It was in 2001 that I started to conduct teacher-training seminars at public elementary schools. In 2002, I kicked off a study group with a handful of elementary teachers and I named the group PEN (Primary English in Niigata). Over the past seven years PEN grew to be a body of 170 elementary teachers and teachers of children, spread over Japan, from Kyushu to Sendai. We communicate daily by mailing list and every other month we have a meeting called "Pencil Box Seminar". Members present their lesson plans and I give workshops as the advisor.

One of my first team-teaching experiences was in 2002. I met with the homeroom teacher who had a pretty good command of English to discuss the lesson plan. I proposed a lesson plan that had worked very well in my own school. The next day we confidently started the class. Guess what happened. The children didn’t speak at all. They clammed up and eyed us suspiciously. We panicked and walked around the classroom to help with the groups but there were six groups for the two of us. It was a disaster.

Looking back, the plan we had made was probably really good for a small class of children who wanted to learn English but it was not appropriate at all for thirty-some children who were not used to having an English lesson in school. The plan did not give children enough listening and forced them to speak on their own right away. The plan looked like fun and children-centered, but set in a large class it became a different monster.

The expertise of the homeroom teacher (HRT) is key to success in the elementary classroom. They know the children’s names and can control the classroom, something that is almost impossible to do if you are a guest teacher (GT). Another key is to design lesson plans that incorporate activities that appeal to various learning styles. My observation is that every class has a few children with some difficulty and often, these children benefit from English instruction that appeals to different intelligences that they bring to the classroom but are not appreciated in other subjects. This idea is based on the theory of Multiple Intelligences, which was developed in the 1980’s by Dr. Howard Gardner, a professor of education at Harvard University.

Every student has eight different intelligences but in different proportions. It is important to take all eight intelligences into account when planning lessons so that all students have an opportunity to learn in their style. This leads to greater motivation and ultimately more successful learning. Here are a few ideas for each intelligence:

Linguistic Intelligence	Read words, name the words, say the words, listen to the words, shout the words, and whisper the words.
Logical-Mathematical Intelligence	Do puzzles, sequencing activities, or classification activities that involve logical deduction. For example: A is taller than B, but shorter than C. Who is the tallest?
Spatial Intelligence	Use visual aids such as maps, big flashcards and realia. Art projects are also useful
Bodily-Kinesthetic Intelligence	Use movement with songs, chants or games that include, for example, running or slapping cards. Gestures, role plays and dramas can also be used.
Musical Intelligence	Listen to songs and chants, sing and chant, use body percussion (stamping, clapping, patting, snapping) to accompany songs and chants, and play instruments.
Interpersonal Intelligence	Involve students in activities or games in which they work together in pairs or groups.
Intrapersonal Intelligence	Involve students in individual activities that require personal input and personal choices.
Naturalist Intelligence	Show how the structure/organization of language relates to things in nature. Use realia and "natural" examples whenever possible.

Eigo Note 1 & 2 (1 for the 5^th grade and 2 for the 6^th) are teaching materials MEXT produced for "Foreign Language Activities" that will officially become a "ryoiki" (area of study) in 2011. At present, most elementary schools are "rehearsing" for 2011 and many have already implemented a certain amount of English instruction in their curriculum- to get ready for the official start in 2011.

Eigo Note 1 & 2 are not MEXT-designated textbooks that all schools must use. In fact, elementary schools are entitled to use any textbook or supplement Eigo Note with any commercially available material.

Many educators have already publicly commented on Eigo Note. The following are the aspects of Eigo Note that I find to be positive. First of all, it’s the first effort of MEXT to create actual lesson plans and to publish Student Books, Teacher’s Books and audio CDs. Eigo Note 1 & 2 serve as the basis of what MEXT wishes the 5^th and 6^th graders to learn throughout Japan. We can also give recognition to the fact that the units are topic-based or situation-based and not grammar-based.
We should also note that MEXT has decided on the number of English Activities, which had been left to the discretion of each school. In school districts where more than two elementary schools send children to one junior high school, the fact all the children have learned the same amount of language. In short, we can give a big hand to Eigo Note for having set a norm for English Activities.

However, as an author of ELT materials and a practitioner of team teaching in elementary schools, I find a number of problems in Eigo Note. An article I wrote recently for the Oxford Kids’ Club Newsletter outlines the issues and offers solutions as well (download article here).

I will be presenting around Japan in January, February and March with a number of other authors and educators on the Oxford Teaching Workshop Series. The theme is The Teacher’s Tool Kit: Ready for 2011 and my fellow speakers and I will be addressing many of these issues in a series of interactive, hands-on workshops that are full of practical ideas and activities for teaching primary learners that can be put to immediate use in the classroom. The workshops are free and open to the public. It’s a great opportunity to make new friends, share ideas and expand your own teaching tool kit!

I graduated from Tokyo Gakugei University and specialized in education. Prior to that I had considered a career in the medical profession, but ultimately decided to specialize in the world of elementary education. In my consequent studies, I soon became really interested in the developmental process in which children learn, and that lead me to think about studying developmental psychology overseas. But before that, I really needed to improve my English language skills, so I attended a special English language school, called Phoenix. I ended up staying there for five years.

Although the school doesn’t exist now, I really liked the system and method of teaching there. The school actually had a graduation system, so I did a two-year graduation program, and then stayed for a further three years. Instead of the traditional grammar translation approach, there was much more focus on real communication. There were: writing classes, debate classes, presentation classes, and so on, and they all had a definite focus. I also liked the project-based classes that were the school’s core curriculum: drama, business presentation, debate classes; which included students of varying English ability level and background. We don’t have those kinds of classes in Japanese schools, and I really think that project-based classes create a need for genuine communication through the higher instances of self-initiative and interpersonal responsibility by the group.

I started employment! I joined the company Eikoh, where I worked in the foreign teacher dispatch department. Eikoh has many different business departments within the field of education, and even has kindergartens in Australia; so I enjoyed the variety. Eikoh then acquired an adult English language school, where I subsequently became involved in the core management. Because of my continued interest in children’s education, I gradually transformed the school from adults to a focus on kids, and we renamed the school ‘Little Steps’. Little Steps focuses on children from ages 2-12, and is based in Omotesando. We don’t concentrate solely on English language, but want to create an creative hot-bed environment for kids to develop a full range of key skills.

We teach English through presentation, art and also through drama. The age groups comprise of three distinct groups: namely 2-3 years of age, 4-6 years of age, and then 7 years old and upwards. The first group (2-3) are more interested in exploration and play, and are not motivated to sit down for long. We use picture books, and a variety of activities and games. In the second group (4-6) the children start to become more aware of learning and the activities become more controlled. The third group (7+) starts to focus more on study - although there is scope for ‘play’ in their drama class, and through art they will explore and reflect on their environment.

For Japanese children it’s very important. Children are so receptive at this age, and their listening skills develop very quickly. Also, the innate ability to mimic with accuracy and conviction the unique phonetic sounds of a foreign language soon deteriorates with age and continued conditioning. Although we mainly have Japanese students, we do have students from different countries, and this promotes real communication and international understanding. We also desire that the children will improve not only in their command of the English language but in other skills and even develop their sense of identity even mental prowess.

We take a very personalized approach to learning, and we also try to involve the parents in their children’s learning - and not just the mothers - we want the fathers to be involved as well!

I think that the general preference in Japan right now is to use mobile technology rather than PC systems. We, however, are continually looking for the best ways for kids to learn English also as communication tools between among us; the school, teachers, parents, and the students. I’m looking forward to seeing how the formal introduction of English into the elementary school curriculum will improve the English education system in Japan.

At the moment English language schools in Japan don’t have a good reputation- and I believe we do need to develop the foundations of English education and English schools in terms of both the prevailing philosophies and curricula.

I am also involved in the hospitality industry (Niki Resort) and started a summer school in Nasu in collaboration with an NPO. We started this dynamic program two years ago, and invite special teachers such as designers and scientists to participate in an program with both children and adults. Our aim is to enable a platform to learn together at a local level, with the collaboration of both children and parents; to explore a positive culture of learning which both reacts to and revitalizes the local community culture. We had a five-day program last summer which attracted more than 700 participants in what we called a “Schule im Berg”. I am also interested in organizing a learning festival for kids in Tokyo in association with 2010 being national ‘reading year’ in Japan. This is planned to feature symposiums and workshops: through which the children will be able to learn experience through creation of the project together.

Thank you.

I graduated from Osaka Prefecture University, and have spent most of my professional career in strategic management consultancy, working in both the retail and IT industries.

I learned English mainly as a result of my professional life, and from doing my MBA from the University of Chicago. I started to study English more seriously when I decided I wanted to become a global consultant.

No, it’s not a franchise –and I’m the President of a US subsidiary company. Legally the company was established in 2006 in Japan, then I joined in March 2007 and started to develop the company infrastructure, and we started trading in November 2007. Now we have a fair number of employees.

We provide software for language learning, and currently offer 31 languages for learners. As you might expect, English is the most popular of our learning products, with around 50% of our total sales – we offer both American and British English, but 80%-90% of these sales are for American English software. But we also have demand for major European and Asian languages.

Yes, it certainly is – our English learning package is by far our best-selling product, but Chinese is in second place, followed by Korean. Chinese is very popular for business, whereas Korean language learners are more interested in studying for pleasure – this may be because of the recent boom in Korean popular culture. For the European languages, French, German and Spanish are still popular and we’ve recently noticed a growing demand for Italian.

We sell B2C and B2B. Within our direct sales B2C model, we advertise in newspapers, magazines and on TV, directing potential customers to our website and call centers. We also have six retail outlets or kiosks as of mid-August, which are located in shopping malls or bookstores, such as Maurzen. Basically places where there is qualified, high traffic. Although we currently focus most of our marketing activities on the B2C market, we are always looking for opportunities in the B2B market, and several major companies and schools do use our language learning software.

We localize packaging, but the product uses the direct, immersion method of teaching languages, so it’s the same as the content in the US. The software interface has eight language options, but the content is delivered in the target language.

The Rosetta Stone method unlocks a person’s natural ability to learn a language. The product features listening, clear images, speech recognition and absolutely no translation is needed – everything is presented in the target language, so you start to communicate right away. This is an immersion method on your own PC, which exposes the learner to a structured approach, resulting in effective communication in a short space of time. A recent research study done in the US showed that Spanish language learners using Rosetta Stone software, resulted in more effective language learning outcomes than in a college classroom setting.

I think our users are currently 60% male and 40% female – many users are likely to be in their later thirties, are professional, well-educated with an intellectual curiosity and are aware of current events. They have often been studying English from junior high school, but perceive themselves as ‘language failures’. They have tried the traditional route, but are not satisfied with the results. In a recent study we found that only 14% of language learners in Japan feel that they have been successful in learning a language. The respondents cited their main reasons for lack of success in learning a language as “ineffective teaching methods” (42%) or “lack of motivation” (41%).

