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Welcome to your March/April newsletter.



Featured New Titles

De-mystify vocabulary teaching...

and genuinely clarify what you think you already know!

Word Knowledge, A Vocabulary Teacher's Handbook is simply a must for every teacher's bookshelf.

A handbook, indeed, this book is a truly great resource for anyone who has ever or who ever will teach vocabulary.

This book deepens insight into the complex world of vocabulary teaching and learning and also opens the door to a much clearer understanding of what our students need to help develop their "word consciousness".

Not sure if you could use this book?

OK, fair enough.

To check, ask yourself the following questions.
  • Did you know it's actually harder to learn the months of the year in a list? Do you know why?
  • Do you know what a word's 'domain' is?
  • Do you know the difference between collocation and connotation?
  • Do you know what a word's animacy is..and why you should?
  • What 10 questions can you ask your students to help them better understand what we mean by using context?
  • How is meaning really acquired by students?

If these questions intrique you, this is the resource for you.

Still not sure? These are other great things about this book:
  • Theory coupled with clear awareness raising activities you can do with your students
  • Clear explanations
  • Loads of examples
  • Tons of practical techniques to enable independent word learners

If our enthusiam seems a bit over the top, it really is because this is a hand-on-heart goody of a book.


Q & A

Where are the GOOD Reading Skills books?

One of the questions we get frequently is, "Do you have any GOOD reading skills books?"

We imagine this question is born of the burning desire to work with reading books that:
  • follow current best practices in staging
  • provide a variety of reading sub-skills focus
  • have well-developed post reading language work
  • engage the students' interest through personalization
  • use a variety of text sources and topics
We completely understand - it's our burning desire to be able to recommend great reading books.

Happily here are two that are cetainly welcome on our shelves.


World of Reading
This is a new series from Longman aimed at low intermediate to advanced learners.

The book is arranged thematically and features texts taken from a range of academic disciplines such as: science, social science, business and literature.

A glossy, colourful layout is just the icing on the cake as this book follows current best practices in staging effective reading skills:
  • very good egagement and lead-in activities
  • very useful focuses on language
  • dictionary skills work
  • interesting responses to the reading

It's great to see attention paid to lesser known sub skills of reading in the 'Text Analysis' sections, such as:
  • effect on the audience
  • writer's intention
  • paragraph purpose

Although the comprehension questions are occasionally little more than form recognition (and so not challenging or much to do with comprehension), the majority of them are very good at checking understanding.

Making Connections

Published by Cambridge University Press, this series, aimed at intermediate to advanced, is best for EAP or Foundation courses. 

Although this book is doesn't 'wow' at first impression (no glossy images or colourful layout here), the content is sound.

The stated core focuses of this book are:
  • building academic vocabulary
  • understanding how academic texts are written
  • developing effective reading strategies
The activites and organization of this book definitely work to fulfill those aims by using clear examples, plenty of practice activities and engaging texts.

If you've already worked with these books and would like to pass on an insider's wisdom to working with these resources, click here.

Upcoming conferences and Events

Time to mark up your calendar with these upcoming professional development opportunities!










One of the best things about the IATEFL conference is that they are committed to sharing - without charging!

At their conference website, IATEFL is making many of their workshops and plenary sessions available free to everyone.

Many of the sessions are broadcast live.  You simply need to register (for free) and then log in. Brilliant!


To watch your EFL gurus' workshop sessions, click here.

Presenters - may your technology work without a hitch.

Participants - may all your workshops be informative, useful and fun.

What's New? Night Review

Great food, lots of happy people and cool resources - what more could we have asked for?

Our first What's New? Night was a great sucess and we'd like to thank all who attended - especially the publishers.

Thanks must go to Rita Leithead from ERPI, Heather Buchansky from Oxford and Kristins Angelopolous and Maya Bahar from Nelson for attending and supplying lots of great free copies of books and CDs for our door prizes.

(Clearly we are never to old to squeal with excitement at the win of a new book and CD set!)

Based on the feedback we received, we will definitely be holding more of these evenings in the future.

...and providing more chocolates!

How are We Doing?

This newsletter marks the one year anniversary of our new format eNewsletter. Yeah!

To help us continue giving you what you want, would you mind answering a very quick question for us?

