Interview

Marc Helgesen

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On Publications

How did you get into writing course textbooks?
I got invited to submit a sample. I had been doing a lot of workshops at JALT, writing articles for the JALT Language Teacher and other magazines, basically just being part of the profession. Mike Rost, the editor who founded Lingual House (which later became part of Longman), heard about what I was doing and contacted me. We talked about the kind of thing I might be interested in and I submitted a proposal. That became 'English Firsthand'.

What advice would you give to prospective textbook/material writers?
Most authors are approached by the publishers, not the other way around. But, of course, you make your own luck. Put yourself in a position to be discovered. Present at JALT and other conferences. Write for ELT publications. Book reviews are a good place to start. Be active in the professional organizations like JALT, AJET, etc. Offer to review or pilot prepublication manuscripts.

Since we're on the topic, readers might want to check out an article I did with a group of other Japan-based authors. It's in the February issue of the JALT Language teacher.

What essential points must be covered before submitting proposals and ideas to publishers?
When submitting a proposal, you usually submit about two units of the book. You don't want to write more than that before a publisher has expressed interest. Definitely don't write the whole book. You're going to end up rewriting it all several times anyway. You also need to submit a proposal itself which includes the a syllabus/scope and sequence for the book, a statement of the market (type of school, level, is it Japan specific?, etc.), books that are competing in that market segment.

A very, very important part of your proposal is how your project will differ from what is already available. So if you figure there's nothing new under the sun, don't even bother. You'd be in the wrong business. Anytime you even think about writing a book it should be to do something in a new way.

A good source of information on publishing materials is 'Material Development in Language Teaching' by Brian Tomlinson and published by CUP. Another good book is 'Material Writer's Guide' (published by Newbury House).

What were the major challenges writing Firsthand?
Things have changed a lot. When we first started, textbooks that were filled with activities – pairwork, task-based listening, etc. – were rare. So we had to figure out put them together in a way that made sense to teachers and learners. Now activities are something we take for granted but it wasn't that way back then.

More recently, when we did the new editions, we faced a different situation. The books were already successful and popular. But what the other authors and the editor and I all felt is that we didn't want to just do a cosmetic change – new pictures and all. So we asked ourselves how methodology had changed and also we looked for things that hadn't been done before. That's how we ended up putting the CD in the student's book, adding personalized About You questions to the listening, adding the Five-minute Grammar Search putting language and the senses activities in the Teacher's Manuals, etc.

On Presentations

How many presentations do you give every year and how do you select the theme of your presentations? What themes are you going to cover in future events and conferences.
30ish. In addition to book related sessions, I like to play with things I'm working on and experimenting with. Over the past couple of years I've been doing some things with grammar and with personalization and some of the ideas I've been trying are now making their way into my books.

For example, I've done a lot with listening over the past few years. One very simple idea to personalize listening -- so it's not just 'overheard conversation' -- is having the recording talk directly to the student. That started out as something I was doing in class to personalize tasks and we ending putting it on the page in 'English Firsthand' as an item called "About you."

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