We advertise very selectively, targeting the media we feel our users prefer.

Definitely – Japanese need English skills, especially for business. Major companies like Toyota and Hitachi insist that their managers and directors study English and encourage them to achieve a high TOEIC score. Interestingly, at a recent Rosetta Stone meeting, our UK office told us that many British people study languages as a hobby, and that they are not really interested in serious study.

Despite the recent decline in the language learning market in Japan, this is still a huge multi-million dollar market. And with our unique product, we feel that there is considerable room for growth. At our current phase we are essentially a start-up business, and we’re investing in growth through marketing.

According to this year’s Yano Research Report, the language learning market is decreasing, but several segments are growing, namely: one-to-one study, pre-school, test prep, business English and eLearning, with the latter especially important for the self-study market. We’re also looking at other ways of delivering our services.

Rosetta Stone product occupies a unique space in the language learning market in Japan. Unlike traditional publishers or other direct sales companies, we focus on speaking skills rather than listening, reading and writing skills. Learners can complement our product with other learning materials.

As you know, the company is very big in the US, and in 2005 we opened an office in the UK. In Korea we were using a sales agent, but this year we set up our own subsidiary. Although I can’t disclose our expansion plans, we will continue to look for growth opportunities.

Yes I am – I’m learning Spanish, French and Chinese.

But of course!

Sure – I’m originally from Montreal, Canada and I grew up with a trilingual background - French and English of course, and as my parents were originally from Germany, German was spoken at home. I spent one year in Switzerland, and then went to university in Canada, where I studied Sociology and Human Geography. I graduated in 1991, spent one year traveling around the world, and a year later returned to Asia decided to live in Fukuoka. I wanted to avoid Tokyo, and decided that either Kyushu or Hokkaido were the places to be – but Hokkaido reminded me too much of the cold Canadian climate.

I had taught at summer camps before, and had always been interested in teaching, but, yes, my first real teaching job was in Japan I arrived on a working holiday visa, and initially worked for an English language school which was also affiliated with a juku. I worked there for 3 years, but as I got more and more interested in TEFL, I gradually made the transition to university teaching, until I became a ‘full-time part-timer’. Now I teach around 30 contact hours per week.

I joined in 1995, but really became active around 1999, when I became the local branch treasurer. In 2001 I helped organize the national conference, and then in 2004, when Alan McKenzie moved on, I became Director of Programs and organized the next few national conferences. When that term came to an end in 2007, I was appointed Business Manager. With JALT being around for more than 30 years now, I see my role as helping the organization move on and move upwards – not only with increased membership, but also as a professional organization.

Primarily the focus of the organization is to support teachers in improving language teaching and learning in Japan - helping them stay up-to-date in the field, giving them outlets for their research, and providing networking opportunities. Although online technology has brought us all a lot closer, JALT still provides teachers with ever important face-to-face opportunities to explore and exchange teaching ideas.

As Business Manager I deal with publishers concerning the exhibition space at the national conference, and set up opportunities for them to display their products and interact with teachers at the local level. Publishing companies are essential to the success of the JALT national conference is, and without them JALT as an organization would suffer financially. At the same time, we help keep the publishers in touch with teachers and market trends. It’s a two-way relationship. Another aspect of my role, is to try and increase benefits to JALT members, and I have also been looking at ways to increase revenues for JALT. To illustrate this point, let me tell you about the recent deal we’ve done with Lexxica to make the JALT Word Engine (http://jalt.wordengine.jp). Lexxica are an online company that helps learners increase their general English vocabulary or vocabulary for specific areas such as tests – either on their computers or mobile phones. For every student that uses the JALT Word Engine, Lexxica donate part of their fee for JALT research purposes. Lexxica also support our publications with advertisements paid for by some of the revenue generated by the JALT Word Engine . The deal was signed at the beginning of June, and announced at the JALT CALL conference the following weekend. Currently there is a promotional offer to launch the deal, and we have 50 free cards for 100 teachers. This is the equivalent of ¥5 million worth of promotion, and we are very grateful for their support. The best way to show people that the Lexxica program works well is to try it out yourself and with your students, so please try it! This is an important deal for JALT, and we also hope that Lexxica and their customers will benefit. I’m looking for more deals like this, as around 40% of JALT’s annual revenue comes from the National Conference. Print advertising revenues from magazines such as the Language Teacher, and the JALT Journal is in serious decline, so other revenue sources are essential if we are to fund new initiatives.

We’ve held steady for the last few years, and now have around 2,800 members. This is a far cry from the ‘bubble period’ of the early 90s when we had close to 4,000 members, but times are very different now. We do have membership drives, and send out a lot of information about our events. Of course the regional JALT chapters are critical for new membership and we have around 40 chapters – roughly one chapter for every prefecture.

If you’re interested in developing your career professionally in Japan, then you should consider joining JALT. For a one year membership fee of ¥10,000, you get 12 issues of the monthly publication, The Language Teacher, and 2 issues of The JALT Journal. A member gets reduced conference fees, and benefits from deals with companies such as Lexxica, and Apple Japan. They can also participate in any of the local chapter and SIG events at member rates (often free). And of course we provide teachers with the support they need to keep up-to-date in their field, by making research grants available, and creating networking and publishing opportunities. Anyone interested in becoming a member should go to http://www.jalt.org.

Definitely – the activities of the organization might be different, but I believe our structure will generally be the same. The national conference may change – we’ve noticed that in recent years we have been receiving many more presentation submissions, as universities expect their staff to make presentations and publish research. In recent years we’ve also seen a lot more mini-conferences around the country – regional conferences and special interest group conferences. Teachers find the mini-conferences have a much more personal feel to them. At the national conference, there are up to 25 presentations happening at the same time, so it can be a bit overwhelming.

That depends on finance, but I do think it would be a good idea to create some paid positions. A volunteer organization has its flaws, and a paid CEO would certainly bring continuity and quick decision making. At the moment there are a lot of people putting in double-digit hours on a weekly basis, and juggling this commitment with work and family can be difficult.

Many of the problems in past JALT conferences have unfortunately taken place outside the conference, and there have been one or two incidents involving teachers – a big story going around some years ago was that a conference participant caused a fire in a hotel. And I guess it doesn’t come as any surprise that there have been occasions when too much alcohol has led to problems. But I emphasize this is post-conference. As for successes, we’ve had some outstanding speakers, such as Stephen Krashen at the conference in Nara, and Mike McCarthy is always a very popular speaker.

The 2009 conference will be in Shizuoka from 21-23 November, and we have 5 plenary speakers – Christine Pearson Casanave, James Lantolf, Aya Matsuda, Merrill Swain, and Scott Thornbury. All details are on the JALT website.

I’m not a specialist in any area, and I like to know a little bit about everything. I don’t want to concentrate on any one area and become locked into that. As a result I probably put my finger into too many pies, but that keeps things interesting. In my free time, I like to get my hands dirty and do some gardening.

Thank you. It’s been a pleasure.

Certainly. I was born in Yorkshire, and went to Ripon Grammar School – a traditional English school – and then on to Edinburgh University where I was fortunate to receive a degree, first class with honours, in English Language and Literature. This enabled me to continue my studies at Edinburgh University, where I did my PhD in ‘The Poetry of Christina Rossetti’. After that, although I was teaching Shakespeare tutorials at the university, I couldn’t get a full-time job in Edinburgh. And then, out of the blue, I was offered a teaching position in Japan – at Okayama National University.

I had always been interested in Japanese poetry, haiku and tanka, but mainly I fancied a fresh challenge in a culture that, at first glance, appeared radically different from that in which I’d been raised. But to be honest, I didn’t know a great deal about Okayama and the job ahead.

Very well, actually. Although I was initially employed on a two year GaikokujinKyoushi contract, this was extended, and I stayed at the University for a total of 10 years. But, as there was no chance of this becoming a permanent position – every year I was given a one-year contract extension – and I was being pushed to teach more and more basic eikaiwa-style classes, I decided to leave. Around that time, I did become rather despondent, had an early mid-life crisis, and started to wonder if there really was a place for someone like me in Japan – an English teacher who wanted to teach literature or culture realistically, without watering down the subject matter so much that it ended up being unauthentic, dishonest. I had a couple of temporary teaching positions that didn’t really suit me, then in April 2005 I became an Associate Professor of English at Miyazaki National University in Kyushu. I was very happy there, and Kyushu is a beautiful place to live, but it was only a 3-year contract and, again, I felt that my usage of literature in the classroom was tolerated, rather than encouraged. But by that time I had necessarily become more interested and involved in EFL per se and active in JALT. I became President of Miyazaki JALT, published some papers in EFL, but all the time I was arguing for texts that challenged students intellectually. I was now in my forties, my Japanese wife was seriously unwell, and I sorely needed the psychological and financial security that a tenured position could offer. It was a stressful time for me.

Well, then I saw the position advertised at Meiji Gakuin University, and I thought it seemed tailor-made for me at that stage in my career. I applied, got the job, and I’ve been there since April 2008. It’s a fantastic position, a dream come true to work there. I deal mainly with 3rd and 4th year students who are all English majors. I teach seminars in Romantic, Victorian and Modern British poetry, as well as giving lectures in traditional and contemporary British culture. I also have a class where I trace the birth of lyric poetry in Britain and show how it links to pop lyrics of the modern day. I show how the Sex Pistols can be connected to medieval poetry, and we study song words by Morrissey, The Sisters of Mercy, Artic Monkeys, and show how written poetry and pop song words are related and do similar things with language. Don’t forget, in their day poets such as Byron, Shelley, and Swinburne were the equivalent of today’s rock stars.

Perhaps I’m fated to be a Jack-of-all-trades and a master of none. I have a passionate love of language and literature, and also a passion for teaching. And none of these passions contradict each other. I have taught literature in English to English majors and to non-English majors. For the first few years of teaching I’d take Penguin classics into the classroom – Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Henry James, Katherine Mansfield, short stories.

When I first arrived in Japan, I thought I was going to teach English literature full stop; but of course, I had to adapt my approach for second language learners. I adapted my content-based courses to include more language-oriented components, and the students really benefited from and enjoyed this approach. So I collaborated with a Japanese colleague to write some EFL textbooks that foregrounded authentic literary content. The aim was to provide appropriate language scaffolding to the students so they could then confidently interpret the literary texts in a creative, meaningful and mature way.

Not at first, no. Don’t forget, this was 1992, and many national universities used to look down on ‘communicative’ EFL texts; those kinds of texts, the ‘communicative’ ‘task-based’ ‘conversation’ course books, didn’t really start creeping into the university system until the mid-nineties. I strongly believed that such texts were too often unnecessarily ‘dumbing down’ the teaching of language and more suited to school kids than university learners. The design and layout of some textbooks seemed puerile and childish, cartoons and gaudy illustrations, and I was worried that students would stop taking English seriously. Such books and the teaching style they spawned seemed to me to promote entertainment instead of education. And to this day, there are some areas of EFL textbook teaching that concern me – such as oversimplifying the way content is presented to learners at university level. A lot of the material is just not suited to their maturity and to their intellectual potential.