Really - one question.

Want to see less of something? More of something? A quick click will give us a better idea of how to give you more of what you want.

Got 20 seconds?  Click here.

Who do we think we are, anyway?

Since we know ourselves very well, and some of our regular customers know us pretty well, sometimes we forget not everyone knows much about us at all...

apart from being the cool writers of this newsletter of course.

Well, here's your chance. If you'd like to know a bit more about us, please click here. Go to page 38 (p. 40 in the pdf page function).


Just forgive the nod to Charlie's Angels - we were in a silly mood that day.

If you don't want to have a look, just imagine the best people you can. We're the ones standing next to them.







Other New Titles
Just Right Middle East edition

It seems that
we have an increasing number of students from the Middle East in our classes. 


As such, we have recently had a number of requests for culturally sensitive materials.

One excellent resource we can offer is the Just Right Middle East edition.

It's a fabulous integrated skills coursebook that can already boast of:
  • engaging and personalizing tasks
  • effective vocabulary expansion activities
  • a variety of approaches to suit different learner styles
  • learner training skills

...and with this edition, contexts and images that are more culturally sensitive to those folks from the Middle East.

If you or your school are looking for this type of resource, please contact us.

Oxford Picture Dictionary Readers


The newest resource to join the OUP Picture Dictionary family is the Readers series.

These readers are correlated directly to the Oxford Picture Dictionary content.

Click here to:
  • preview one of the books
  • upload the reading library answer keys
  • upload the reading library teaching notes

You may be asked to register first. It's free, quick and allows you access to these resources as well as all the other teacher resources on the OUP site.

Enjoy!

Want to know why graded readers are a good thing to use in class?
Click here.

Cool Blogs

Boy-oh-boy have we got three treats in store for you this month.

Creative, current and full of inpsiriational ideas.

Seriously - we're already excited for you.

Nik's Learning Technology Blog is written by Nik Peachy.

A vertibale cornucopia of great ideas for using technology in the classroom that do NOT require you to be a techno-whiz.

Skype, Wikis, Flikriver...we could spend hours with this stuff!

Jeffery Hill's,
The English Blog, is just simply great at keeping us in touch with what's happening with ESL/EFLon the global stage.

His website features are informative and absolutely chock full of other great links to resources and other cool blogs.

Check out what he says about Myngle, Alibela and the new free online Macmillan dictionary!

Lindsay Calndfield is clearly full of great ideas.

His new blog Sixthings has succinct, informative and interesting posts.

Check out:
  • six podcasting sites for EFL
  • six places to get published
  • six teaching ideas for March

All this excellent content plus even more cool links.

Teaching Tips 101

If you have ever felt offended by a non-native speaker whom you know to be a kind, gentle soul, then chances are a cultural misunderstanding could be to blame.

But teaching culture - that can be  a tricky one.

Taken from Barry Tomlinson's workshop at IATEFL 2008Here's some suggestions that might help.

Focus on culture below the surface
  • culture is much more than the colour of our money or the way we celebrate Thanksgiving
  • explore behaviours and values that surround cultural 'products'
Personalize and get students' interest. Ask students:
  • what confusing /upsetting issues they have had
  • what has surprised them during interactions
  • what expectations they had about a situation that were not met
  • to compare and contrast specific situations / behaviours between cultures

Use your coursebook and media images and ask students to:
  • identify relationships
  • identify outcomes of the interaction
  • reflect on the body language and what it means
Culture discussions can be highly engaging, but touchy, so:
  • Set rules at the beginning of every cultural focus to keep a lid on  judgemental or thoughtless comments that could really offend
  • remind students that understanding why people behave the way they do is the most valuable way of understanding a new culture
Provide culture-based homework or field trips. Ask students to:
  • look at personal space differences
  • survey native speakers about why they do certain things
  • observe gestures and facial expressions
To attend an informative workshop on teaching culture, English Central's Akua Joseph will presenting on this topic at the North York TESL conference on April 25th.

For practical and engaging ideas on how to bring cultural discussions and topics into your class, have a look at Cultural Awareness and Teaching Culture: Strategies for Intercultural Comminication.

Educator's Quote

The only person who is educated is one who has learned how to learn and change
~Carl Rogers

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(from constructive criticism to high praise)
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