train who stored like a bear and I barely slept at all. Anyway, no snorers on the train back.   

A week back home in Paris and then off to Romania for a weekend Cambridge Day with 320 teachers in Bucharest organised by our local bookseller Centrul de Carte Straina Sitka with the ‘two Cambridges’: Cambridge ELT and Cambridge ESOL. Cambridge exams are now accepted in Romania as the English requirement for the state secondary school-leaving baccalaureate exam and I was talking about the wide range of Cambridge ELT preparation materials for mainly CAE (Romanian students have an excellent level of English!); ‘Cambridge books for Cambridge exams.’   

Gary after his tour of the Balkans, August 2009

   

But I also did a two-day tour with Centrul de Carte Straina Sitka before the big Cambridge Day, giving two talks each day in a prestigious colegiul national (national high school) in the main cities (Braila, Galati, Craiova and Slatina) of four different counties on ‘technology2teach — and learn!’ on autonomous learning and ICT with face2face which is on the Romanian Ministry of Education list of approved courses for secondary schools. Let’s see: we left Bucharest by van at 6.30 each morning and arrived back at around 10 p.m. each night.   

But, hey, I’m not complaining; I like my job! Just, as in one of The Who’s first hits ‘My Generation’: Hope I die before I get old. In any case, hope this post has given you a taste of my life on the road — but will return to pedagogical subjects in future posts.   

Look forward to meeting some of you at events in my Upcoming Travels…on the road.   

Gary Anderson, Cambridge ELT International Teacher Trainer    

PS. The picture next to this post doesn’t come from either Kazakhstan or Romania, but from the end of a tour last summer in Bosnia — where I’m returning at the end of this month: nice country; loooong roads…