If they work hard and are taught conscientiously, yes. I present some quite complex English literary texts to English major students at Meiji Gakuin University. We read and discuss, explicate them into more manageable language whilst ideally not compromising or reducing the intellectual depth. It works and they thrive and they tell me they love it. It’s an approach that respects them as mature, thinking, adult learners and challenges them intellectually whilst holistically improving their language skills. But I don’t blithely prescribe this approach, say, to students in a private Business English school, or Agriculture majors or students at a two-year Nursing college. So equally, and this is my point, I strenuously object to those people who preach to me that it is not appropriate to teach literature in the English language classroom here at all. You have to be adaptable and open and sensitive to learner needs and wishes; suit the word to the action, as Shakespeare had Hamlet say. Keep it appropriate.

Yes. Recently I was interviewing some high school students who had applied to Meiji Gakuin University. I asked one applicant, ‘What kind of books do you read in your free time?’ She replied that she read biographies, and the last two she’d read (in Japanese and in English) were of Karl Marx and the Italian poet Dante. So what should we teach her in the university English class? How to buy stamps at the post office, or ask her what vegetables she likes? How brutally ignorant of her maturity level and goals, and cruelly stifling of her obvious intellectual potential would that be? I just think that, for students such as that inquisitive and intelligent young woman, certain EFL texts featured on the English curriculum at many Japanese universities are inappropriate. We have to be wary of lowering the bar. If we raise the bar, keep standards high, students will raise their game accordingly; if we lower the bar, they’ll tend to start treading water and eventually lose interest, give up. This pervasive dumbing down, this tragic misguided infantilisation, is, in my mind, the single most alarming aspect of the direction in which English education is moving not only in Japan but also in other countries. I hope I don’t sound supercilious or arrogant; I am not. I can only base what I say on what I have seen during the last 16 years as a passionate teacher of English literature and language. To paraphrase T. S. Eliot, ‘The end of our journey is to reach the place where we started and know it for the first time’, and now that I’m back teaching literature I think that I’m a far better teacher today because of my EFL experience and exposure to sundry styles of EFL instruction: many of them excellent and meaningful, but some not so appropriate to me or my students. Eliot also wrote, ‘We shall not cease from exploration,’ and that’s important too for teachers: never to become complacent, always keep looking for ways to improve the students’ experience and our own experience as educators.

Of course there is. I once did a survey of Japanese university students and asked them what adjectives they associated with English poetry. The overwhelming response was “difficult’, “boring”, “irrelevant”, but the interesting fact was that 70% of the respondents had never read a poem in English. So first of all we have to overcome the misconceptions of the Japanese student, the erroneous negative preconceptions they tend to have about literature, especially poetry, in English.

Poetry uses language in a creative way – it explodes meaning and uses language in joyful, imaginative, surprising ways. It brings dead phrases and expressions back to life, makes words beautiful and more than just prosaic functional tools. To think of language as only a means of communication is like saying that food is only a fuel, or that sex is only for reproduction. We’re human beings and we take pleasure from food and sex, and that’s what poetry does – it shows us that there’s a pleasure in using language. Poetry can stimulate us and challenge us intellectually, and it asks the questions that through the ages we ask ourselves. Rather than asking, ‘How do I get to the Post Office?’ literature poses profound questions such as, ‘To be or not to be?’ Shakespeare is saying, is it worth staying alive when life seems unbearable? And although the language is simple, the question is profound and timeless. I believe that my role as a teacher is to educate, to draw out the latent potential of those students who have learned facts and have accumulated knowledge at school, but have been denied creativity.

Many Japanese students, who come through the Japanese school system, are told that there is a right answer and a wrong answer. Poetry challenges that naïve preconception in a healthy way, as poetry allows each reader to take away his or her own meaning from the poem. Poetry lets students personalize the English they’ve been taught elsewhere, make it their own. A poem can often use simple language to convey a complex meaning, which I feel is suited to adults. Learners can therefore find their own identity, form their own interpretation, and get ideas for expressing themselves originally, as poetry means different things to different people. There is not necessarily a correct or incorrect answer. Poetry mirrors life in that important respect.

That really grew from when I was in a rock band – I was a terrible singer, but I loved writing lyrics. But it really took off when I was at Okayama University and I met Iris Murdoch and her husband, John Bayley. They encouraged me to publish my poetry after they’d read a few of my poems. I’ve now had four books of poetry published, and writing poetry is something I love. People say, why do you write poetry? I say, why don’t you write poetry? It just seems like breathing to me, comes as natural as leaves to a tree, as Keats wrote.

Yes, by definition they do; but, produced sensitively and intelligently, they don’t have to simplify the themes or implications of the original text. I absolutely approve of extensive reading, and I support and applaud the kind of work teachers such as Rob Waring are doing. The aim is to get students reading as much as they can, and graded readers contribute a great deal to this approach. I particularly like the graded readers that introduce iconic ‘classic’ works of literature, and in the last few years at Meiji Gakuin we have introduced an extensive reading program – and the students love it.

I’d just like to say if it works – use it. Don’t force literature upon students, but let’s use it when it’s effective and makes them motivated and inspired and happy.

I teach British Culture as well as British Literature, and I’ve just had a book published by Cengage, called Britain Today. It’s different from certain other texts on the subject, in that it presents Britain as it really is today – ‘warts and all’. We include topics such as knife crime and the racism of the National Front. This isn’t about the village bobby and Miss Marple. I wrote the book with Masayuki Teranishi, a Professor of English at Hyogo University, whom I knew as a student some years ago at Okayama University. It’s a dynamic, interactive course book that can be catalyst for a productive classroom atmosphere. It’s real. We haven’t dumbed down the issues. We’ve simplified the language of instruction but not the topics – and that makes it challenging, truthful, genuine.

You are welcome, and I’m so grateful to have had this chance to state my case. I really do think that there is a place for literature and culture in tertiary-level EFL, and it is unkind and disingenuous to deprive students of the marvelously varied, meaningful, substantial, provocative and challenging content that great works of literature or candid, thoughtful writings about culture can offer. Thank you.

Thank you – it’s my pleasure.

Well, I taught English at Suzhou University in China for 10 years, and then decided to do my PhD at The Ohio State University. I taught ESL Composition at Ohio State until I got a tenure-track position at the University of Arizona in 1998. I started off as an assistant professor, became an associate professor, and finally a full professor all within 8 years, and I’ve been here for 10 years now.

I was Executive Director of the English Center from 2003 until 2008. But because of my increasing work commitments, I had to give up the post. But I enjoyed my time there very much.

Yes I do, as I’m very involved with Hanban and the Confucius Institutes. In fact I’m Director of the Confucius Institute at the University of Arizona, and I have been newly elected to be Vice President of Teachers of Chinese to Speakers of Other Languages (TCSOL).

Yes – The full term is: The Office of the Chinese Language Council International. It’s a kind of Chinese equivalent of the British Council. Its mission is to promote Chinese language and culture. I am working with them to help improve the standards of Chinese language teachers. As more and more people want to learn Chinese, consequently there is a greater demand for Chinese Language teachers. In order to meet this demand, large numbers of Chinese teachers are now being trained. There are 276 Confucius Institutes around the world – Close to 50 in the US alone.

Many K-12 programs now teach Chinese as a foreign language. The demand worldwide for Chinese is second only to English.

That very much depends on my length of stay in either country. When I went back to China after 10 years in the US, I experienced a reverse culture shock. New buildings had sprung up everywhere, and young people were talking a different kind of Chinese language. It was all new and fascinating, and completely different to what I was used to - but after a few months I settled back into the Chinese way of life. I then spent a few years in Shantou and had to readjust when I went back to the States. But these days I feel comfortable in both worlds. In fact my American and Chinese teaching colleagues are similar in so many ways. They have the same goals, and they all want to improve as teachers.

I’m still involved as a teaching professional, and I like to keep informed about TESOL developments, but of course it doesn’t compare to my previous involvement as TESOL President and as a member of the TESOL board.

I was very proud to be the first non-native speaker President of TESOL in its 40 year history, and during my time as President I traveled to more than 20 countries. In Asia I went to Japan, Malaysia, South Korea, Singapore, the Philippines, China, Hong Kong, Thailand and Cambodia. I felt, and still believe very strongly, that the center of the ELT world is Asia. I also wanted to meet teachers in Asia from similar backgrounds to myself. In February this year I’m going to Cambodia TESOL and afterwards will visit Vietnam. Later in the year I’m going to Thailand, and I would love the opportunity to visit Japan again.

Throughout Asia, Communicative Language Teaching is gaining predominance, especially using task-based activities. I see more teachers encouraging learner autonomy and I also think there is a better balance between teaching grammar and communication. As English teaching is increasingly directed towards younger learners, I see content-based instruction becoming more important in the future.

As I mentioned earlier, I’ve been working on developing teaching standards for teachers of Chinese. I’ve also finished translating the Council of Europe’s ‘Common European Framework of Reference for Languages’ into Chinese, and I have recently been elected as Vice President of TCSOL.

Teaching Chinese to Speakers of Other Languages – the Chinese language version of TESOL.

I’m a Project Consultant for an interesting and innovative project in Malaysia, called ‘Magical Lab’. A Malaysian company called Ibuzawa, are developing an extensive vocabulary database which is intended for use by not only learners of English, but also by teachers, authors and researchers. I believe it will prove to be an invaluable resource. Another project, with a Hong Kong based group, concerns testing spoken English online. As you can imagine, it is virtually impossible to do objective face-to-face standardized oral testing for millions of English language learners around the world.

Correct – it’s a task-based oral test which is designed to assess overall language ability. The University of Arizona uses it to screen international teaching assistants, and we have also developed an online English language assessment tool for Chinese middle and high school children. It’s called TBEST (Task Based English Standard Test), and more information can be found on the website. My other project is with the Ministry of Education in China, and we are in the final stages of introducing a comprehensive teacher training program for English teachers in Chinese Primary and Secondary schools. We’ve designed the framework and the teacher training modules and are now working on the implementation plan. This is a huge undertaking, and will involve partnerships with several private companies, including publishers. It will be a blended approach of online and face-to-face training, and is being developed with TCL – the Chinese Open University system.

Thank you.

I'm the publisher of the Scholastic ELT Readers series. I have worked extensively in ELT for over 15 years, starting my career as an ELT teacher and then working at the BBC, Oxford University Press and Richmond/Santillana.

Scholastic is famous as a publisher of reading material, so it seemed like a logical progression from our established magazines business to expand into readers. We wanted our Scholastic ELT Readers series to reflect the same core values as our magazines: high interest, teen-focused, full colour material which motivates teenagers to read in English.

All the authors that work on the series are experienced teachers who combine teaching with writing on a freelance basis.

