Happy new Decade!
Reflections and wishes for the ELT field

A conversation between Olha Madylus and Paul Shaw

OM: Happy New Decade, Paul! It’s hard to believe we are already 10 years into the 21st century and even harder for me to believe I first started teaching in Greece in the mid-80s! I guess we all had great hopes for the new millennium in lots of ways but, Paul, what do you see are our greatest achievements in the last ten years in ELT here in Greece?

PS: Same to you. Honestly, it’s astonishing that we made it through! Next year I'll have been here in Greece 20 years and, Olha, it’s amazing when you look at how language teaching was approached then and how many dramatic shifts there were in the 90's and especially over the last 10 years. I praise owners and teachers who have managed to juggle so many shifts in materials, approaches but of course it has left many not knowing which way to turn.more

Sandra Briggs talks about the importance of learning strategies
Learning requires some sort of "experience" to take place. And the experience may be quite different for each learner in that we have to consider differences in interest spans, needs, aptitudes, achievements, variations of time needed to master a specific learning task, abilities to deal with abstractness or concreteness, degree to which a learner needs to be guided, abilities to deal with complexities, abilities to manipulate objects (such as equipment or machines), the degree to which imaginations can be involved, degrees to motivate creativity, problem solving differences, etc. Thus, good instruction provides individual learning experiences within the learning environment with a mixture of media, strategies, and methods. These learning experiences promote interactions that allow the learners to recall information and combine it with other experiences so that new knowledge bases may be formed.more

eXact publishing working in partnership with Richmond publishing
‘transform experience into expertise’
Alan Jackson, Managing Director of Richmond Publishing talks to ELT NEWS
Alan Jackson is well-known in Greece. Many of us who started our career in the 80s remember with nostalgia the full to capacity classrooms in our schools, the coursebooks we used, the publishing companies and their representatives who would visit us every two or so years to talk about their new books –not so many at the time.Successful coursebooks became best sellers overnight and enjoyed a long and happy life before reaching maturity. I remember Alan very well. He was a dynamic, hard-working and ambitious young man. He often came to the foreign language school we ran in the 80s –sometimes accompanied by OUP’s authors- and talked to Andreas. We became friends.more

Prof. Michael Hoey talks about Lexical Priming-A new theory of words and language
Michael Hoey is Baines Professor of English Language at the University of Liverpool. Since 2007 he has also been Dean of the Faculty of Arts. He was Director of the Applied English Language Studies Unit, which delivered ELT to non-native speaking students in the University, between 1993 and 2003.His major publications include Signalling in Discourse (1979), On the Surface of Discourse (1983/91), Patterns of Lexis in Text (1991), which was awarded the Duke of Edinburgh English-Speaking Union Prize for the best book on Applied Linguistics in 1991, the edited collection, Data Description Discourse (1993) and Textual Interaction (2001).more