The Scholastic ELT Readers are unlike any other readers series on the market. We publish the only readers series specifically aimed at teenagers and solely focused on film and media tie-ins. In addition to the appealing subject matter, the readers also constitute a sound academic resource and a carefully graded syllabus. The readers are based on a pedagogical framework but also deal with contemporary themes and issues that reflect the lives of teenagers today.

We like to publish film titles which have both teen and teacher appeal. One of our bestselling titles, Billy Elliott is a perfect example of this. Teachers tell us that they love this title because it contains many themes that they can exploit in class, such as gender issues, the class divide, the North-South divide in the UK. Students love it because it covers coming-of-age difficulties which they can relate to: friendships, decisions about the direction of their lives and so on.

We have 50 titles that are now available and plenty more exciting titles to come next year: Fast Food Nation, The Queen, Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Sense and Sensibility to name but a few. We will continue to publish the most exciting blockbuster films and TV series with teen appeal.

The most important thing in getting students to read, is for them to read something which motivates and excites them, and to read lots. Our experience over our 50 year history of producing youth-focused material is that students will acquire language more easily and naturally if they are truly interested in the content.

Is that right? Can’t believe it.

Well, where do I start? There has been a huge amount going -- on perhaps the biggest project that I have been involved in during that time has been a project I started in 2003 which was to design a curriculum and write text books for the middle schools and junior high schools in China and since that time we have sold 700 million copies.

700 million, yeah.

Right. And it took everybody by surprise, including the publishers. They thought it was just going to be a testing of the waters and they thought maybe we would sell a million copies a year.

And now there are 9 publishing houses across China publishing it – churning out the books, it won't stop.

That’s, yeah, junior high school. The first three years of high school in China.

I had to modify the international Go For It! series to fit into the specifications of the Ministry of Education in China and that meant modifying the series in terms of the syllabus – because the series itself is basically uses a task-based approach and the ministry of education in China has embraced task-based learning as one of its central tenets; the idea that kids should be learning language in order to use it for functional purposes rather than to pass exams. Obviously passing exams is still a major consideration but then we have to calibrate the course against the Ministry of Education’s core vocabulary and core grammatical specifications and so that was something that I had to do. I took six months off from Hong Kong U to do the series and customize it for China.

Well, I mean, in the traditional approach one starts with analysis of the language and you have sets of grammatical and vocabulary items. In a task-base approach you don’t start with the language, you start with the learners and you layout the kinds of things that the potential – that the audience for the series whatever it is – in this case it’s junior high school students, what the kinds of things that they may potentially or actually need to do with the language. So instead of having a list of grammar items you have a list of tasks -- the things the people want to do with the language.

Sure, yeah.

And then you lay out the grammar and vocabulary as a kind of second order activity.

A kind of extreme view of tasked-base learning has it that you don’t actually need to do that second order stuff. You don’t actually need to specify the grammatical syllabus. The structures come along kind of naturally. But there seems to be increasing evidence that most learners do actually benefit from also having a focus on language forms.

Yes. Yeah. I am currently doing the second edition for the series and what we’re doing there is, we’re actually adding in more grammar and we’re adding in – we are bulking out particularly for the later levels – we’re bulking out and adding in much greater reading and writing, much greater emphasis on reading and writing because the first series focused very much on developing listening and speaking skills with reading and writing as a kind of second order activity.

Yeah, role-plays, simulations and so on. Each lesson culminates in an activity or task that gets the learners to actually use the language they have been learning in some kind of simulation or role-play and so that has a number of benefits. The main one is that it dramatizes to the learners and the teachers and all those involved that they can actually do something concrete at the end of each lesson, so hopefully that is going to be motivating for the learners.

Because as you know learning language is a long term business and particularly once you get beyond the very initial stages of learning a language it becomes very kind of frustrating and de-motivating for learners as they seem to be putting in a huge amount of effort and they don't seem to be getting any payback for that effort.

Yeah, yeah, they can say they can actually do something.

No.

Yeah, it surprises me when I go to China and they say that, yes, you’re very famous.

through…

Yeah, yeah -- or have failed to learn English! Hopefully not!

I think so. I can’t imagine that any other series has sold more than that.

A lot of things, yeah. I have been involved with Anaheim University where until a couple of months ago I was the president of the university. I have now stepped down a notch to being Vice President for Academic Affairs because I preferred that kind of focus -- rather than doing a lot of the administrative stuff that we have been working on. They have just established the David Nunan Institute for language education…

…and through that we’re favoring certificate courses. We’ve got a certificate in TESOL and we have a certificate in teaching English to young learners which is one of the major trends that has happened in these 8 years since you last interviewed me.

And that is very exciting as well because of the huge explosion in the demand for English around the world, the industry itself simply can’t keep up with that demand and so one of the things that we’re doing is developing these online courses to provide people who are perhaps coming into the field for the first time or perhaps switching from being say teacher of science or geography into teaching English.

This gives them a basic grounding…

Young learners yeah.

Yeah.

Yes, we have only just – we’ve got our first cohort of TESOL certificate students, the young learners course will probably be rolled out in full in a few months’ time, but we have just signed an agreement with GEOS in Japan here for their teachers to enroll in the TESOL certificate.

Yeah, so that should be really exciting and I look forward to working with those teachers.

Yeah.

The research is very controversial but the bulk of it seems to show that starting at a very young age doesn’t make a difference or historically it hasn’t made a difference. So if you take a group of learners from a particular demographic and you start them learning English at the age of 5 and you take another group of learners from the same demographic and you start them learning at the age of 10 and you test both groups at the age 15 you find no difference.

Yeah.

You would think so, wouldn’t you?

So then the question then is: why is there no difference? Is it that -- some psychologists and psycholinguists believe this --- that it’s because learners at an early age really can’t benefit particularly from learning foreign languages and the older you get the better you’re at learning anything -- as long as you begin learning prior to puberty -- so around the age of10 or 11. There is no comparative advantage starting at the age 5.

Yeah, it seems to be puberty and again this is controversial, but there is this theory called the “critical period hypothesis” that something happens to the brain around about puberty and that if you start learning a language prior to puberty you are given a comparative advantage, but starting at very young age doesn’t give you an advantage.

Now, I think the jury is still out because I think that one of the problems is that a lot of young learners programs are not specifically designed for young learners so they simply – they have just imported a curriculum that's been designed for older learners and given it to young learners.

So the curriculum, the materials, and also the teachers are not adequately trained to teach younger learners and that’s one of the reasons why we have launched this TESOL certificate for younger learners to provide that kind of training. I mean, I think that --- even if it were the case that there is no difference between someone learning from 5 and someone learning from 9 -- it’s not necessarily a good enough reason not to start for people learning at the age 5 because I think there are a lot of cultural and attitudinal aspects of language learning that can be inculcated at a young age.

It’s a 90 hour course and it costs around $700 US so it’s accessible to all. And for that they get 15 modules and each module consists of a lecture from me, which is uploaded through the website. They have a set reading. The course itself is based on a book that I did for McGraw Hill a number of years ago, Practical English Language Teaching and there are 15 chapters in that book and the course itself mirrors those chapters, so each module has a lecture from me, has the set reading that goes with it from the text book, and then there is a set of discussion questions that students – there is a discussion forum and students can interact with each other discussing these questions through the online environment.

True yeah. Yeah, there isn’t, and that’s something that we try to deal with by building in classroom-based activities. About a third of the tasks for each of the modules require that the students actually go and do something in class and then come back and discuss it.

And given the hundreds or thousands of teachers that need training around the world it’s clearly not feasible to have supervised practical lessons for everybody, so I think the idea of online instruction is a good one and the beauty is, for example, a student who, for example, is not a native speaker of the language can look at this online lecture and can go back and look at it as many times as they like.

There are some interesting projects just coming up. There is a project in Malaysia called Magical Lab, which is very exciting and I have just become involved in but which I’m quite excited about because it isdeveloping e resources and tools for teachers related to vocabulary.

Well I think it’s central and it’s becoming more and more important. When I started my career about 30 years ago as a language teacher we were actively discouraged from focusing on vocabulary because the…

Yeah, the dominant method at that time was audiolingualism and one of it’s central tenets was that, fundamental to language acquisition was acquiring the basic pattern, structural patterns of the language or grammatical patterns of the language, and so you consciously limited the amount of vocabulary in order to teach all of the basic structural patterns in the language and the idea was…

Well, yeah, there is only a certain amount of attention that a learner can pay to the language that they are learning and if you…

Yeah, if you try to teach vocabulary as well then the learners are going to be overloaded and that if you’re going to focus on anything it should be on the structural patterns, but then with the development of the communicative approach to language teaching, vocabulary came back into focus. My view and this is viewed as reflected in the book that I wrote last year for MacMillan called What Is This Thing Called Language, is that there are only three systems or subsystems of language. There is a subsystem of sound, of phonology, subsystem of vocabulary or lexis and subsystem of grammar with structure. If some people say what about discourse? what about pragmatics? and so on, I say, well, they are not systems and I give the rationale for that in the book, if people are interested.

But these three subsystems -- for the purpose of a study you can separate them out -- but ultimately you can’t. I have got a lot of examples in the book to show that ultimately you cannot really separate these, particularly vocabulary and lexis you can’t separate these out ultimately, for example, the issue of say pluralization, you know, dog : dogs, cat : cats. We add the s to the end of the word. Is that vocabulary issue or is it grammar issue? And it’s both.

They have had tremendous influence. I’ve just started to work on a new series and they’re giving vocabulary a central place and we’re using the Cobuild corpus that was originally developed at the University of Birmingham in the UK, we are using that as one of fundamental tools and one of the things that it does is, first of all it gives insights into things such as word frequency, but also more importantly how the given word is used functionally because most words have multiple functions and a corpus of millions of words can tell us the appropriate function to teach at a particular stage. And it also gives example that we can pull out from the corpus and then put in to the series as well.

I don't know - I don't know what counts as success? I don't know how many copies Dave sold. If it didn't reach its potential, I suspect it was because teachers themselves weren’t ready for the approach and this is something I have learnt in some ways to my cost over the years. And a very important lesson that I have learned is that there is no point in launching a fabulous new approach on the marketplace whether it’s task-based learning, the lexical approach, or learning languages through standing on one leg, or wrapped in a blanket and…There is no point in launching the latest, most fantastic research-based thing if you don't also have a very comprehensive and effective teacher-training program that goes with it and that's also something we have been working very hard at in our China project…

Again, in some parts of China you have got people who may have been teaching geography or history and they have suddenly had to switch into teaching a language and they are not equipped to do it and so they will tend to teach the language the way that they were taught and so this really enforces a kind of very traditional approach to language teaching and so I have actually had to modify my approach when I write the series and I had to build in a lots and lots of teacher training opportunities and so we developed a very comprehensive website, we found master teachers in China and we uploaded 100s of exemplary lessons from different levels of the series and so on.

Yeah.

Yeah it was and this comes back to Magical Lab because I think one of the things that – one of the potentials here is that it can provide tremendous amount of assistance to curriculum design and material writers such as myself. When I wrote the series when I was adapting the series I was given the official Chinese ministry of education set vocabulary list and I had to then calibrate, I had to build in vocabulary items at different levels and there were times I was scratching my head and I would say well you know why do I have to teach kangaroo in book two, unit four. I mean who says that learners in China have to learn the word kangaroo in this particular unit? And one of the things that I think would be a tremendous resource and one of things I am going to be encouraging the people behind the Magical Lab project to do is to upload the official vocabulary lists from different national syllabuses in China, Japan, Korea, and so on and it will be interesting from a research point of view to look at the commonalities and differences. From a materials writers point of view they can draw on those resources when they're writing materials for these different markets.

Yes, I think it's an exciting project and it's one that it's very much in tune as we said earlier with current trends, which suggest that language acquisition is basically lexically driven.

Yeah, absolutely, yeah. When I first moved to Hong Kong, and that was 14 years ago and I was trying to learn Cantonese, I didn't really give a damn about the grammar. All I wanted was the whole vocabulary because it was that enabled me to communicate in a fairly rudimentary way.

Insomnia.

I need about 4-hours sleep a night. No, I think it comes down to really loving what to do. I have always loved teaching and I’ve loved words and writing and… as a kid about 7 years of age, I think I wrote my first short story when I was 7 or 8 and won a prize for it… I think it was about a day at a theme park in my hometown.

I have never actually seen writing as a job. It is something that I do. It defines me, it’s part of my identity. It's yeah, it's hard work, I mean, somebody once said that writing is easy, you sit and stare at the computer until drops of blood appear in your fart, but yes it's something that I really enjoying doing -- and I do a thousand words a day. Often I throw 900 words of those out in the evening. The first thing I do in the morning when I get up at 4 or 5 is to sit and write 1000 words -- it could be a newspaper article or it could be part of new book that I am writing, but I do these 1000 words and it's almost like…

Yeah, it's like five finger exercises.

Yeah, don't wait for inspiration because if you do then you may be in for a very long wait.

Well exactly. And there are times when I would spend 5 to 6 hours trying to get those 1000 words down and there are times when the 1000 words flow out in 30 or 40 minutes.

Well, I do -- I have just written a book. I have written a book which -- I think it's creative. I‘ve called it Road Show and it's a book of about anecdotes about my travels mainly around Latin America launching book series and that was great fun to write.

Yeah. Yeah it's a travel memoir -- it’s ELT. Although, I am not nearly as funny as Bill unfortunately. Some of the stories are frightening, though!

My pleasure.

In terms of my many hats, I believe I'm very fortunate to have had the opportunity to view materials writing from a number of different perspectives, as well to have met and heard about the experiences of so many teachers around the world. Think About Editing was written out of my experience teaching writing to intermediate students. I found (as most teachers do) that, although students had had previous exposure to key basic grammar points, they still continued to make errors with that grammar in their writing. The book was designed to raise their "grammar awareness" so they could self-correct more readily - an approach I found worked successfully in my classes. It has been very rewarding to hear from a number of teachers using the text that they have observed significant results.

I was there way back in 1985 through 1987, and at that time English classes were very "grammar translation." Some language institutes were just opening up to more communicative methodologies, and I had the opportunity to observe some phenomenal teachers - but they were the ones who tended to move overseas to Australia, the US, or the UK, rather than contributing to the profession in China. In my speaking classes, many students had the same reluctance to speak that so many Japanese students have. There were, of course, always a few talkative students who desperately wanted to converse with me, and the easy thing to do would have been to chat with them and ignore the rest. So they were usually quite shocked when I continued to insist on class participation by all students. Everything in China has changed so much since that time, so I'm sure language teaching has also seen some great leaps forward (if you'll excuse my choice of words!).

I am not sure about having a philosophy that sounds rather grand. I have a way of thinking about TESOL: that if it is to justify the name of a profession, then its practitioners have the responsibility to think critically about what they do. In my view, they need to be educated and not just trained, that is to say informed about theoretical ideas and research findings but not, emphatically not, simply to accept them as fact or on faith, but to subject them to careful appraisal so as to decide how far they are relevant to their own circumstances.

Research findings are of their nature generalizations, and always need to be interpreted in the light of particular pedagogic conditions and requirements. They may indicate things that teachers might find it appropriate to consider, but cannot determine how or what they should teach. But teachers are under considerable pressure to adopt what is recommended, indeed touted (as you put it) on the authority of "experts".

Perhaps the most obvious recent example of this is the current precept that English teachers must only use real or authentic English in their teaching - that is to say the English that naturally occurs in the contexts of native speaker use. This directive comes from corpus linguistics and as such has no necessary pedagogic validity whatever.

In language pedagogy, as every teacher knows, the primary consideration has to be how to make the language real for learners in the context of their classroom so that they can engage with it, appropriate it, learn from it. The essential point, I think, is that the English that is taught as a subject is not at all the same as the English that occurs in native speaker contexts. It is a foreign language, and it is this foreignness that is the reality that learners have to be guided to cope with. And English is foreign in different local ways in different countries and different classrooms.

It is obvious that people vary a good deal in the kind of thinking they find conducive. I am always amazed, for example, at the facility with which colleagues of mine do crossword puzzles that I find completely baffling, or represent ideas by means of diagrams, which I cannot make head nor tail of. And of course I take comfort in the thought that they have a different kind of intelligence from mine, but not, of course, superior. The difficulty is that certain kinds of intelligence tend to be privileged over others in particular cultures and in particular traditions of education, and people who cannot demonstrate this approved way of thinking are then written off as failures, no matter how intelligent they might be in other ways.

As far as language teaching is concerned, this should alert us to the possibility that certain kinds of activity that are to be found in textbooks, particularly those perhaps associated with task based learning, might presuppose ways of thinking that are alien to certain individuals, or groups of learners, who might then have to cope not only with the foreignness of the language but the foreignness of the way of thinking that the activity requires. We come here to the very general issue of individual and cultural differences among learners and how far these can be, or should be, accommodated in teaching. Again, having identified a possible problem, its solution can only be a matter of local decision.

Generally speaking, stylistics is the study of the linguistic features of texts, the actual verbal texture of occurrences of language use and its effects. Originally the texts in question were literary, and stylistics was seen as an extension of traditional work in literary criticism in that it linked interpretation to a more precise linguistic analysis of texture. These days, stylistics has extended its scope to include texts of all kinds, and has become more or less identified with critical discourse analysis and is primarily concerned with revealing how linguistic features are indicative of underlying ideological significance.

As applied to literature, the central claim of stylistics (at least as I see it) is not that it can lead to a more exact interpretation of a text but that it can provide students with the means for substantiating their own understanding of a text, and so make them less dependent on the ready made and second hand interpretations handed down to them by critical authority. So for me, stylistics is essentially an approach not to literary criticism but to literary education.

This was a procedure that Patrick Allen and myself devised when we were developing ESP materials in Edinburgh in the early 1970s, which resulted in the English in Focus series. We noted that technical and scientific writing typically made use of visual devices like diagrams, graphs, charts and so on which supported and complemented the verbal text in various ways. It occurred to us that since these were an alternative and non-language specific means for conveying information, they could be used as a prompt for developing abilities in English. Thus students could be asked to demonstrate their understanding of a verbal passage by means of a diagram, chart or whatever (a comprehension activity), and conversely could be asked to compose or complete a verbal text by reference to such visual devices (a composition activity).

Although these information transfer activities were originally developed for teaching ESP, they can clearly be used more generally, and would seem to be particularly appropriate for task-based teaching. Anybody interested can find a detailed discussion of these information transfer activities in my book Teaching Language as Communication (OUP, 1978 - details here).

Teaching is an interactive process which naturally depends very much on establishing rapport with learners, and humour can be a very effective way of doing this. Humour can also be effective in making ideas more accessible and more readily retained. Amusement does not preclude serious thought. On the contrary, it can stimulate it, as satirical comedy makes clear. People are more likely to take note of things if they find them amusing, and I think that a lot of theoretical work in our field would have more impact on teachers if it were more entertaining. You do not have to be solemn to be serious..

Since I know next to nothing about English teaching in Japan, I would be in no position to offer advice on this particular matter, which would need to take local conditions into account. All I could do as an outsider would be to raise certain general questions about the rationale for introducing English at that stage, about how it would be taught as a subject, what language abilities would be focused on and why, and so on.

It was about the communicative approach to language teaching. Michael Swan had written two articles in the English Language Teaching Journal which I took objection to on the grounds that instead of evaluating the basic principles of the approach, he simply reduced it to absurdity. Anybody interested can read our exchange in Currents of Change in English Language Teaching (OUP, 1990). Since then, Michael Swan and I have recognised that much of our disagreement was apparent rather than real, and mellowed by age and friendship, we have either resolved our differences or have become reconciled to them.

I love living in Vienna. You can walk in streets untroubled by traffic, you can go almost anywhere safely by bicycle along the Danube as far as Bratislava if you are so inclined. And it is the only city in the world where you can get a tram in the centre of town and find yourself in a wine tavern among vineyards half an hour later. Where else would one want to live?

Like many others, in those far-off days in the 1970s. We were young, the world beckoned, we did some training, and set off into the wild blue yonder, clutching our Thomson & Martinets (the essential Learner's Grammar of the time).

It wasn't really a conscious decision. It was a very gradual process; the writing grew out of the teaching, the teaching reinforced the writing, which led to more writing, and so on.

It was the brainchild of Mary McIntosh, a very talented editor at Oxford University Press at the time, who worked with Tricia Hedge, the founding series editor, to develop a syllabus for writing graded readers that paid much more attention to features of discourse than had happened before. I joined the project as the first scripts started to come in.

A lot more to it! There is a core grammatical syllabus as well as the headword list, and a host of guidelines on syntax and discourse features.

In ER learners read a vast amount of text, well within their current linguistic competence, choose what they want to read, and focus on the meaning not on the language. The aims are enjoyment, and developing confidence, fluency, and automaticity in reading.

In IR learners read short, usually difficult texts, typically chosen by the teacher. They focus on the language rather than on the text, may be translating, using a dictionary, learning new vocabulary, studying the grammar, answering comprehension questions.

They each present different challenges, but once I am immersed in a story, whether it's my own story or began life as someone else's, they are both equally enjoyable.

There are lots of publishers publishing graded readers, but it is quite a competitive field now. You have to be a good storyteller, not just good at the language controls.

No, a series editor shouldn't have favourites. I love all the titles I have ever worked on with an equal passion.

A theory of narrative the critical and theoretical study of the numerous forms of narrative discourse, especially in literary and film studies. That sounds as dry as dust, but it is fascinating in practice, for example, studying how the story structure of Howl's Moving Castle changes from Diana Wynne Jones's original narrative text to Hayao Miyazaki's retelling in film animation. Which I hope to do, as soon as I can get to see the film.

Hugely. As a speaker of what is now one of the minority English varieties (British), I am keen to improve my accommodation strategies when communicating with speakers of Other Englishes. And there is some terrific creative writing being done by non-Anglophone writers, full of zest and freshness and newly minted language.

In keeping with the conference theme of "Sharing Our Stories," I'll be speaking about Storytelling. The title is "Infinite Riches in a Little Room: Storytelling for Extensive Reading."

I look forward to meeting everyone at that event. And I have written a little story especially for the occasion...

My pleasure. I was honoured to be asked.

Desperation! I started out teaching emotionally-disturbed children, and the Shakespeare and other literature I had studied wasn't helpful. The kids couldn't string a sentence together or read simplified books. I thought a Diploma in Applied Linguistics from the University of Victoria would help me understand and address their problems; it did, and I encourage all English teachers to study linguistics and ELT methodologies.

Eventually, I ended up working with teenagers at a children's prison; I had to go through five locked doors just to get to my classroom where a guard was always present. I left to volunteer for a year as a lecturer at Southwest China Teacher's University in Sichuan and have been involved in ELT ever since.

But before I moved to China, I tried to find a teaching job in Japan. I answered an advertisement from a Tokyo language school and received a letter saying hundreds of candidates had applied and, unfortunately, I was the second-best candidate; they had hired someone slightly more qualified. I was disappointed, but also flattered. I applied again the following year and received the identical letter! I realized it was simply the standard polite rejection letter sent to everyone who didn't get a job. I laughed and laughed. Politeness is one of the things I love best about Japan!

Creativity. In every field not just language teaching there is a move toward specialization. People on tight career paths take no time to study outside their own disciplines. In my case, my first degree was in Geography followed by Diplomas in Education and Linguistics. After that, I studied Theater, completing a Master's degree in Playwrighting. My PhD is in computer-assisted language learning. When I approach writing, I do so from a variety of experiences and perspectives and hopefully bring along my own infectious love of learning. I'm always up for a challenge and try to write create materials in new ways.

Throughout Asia, students are forced to take years of English instruction. But the purpose, most often, is to pass tests, not to demonstrate working language proficiency. When most Hong Kongers or Japanese graduate from school or university, they seldom need English at work or in their daily lives. Motivation is low.

In China, the situation is quite different. English is seen as a language of opportunity and a competent speaker of English can find far more interesting and better-paying jobs, sometimes with opportunities for international travel. Motivation is high and despite a lack of resources, students find their own ways to learn. There are more English speakers in China than there are in the USA.

But it is important for governments and educational authorities both in Hong Kong and Japan to face the fact that they are heavily dependent on tourism at home and international trade abroad. When a Japanese businessperson travels in Asia, Europe or anywhere else in the world, the common language is usually English. For Japan to continue to compete in business and many other areas, there needs to be a fundamental shift away from the current testing situation that so influences what is taught and how it is taught.

Yes, I have done a great deal of writing with Longman over the past few years with a primary listening series (eight books) and a secondary non-fiction readers series (40+ books) in China and the four-book secondary/university Read and Think! series used in Japan and throughout Asia. And I continue to write for Longman.

Good publishers are like family. I am sure teachers who have dealt with Longman representatives will recognize among them both personal bonds and a strong culture of learning. The topic of our discussions is never how we can sell more books; it is always what we could be doing to more effectively address the needs of students and teachers. It's a great company.

I have always been a naughty student the first to ask, "Why are we learning this?" But it's a question that all students think about or should think about. Simply knowing that something is part of the curriculum or in the book is not good enough.

Too often, teachers say, "Memorize this list of words and these grammatical structures they will be on the test." For the student, this is poor and short-term motivation. It also presumes that there is a set of knowledge items that everyone has to understand and communicate in the same way. But in the real world, this is not so. There are many synonyms, circumlocutions, grammatical structures and even body language to express similar ideas.

How often does someone ask you a multiple choice or true/false question? When people talk, they explain problems and ask for solutions. And when we solve problems, we tend to do so collaboratively with family, friends and co-workers. I'm suspicious of traditional teaching, which tends to focus on competition over collaboration.

Consider this task: "You and your friends are going to a restaurant in a foreign country. You don't speak the language, but you are extremely hungry! Talk together and decide what sorts of language and structures would you need to get a meal."

In this type of task, students see a real problem and a real reason for learning. The task makes the learning more natural and memorable. But there is one problem many teachers fear open-endedness. "How will I mark it?" they cry. My response is that the language teacher's first purpose is to teach language not just to constantly test. Be creative. Be innovative. Let the students test themselves. Try something new and different and unforgettable.

What we know so far is that computers come to the language classroom with problems as well as benefits.

Computers and the WWW are great for communication, but spelling can deteriorate as students start adopting phrases such as How R U? I m gr8. Computers are good for research, but they usually fail to help students think critically about what they read. Computers can test simple written input efficiently, but they cannot deal well with ambiguity in speech or writing. Computers can present interesting graphics and video to enliven learning, but they cannot easily adapt their presentations to different audiences.

In short, a state-of-the-art computer system generally cannot do many of the things that any reasonably qualified teacher can do. However, what computers can do better than teachers is exhibit unlimited patience. A CD-ROM will give eternal personal attention and answer the same question with the same answer incessantly, anytime, anywhere.

Computers are a good resource for teachers and students. The problem today is many administrators and businesses want computers to be replacements for teachers. It's the wrong paradigm and inhibits the development of truly useful computer applications in the classroom.

For you software experts out there, here is the type of pedagogical application I would like to see: In a program like Microsoft Word, spelling is routinely and effortlessly corrected; invent a subprogram to record and review the errors a student makes.

And for the inventors out there, I would like to see a primary school keyboard with all the letters in two long (logical) alphabetical rows, one for upper case and one for lower case.

In Teaching and Researching Computer Assisted Language Learning, I have a very simple measure of what will constitute success in CALL: a student in Japan will use a computer to learn a language such as Swahili to a high degree of fluency without any access to a native speaker of the target language or any other target language materials.

We are a long way off from this happening and the reasons why are fascinating because they tell us a great deal about the nature of teaching and learning.

The next big thing in computing in general and CALL in particular will be near-perfect speech recognition so we can do away with the traditional computer's need for a keyboard and mouse. Once this happens, a highly powerful mobile phone will be all the computer most of us need. Imagine having the opportunity to have unobtrusive but highly interactive Italian language lessons as you stroll down a street in Rome.

During my thesis research, I spent a lot of time reading science fiction for ideas about the future of books, computers and education. Science fiction can dream of the ideal without being caught up in the limits of the possible. For example, in Neil Stephenson's The Diamond Age or A Young Lady's Primer, there is a wonderful description of what an educational computer program should be. It would be nice to convince Bill Gates to spend a few billion dollars to build it, but I believe it will come anyway, incrementally, eventually.

In general, the most important thing we need to see is computer applications and peripherals which are not poor copies of real world artifacts. For example, early programs tried to replicate the look and feel of books or blackboards on screen. What we need to see are new ideas for the intuitive presentation and transmission of information that take advantage of what the computer can do and that the book or teacher cannot. An innovative example is Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus.

Imagine you had to move to another country for seven years. Would you rather go to Siberia or Hawaii? Would you rather go with someone who is going to lecture you endlessly about 50 kinds of snow or someone who knows a bit about beaches but who would like to join you in learning to surf?

When you start a Ph.D., have passion for both what you will study and the people with whom you will work. Don't simply choose a topic which you think is safe or practical and an advisor who is an established expert on the topic.

When I first proposed my thesis to David Nunan he dismissively tested me by saying he wasn't an expert on CALL. I explained I knew that, but thought he probably wanted to learn. He liked the answer and took me on. We both learned a great deal through the process. And, as a bonus, I found out that David could easily give up his academic life and become a professional chef; we've had countless great meals together!

On a more practical note, I recommend David's book Research Methods in Language Learning. I read it before I started and it saved me endless grief as it addresses the common problems so many Ph.D. and Masters degree students face.

Sometimes the best plan is to have no plan. I left Hong Kong on 1 July 2004 and traveled through Asia for three and a half months with my wife and two sons, ages 3 and 6. We settled on a small island near Vancouver with a population of 3,200 where wild deer graze on my lawn and salmon spawn in the streams. I settled down to continue writing but have also been drawn into an odd assortment of adventures including consulting on creativity and new product development for an international toy company.

And what next? I'm sure we will live abroad again. My wife is a painter and we always thought a year in Kyoto would suit us perfectly. Now, if only my computer had a crystal ball function to peer into the future!

I know this well having gone to school in England for 5 years. Even my best friend there called me 'Spud' (I won't tell you what term my enemies used!). I believe that the equivalent in Japanese is 'imo' which is used hurtfully to describe someone unsophisticated and simple like myself. As Irishmen, I think we should stand up to this discrimination against humble root vegetables. What do you think Mark?

But seriously...the real story behind the Potato Pals began when I came to Japan from Ireland 9 years ago, clutching my hard-earned two-week TEFL certificate. The first and most burning issue was to find a job. Well, I opened the Japan Times and one advertisement jumped right out at me. "Potato Club Requires Teachers". Nothing had prepared me for this. Vegetables teaching English! What was going on here? I mean, I was prepared for a certain degree of culture shock in Japan but this was ridiculous! Anyway, having come from Ireland, famous for its potatoes, I thought "That's the job for me". Fortunately, it was. "Why potatoes?" I asked the owner. "Everybody loves them!" she said.

The school had foreigners teaching alongside Japanese assistants. Actually it was really the assistants that ran the show, dealing with running noses, toddlers who missed their mummies and anxious parents⑷ll the usual day to day dramas of a children's English language school. I was lucky to be paired up with Rie Kimura, a gifted artist with a great talent for drawing potatoes! We worked together to produce readers and workbooks for our students. I would do horrible rough sketches which Rie turned into beautiful finished art. It was through this process that we developed our creative partnership, having lots of fun on the way. The books we produced during those four years became the 'seeds' of Potato Pals.

The concept is very simple. Potato Pals helps young learners to develop their communication skills by telling the story of the things they do in their own lives. The stars of the show are these 6 very cute potatoes, three potato boys and three potato girls. They are Buddy, Daisy, Nina, Dean, Joy and yes, you guessed it, Chip!

The world of the 6 Potato Pals mirrors the world of real kids. They do all the things our students do. They use all the things our students use and their world contains all the 'topics' such as colors, numbers and shapes that we teach. The fact that they are potatoes somehow makes it more fun for kids than if they were human children. Why? I don't know, but it works. More digestible perhaps!

The language is presented in 16-page readers which come in sets of 6 books with a CD of readings and some very catchy TPR songs by fellow Irishman, Brian Cullen. There are also Workbooks, a User's Guide and Picture Cards. The materials can be used in the classroom or at home but ideally, both. I'm always being asked by parents what they can do at home to help their kids learn and these materials are a response to that question as well as a reflection of what I felt would be most useful to the kids. Language that they can really use in a format that is accessible to teachers, parents and the students themselves.

A Memoricon is a little picture cue representing a story sentence. They accumulate on the alternate pages of a Potato Pals reader and encourage the students to repeat and review the language of the previous pages. Students are able to read or sing the book through the Memoricons...in effect, speaking English through visual prompts. I did indeed coin the word and hopefully one day the word will return the favor and coin me!

The Potato Club is a school which believes in supporting teachers to develop their own materials and style of teaching rather than imposing one particular 'way'. We were given guidelines and suggestions as well as any help we ever needed but we were always encouraged to try new things and share our 'findings' at meetings with the other teachers. We were taking part in our own development as teachers as well as in the success of the school. This was teaching as a creative process. Teachers interested in making materials, developing the curriculum in various ways or working on the school's newsletter were even paid for the time they spent doing so.

Rie and I produced workbooks, readers, and cartoons which were used by our students. One summer, I showed these to my sister who suggested we send them to some publishers. There was nothing to lose so, with the help of a friend, I wrote a short proposal which was sent to the three biggest publishers of EFL materials. I really had no connections in the business so the proposals were completely unsolicited. I did however get down on my knees and pray that they might land on the right desk. Within a week we had been contacted by editors from OUP in New York. They invited us to meet them in Tokyo. You can imagine our excitement and delight when the books were favourably reviewed by teachers in the field and we were given a contract!

To use an Americanism, it was a totally different 'ball game'. Our previous work had consisted of me passing Rie a rough sketch which she drew and was then sent to the old fella' at the printers around the corner (who used to drop cigarette ash on the documents!).

Now that Rie lives in Osaka and our editors are in New York, everything is much more complicated. I send manuscripts, art specs and rough visuals to New York. These are thoroughly gone over by the editors there who send them back with suggestions for changes. These changes are discussed in endless emails before a final draft gets sent off to Rie. She then does pencil drawings which are likewise commented on and changed where necessary. She then submits the final ink drawings to be digitalized and sent back to her to color before going into the final stages of editing and design etc. Finally, the books are printed in Hong Kong to be marketed all over the world.

I found the whole creative process extremely interesting. It has been an education for me to learn how books are made and I certainly look at all books differently now. OUP's attention to detail was an eye-opener for someone as scrappy as me. There was a creative buzz with ideas coming from left, right and center. The final look and content of the books we ended up with are far beyond what I had hoped for.

This year has been great fun as we have been taking the Potato Pals on the road as part of OUP's efforts to let people know about how to use the books. This is the most enjoyable part of the job for me as I get to meet the people who are, or will be using the materials. The sales and promotions team are a great bunch and have made me feel very welcome as have the other OUP authors I have had the chance to meet, especially Setsuko Toyama and Peter and Karen Viney who have been very supportive. We have been getting positive feedback from people all over which is a thrill too. It's a great feeling to think of all those children all over the world using the books to learn English.

Oh yes! The six books in Series 1 go through a day in the life of the pals from morning to evening. Series 2, which will be hitting the shelves soon, sees them out and about with their families: to the beach, zoo, farm and so on. Next, I would like to take them on some real adventures, exploring the jungle, through the desert and into space! I'm currently working on those but this is highly confidential as I wouldn't want the designs for a potato rocket-ship to fall into the wrong hands.

I teach 30 hours a week in the classroom at the moment and have two small children so the writing gets squeezed into vacations and late nights. At the moment I am spending much more time teaching than writing. I enjoy being in the classroom but would like to spend more time writing and hope to do so in the future. My ideal would be to teach for a couple of hours a day...when I felt like it. I'm sure some of your readers out there share this sentiment!

The standard answer to this question is that one should go to lots of conferences, read and review books, get to know teachers, writers and editors and generally network with people in the business. I am sure that this is all good advice but I did none of these things! I think that in our case, OUP were interested because we were actually producing the materials on a small scale and using them successfully in the classroom. That fact, some of the innovative aspects of the materials, and the visual appeal of Rie's artwork got our proposal noticed. Publishers want to see the market potential of a project and a proposal should show them some selling points or an 'angle' which will attract people.

I get the feeling that editors meet a lot of people who 'have a great idea for a book' and that most of these ideas remain in precisely that state. It is a long haul from first contact with an editor to seeing the books in your hands and you should be ready for more work than you expected. In the case of Potato Pals this took about 2 and a half years and that's not including the four years we spent working on them at the Potato Club.

As I mentioned, I had been at school in England so going to Oxford was not really such a strange decision. What was strange was my decision to run away to Pakistan half way through my degree course, which I never completed. After 5 years on the run, much to the relief of my mother, I went back to 'formal' education and did a degree in English Literature at Trinity College, Dublin. During the 'lost' 5 years I had failed in a variety of fields from selling pillows to prawn fishing, so going to university was really the only option left if I was to salvage anything from the wreckage!

Worse was to come however! Having finally graduated, my next ill-considered move was to open an all-night cafe in the center of Dublin. The food was awful and the service was worse but we were packed every night because we just about the only place in town open at 3 a.m. It was a lot of fun and I reckon that waiting tables and dealing with drunk customers prepared me for the classroom better than anything else I have done.

Everything changed with Yuko. She was a regular at my restaurant and I used to have lunch at the Japanese restaurant where she worked. Actually the first time she came, with another Japanese friend, they (accidentally?) left without paying the bill. Both said they had thought the other one had paid! Anyway, next thing, we were married (never mix business and pleasure), and on a plane to Japan with the idea of spending a year here. Like so many people, we never got away. So I suppose you could say that I only got into teaching because I was such a bad waiter having got into waiting because I was such a bad pillow salesman! Where will this lead?

I have become much more understanding with students who do not 'fit the mould'. Having my own children made me understand how precious my students are...to someone! Watching my children learn to speak has also shown me the wonders of language acquisition. Ami (6) has been through various phases but is now bilingual and has strong opinions on everything in both languages. Kai (2) is in the babbling phase, producing long, unintelligible sentences in a mixture of Japanese and English spoken with a very earnest expression on his face and finished with "...OK?" Actually I am completely 'oyabaka' (English translation anyone?) and could go on about my children for ever.

Thank you, Mark. I look forward to meeting you in person some day, in Tokyo, Nagoya or North County Dublin. Keep up the great work.

After I received my master's degree in education, I went to work at a private high school in Boston, and I was assigned to teach reading. I wanted to strengthen my skills as a reading teacher, so I took evening classes to become certified as a reading specialist. I found that it was a rich experience to teach and study at the same time. I was able to apply what I was learning about the teaching of reading in my own reading classes.

Yes, I see connections between a stronger emphasis on reading instruction in EFL programs and the enhancement of native-language literacy. Students can learn to read fluently and with good comprehension in English, and that success evokes a more positive attitude towards reading in their native language. Moreover, when students realize that reading is a thinking process, they can adapt many of the thinking processes that they learn in EFL to reading in their native language. And, finally, once students notice how much they enjoy pleasure reading in English, they are likely to want to read for pleasure in their native language, too.

Literacy has most recently been defined as more than the ability to read, write and comprehend. It's the ability to do those things within the expectations of a particular cultural context. I think that becoming literate in a foreign language certainly raises the student's awareness of the processes of language, but it also highlights the role of cultural expectations in the use of language. This heightened awareness of literacy as a socio-linguistic-cultural phenomenon, in turn, can enhance the student's native language literacy. That's because once students have learned that English literacy practices include cultural expectations, they begin to notice the cultural expectations that underlie their native language and literacy practices.

Of course students must learn to think in English in order to speak, write and comprehend spoken language. We have found, though, that many students have the mistaken idea that reading is different, that reading is merely translating word by word from one language to another. However, effective readers read for ideas, for how the words are put together in ways that are unique to the language. That is why we stress the importance of thinking in English while reading.

Here are a few suggestions:

• Students should read for pleasure, and the books that they read should be easy enough so that they do not need to translate words to follow the story.
• Students should be discouraged from writing the native language translation of words in English texts.
• Teachers should ask students to explain orally (in English) their answers to various exercises in their English books. How did they arrive at their answer? What is the logic that they followed?
• Teachers should model the use of the target language by using it as much as possible during English reading classes, especially in explaining why certain answers are correct and others are not...

Reading for pleasure is also called "extensive reading." Research has shown that students need to read a lot in a foreign language in order to develop reading fluency, a larger vocabulary, and a sense of immersion in the language. Therefore, pleasure reading is a vital part of the reading class. The important feature of pleasure reading is the quantity of books read, not necessarily the quality of the books. Students should select their own books, but they should be guided to choose books that are at their level of comprehension. Pleasure reading books should be what Stephen Krashen termed "comprehensible input." A book that is too difficult is inappropriate for pleasure reading. The books should be easy enough for students to read without having to use the dictionary constantly (fewer than 5 unknown words per page). For students at beginning levels, graded readers are a good choice.

Reading comprehension skills are the thinking processes that good readers employ, usually unconsciously, to reconstruct the writer's intended message. For EFL students, the most effective skills are those that help them learn how information is presented in English. In order to acquire these specific comprehension skills, teachers should focus students' attention on one skill at a time. Students must learn to talk about their thinking as they work on the skill, and they must have opportunities to apply the skills once they have learned them. This training results in metacognitive development -the ability to think about one's own thinking processes. Several studies have reported excellent results for Japanese students who were trained to use comprehension skills.

Reading faster, also known as "reading fluency," is essential for comprehension. Slow reading means reading one word at a time, and that is ineffective because the brain doesn't deal with the input of individual words. In order to be processed, the input must be in the form of ideas expressed in phrases and sentences. Besides being essential for comprehension, reading faster is the key to success in schools, colleges, and businesses where students are required to complete large amounts of reading. One of the major factors in student failure is the inability to keep up with the reading assignments.

Thinking skills training helps students learn to think in English. Thinking in English means learning how ideas are presented in English. This includes being able to notice and understand syntactic, semantic, and logical connections between ideas.

In a sense, the charts and tables do not represent standards. Each student's rate is different, and the idea behind the charts and tables is to allow each student to work at steadily increasing their reading rate. Consequently, we included a wide range of possible reading rates.

There is some agreement among specialists that students should strive for a reading rate of at least 250 words per minute for non-technical expository text at their level of comprehension. At that rate, the student is reading ideas, not individual words, and they are successful in comprehending what they are reading. When I teach EFL reading, I encourage students to work toward the goal of doubling their initial reading rate by the end of the semester.

These are difficult questions! Yet the number of books sold, at least in the United States, continues to increase, and most of the books are bought to read for pleasure. So there must be something special about pleasure reading. In fact, pleasure reading is a habit, and once students are hooked on books, they will choose to read for pleasure on their own.

How do you hook students on books? First of all, and most importantly, they must read books that they really want to read, books that speak to their own inner feelings and concerns. Obviously that will vary from one student to the next. The teacher's most important job in this case is to expose students to the widest possible collection of books, and to get to know each student and help them identify a book that will "hook" them.

Second, students need to be given time during class to reading silently. This is called "sustained silent reading."

Third, students need to learn how to express their response to the books that they choose to read. However, this should not be done in the form of a traditional written book report. It's best to plan class time for students to tell the class or to tell the teacher about their book and their reaction to it. In this way, teachers can instill in their students the meaning of "pleasure" in pleasure reading.

Most studies show that children who grow up speaking two languages are more successful in school. Rather than interfering with their mastery of their native language, the ability to use a second language actually increases children's awareness of language processes.

Linda Jeffries, co-author of the Reading Power books and a native speaker of English, lives in Italy with her Italian husband and their two children. The children, born in Italy, are completely bilingual. They consider Italian their native language, but they are just as fluent in all aspects of English. In fact, they spent a school year in the United States, learning only in English. On their return to Italy, they easily moved ahead in their school work in Italian. They're in high school now and getting ready to apply to college. Their options are greater because they are bilingual.

Journals:
The Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy (International Reading Association)
Reading in a Foreign Language

Books:
I do want to mention one of my own books that teachers of reading often find very helpful.
Mikulecky, B. 1991. A Short Course in Teaching Reading Skills. Addison-Wesley Longman.

Birch, Barbara M. 2002. English L2 Reading: Getting to the Bottom. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Carrell, P., J. Devine, & D. Eskey. 1988. Interactive Approaches to Second Language Reading. Cambridge University Press.

Day, R. R. and J. Bamford. 1998. Extensive Reading in the Second Language Classroom. Cambridge University Press.

National Institute for Literacy, U.S. Department of Education 2001. Put Reading First: The Research Building Blocks for Teaching Children to Read.

Articles:
Prowse, Philip. Top Ten Principles for Teaching Extensive Reading: A Response. Reading in a Foreign Language, Volume 14, Number 2, October 2002 (available online)

Sharp, A. 2002. Chinese L1 schoolchildren reading in English: The effects of rhetorical patterns. Reading in a Foreign Language, 14(2), 111-135 (available online

Uehara, K. (1994) The effect of global strategy training on comprehension and metacognitivie awareness in the Japanese lower secondary EFL reading classroom. Unpublished thesis. Gunma University, Japan.

Teachers will hear more about the reading comprehension process and the challenges that Japanese students face when they read in English. They will be introduced to an approach to teaching reading that is student-centered and includes variety, fun and results. They'll have a chance to work on several key comprehension skills and find out how their students can learn to think in English and explain their thinking. They'll hear about techniques for encouraging pleasure reading in English. Teachers will come away with ideas for developing richer lessons for their students.

I enjoyed it very much. It was an interesting panel of people, each of whom have been in the language pedagogy business for many years we must have combined well in excess of a century of experience. The theme what we wish we'd known then that we know now was a good challenge and one that was designed, quite rightly, to steer us away from tub-thumping on our favourite hobby-horses, if you'll excuse the mixed metaphor. I hope members of the audience enjoyed it as much as we, the panel, did.

I felt particularly stimulated by the more theoretically-oriented questions asked of me directly, especially in relation to the grammar-vocabulary equation. I firmly believe now that language is lexis-driven, not syntax-driven; grammar is a 'trace' after lexical choices have been made. It's not the case that we choose syntax then slot vocabulary into it. And so for me, vocabulary learning is primary in second language learning.

I guess task-based learning (TBL) would be on my list, or should I say the stronger versions of TBL which would relegate learning about the language system to a secondary place, subservient to some real-world task. Tasks are great, but they should not exclude good, old-fashioned grammar and vocabulary learning via systematic syllabuses, since the feeling of progression and systematicity are key psychological concepts for learners.

Another bandwagon I would not jump on to is the view that teachers should just take a back seat, become 'facilitators' and just let learners get on with it. Learners enroll in language programmes because they expect teachers to assist them through attested methods using tried and tested materials. They also expect correction, support, feedback, and the feeling that they are in the hands of a competent professional, and they have the right to all of those elements of service from us. They are not guinea-pigs in some big academic experiment; they are thinking human beings struggling with a huge and difficult task to make sense of a new tongue.

Practical tips, right. Well, first of all, get to the 2,000-word threshold as quickly as you can, using any method whatsoever, flashcards, translation lists, rote learning, anything, because without those 2,000 most common words you can't do much, and especially you can't use the words you know to guess the meanings of the words you don't know if you haven't got those 2,000.

Good elementary level vocabulary books should be based on the first 2,000 words. Don't buy them if they aren't! Next, always learn words in pairs (collocations): for example, if you learn a verb, learn either a noun or adverb or preposition that goes with it (run quickly, search for, a ship sails from X to Y, etc.).

Next, after the first 2,000 words, personalize! Make a special effort to memorise and use the vocabulary that relates to your personal experience, your history, your dreams and ambitions, your environment, your relationships. You can never learn all 400,000 or so words, so learn the ones that will enable you to communicate about your world.

Next, always keep a small vocabulary notebook in your pocket and jot down new words and collocations. Research shows that transferring a word from the source you encounter it in to another source such as a notebook or a workbook to be one of the best ways of learning.

One last tip: every time you look a word up in the dictionary, make a little coloured mark in the margin next to it. Any word that gets three coloured marks must be a word that's important for you. Make a special effort to learn that one, and transfer it to your vocabulary notebook.

Absolutely. There is a great deal of attention being paid these days to the idea of 'local knowledge'. We are in a global economy, and language teachers are very mobile, much more than they were when I first started out. My first job was in Spain in 1966, and at that time, British teachers rarely looked beyond Europe for teaching posts.

But now, in this global village of ours, it's more important than ever that we respect local cultures, especially modes of transmission of knowledge, classroom cultures, learning cultures, world-views and philosophies, and do not try to impose linguistic imperialism or pedagogical imperialism of any kind. Even so-called 'primitive' societies have been successfully educating their children and transmitting their culture for millennia, including successfully learning other people's languages. And they didn't have multimedia course books, CD-ROMS and websites!

And also in your question is the notion of 'global English' versus what students need as a local issue. Let me say one thing that does irritate me sometimes. People talk glibly about 'International English' and 'English as a lingua franca', as if they were encoded varieties of English just waiting to be put into course books and other materials. The truth is that there is no one variety of International English there are as many varieties of English as countries and regions where English is spoken. Even within a small area like the islands of Britain and Ireland there are at least four, probably more, major distinctive varieties of English. And the English of Asia is very different from that of Africa, or the Caribbean, and so on.

And as for English as a lingua franca, I see that more as a function of English than a variety it is a way that speakers accommodate to one another when they're using English, just as an Australian user of English might accommodate to a Hong Kong user, and vice-versa. The short answer to your question is: always respect local learning wants and aspirations, rather than some externally imposed idea of 'internationalism' or even 'needs'. People know what they want; we shouldn't tell them what we think they 'need'.

I was very fortunate to get a job in 1982 as a lecturer at the University of Birmingham in the UK. I became a (rather junior) colleague to an inspiring and fantastic group of people headed by Professor John Sinclair, who, to this day, is the most brilliant linguist I have ever encountered. Associated with him were legendary names such as Malcolm Coulthard, Michael Hoey, and David Brazil, and it was where I met my writing partner of so many years, Ron Carter.

It was an amazing environment in which to work. Sinclair was developing corpora for the production of dictionaries (the COBUILD dictionary was the first, ground-breaking product). But not only did he convince us corpora were a good thing on which to base the language input for materials and resources, he also showed us how researching corpora could change forever our theory of language in use. His inspiration led me to understand the power of lexis in the organization of language, quite different from the dominance of syntax, due to the influence of Chomsky. Without Sinclair, my later work on spoken corpora, and my books and materials on vocabulary and spoken language would never have happened. I'm now a corpus addict!

Probably the power of 'chunks' in language. When you research corpora, especially spoken ones, you realize that some phenomena are so frequent and all-pervasive in language that we simply can't ignore them. For instance, the two-word chunk "you know" is the 15th most frequent item in the language, more frequent than single words such as they, have, so, what, and many other 'core' items. Other chunks are also massively frequent, for example, "things like that", "a lot of people", "know what I mean", and so on.

What the corpus insights into chunks show is us that they are extremely frequent, that they are responsible for some of the most basic interactive meanings in conversation (e.g. showing shared knowledge, making vague references, organizing the talk, etc.), and that, without them, fluency would be impossible. We simply have to have a repertoire of ready-made, off-the-peg chunks to structure our utterances; we cannot possibly invent every utterance anew, every time. So I think chunks should be at the centre of vocabulary learning. Vocabulary is not just single words. That's been a big insight for me as a corpus researcher.

It does look like other course books, that's because we don't want to scare people, and we know that teachers are busy people, who don't want to think they need a six-week training course before they can use a piece of material. So it's got all the familiar things you expect in a course: grammar presentations, vocabulary, pronunciation activities, speaking and listening activities, writing, and so on. It has the familiar four levels.

But there are important differences, which we, the authors, think make it very exciting. First there's the fact that it's based on the North American segment of the Cambridge International Corpus, which means we've got evidence of how people really speak and write from millions of words of English as it has been used by a wide range of users. The corpus has informed us in our choice of vocabulary, our priorities in the grammar, and, above all, on our special sections on speaking strategies in every unit.

As well as seeing how people perform strategies such as asking follow-up questions, responding with more than just yes or no, we can actually see the words and phrases they use to achieve these strategies (what we call our Strategy-Plus language). And we share some of the exciting information we find in our corpora with the teacher in the teacher's edition, as well as having occasional fun 'In Conversation' boxes in the student material, where you learn just how common (or uncommon) some things are in the language.

Then we have our 'Vocabulary Notebook' in every unit, where we focus on helping learners to become good vocabulary learners and to be more autonomous, because we know that we can never (no course book can) teach enough vocabulary, and that it's important to foster good learning habits. And there are many other features too that make Touchstone familiar but special and different.

Book 2 will be out in the spring of 2005, and Book 3 at the end of 2005. Book 4 will follow soon after in 2006.

I'm no expert on either Japan or primary education, as I've always taught adults, but I will say this. Kids may be quick to pick things up, but adults can focus their learning more efficiently (I'm always amazed that it takes 10 years to give to a kid all the literacy and numeracy skills that an illiterate and innumerate adult can be taught in two years) and adults can achieve greater depth. Also, adults usually know why they're learning the language; such motivation may be absent from small kids. But I wish Japan every success in this venture.

I'm lucky. I can already devote much of my time to researching and writing. But, if I had bottomless funds, surprise-surprise, I'd go on building spoken corpora (which are very costly to collect and transcribe) from as many places as I could around the world where English is used (and not just in English I'd love a big Spanish spoken corpus too) and buy a very powerful computer, and continue to research everyday communication, because that's where the exciting insights are to be gained.