Mostly new releases, plus references to Premier League sticker albums…

New releases

• English Code – Mary Roulston. Dinosaur on the front cover, win.

• Cambridge Primary World English teacher’s guides – saw on Melissa Bryant’s Linkedin. Hodder Education.

• Language Fuel have another new course and some kinda revamp coming up. Teaching EAP, Tania Pattison. Incidentally, the Language Fuel ‘Who’s who’ of authors is a bit like a Merlin/Panini sticker album of ELT Writers. They only need Rachael Roberts for complete coverage. If you ever collected EPL stickers then you’ll know all about ‘the shiny’, which in this case I guess is Jill Hadfield. I wonder who would be ‘Peter Fear’. I swear, this guy was in EVERY pack I ever bought.

• New books from Pavilion ELT, one being ‘An introduction to Evidence-Based Teaching in the English Language Classroom’. Letharby, Mayne, Harries.

• How to Write CLIL Materials is the latest from ELT Teacher 2 Writer.

The blurb mentions ‘how CLIL typically used in bilingual schools where school subjects are taught in the target language’, so they may be narrowing their target readership to those teachers. It’s all about the ‘Type C’ international schools for me, especially given their aggressive expansion in my part of the world. I’ll be snapping this book up for sure, will almost certainly be relevant to my context.

• Zebra: A Resource Book for Teachers of Very Young Learners, by Sally McAndrew. Self-published. Looks cool.

I saw Sally post on LinkedIn about proposing this to publishers and not having much luck – great that its now available!

Deborah Hobbs – Complete First. I bought this series recently (older versions), pretty good. Can’t vouch for this new one yet though.

• By the way, what is the deal with these? I had a choice of ordering ‘with answers’ or ‘without answers’. Sounded ridiculous. Or is it?!

Wow, a lot of releases. Other stuff…

Following on from the diversity news and views last time, here’s an interesting take:

Clubhouse

Rachael Roberts, the Panini ELT Writers Album 2021 sticker that everyone still needs, has been hosting really good discussions on Clubhouse.

If you are not familiar with Clubhouse yet then read Phil Longwell’s great post on it here. Hugh ‘George’ Dellar (got) also hosts a good chat, Jamie Keddie (need) has done something on storytelling, Jo Szoke (got, double) is hosting soon too although I haven’t attended her chats yet. Follow all these people. If you need a Clubhouse invite then I have a few.

ELTCPD

The ELTCPD team are about to start a new podcast series on becoming a materials writer. Look out for that. Past episodes here.

Pearson

I have loads of screenshots of Pearson announcements from social media recently – they’ve had a lot to say. Things like:

Summary here.

…and about them acquiring Spotlight – see here.

And this…

Images

Good image bank shared on ELT Footprint FB site – climatevisuals.org

MaWSIG

Pre-conference event

Plus an upcoming talk by Clare Maas on EAP materials (register here).

Ben Goldstein. Now, what’s that thing called where once you hear about something/someone then you see it/them everywhere? That’s Goldstein’s article for Digital Learning Associates, MaWSIG, Learning Fuel… Hadn’t seen much from him really since that images book really.

John Hughes

John Hughes is coming up with some nice ‘short take’ vids at the moment. Like this one on needs analysis:

I do enjoy listening/watching John’s stuff, and he’s been super helpful and responsive in the past. Sought after Panini sticker I’d imagine (got two, I’ll swap my double for a Hadfield if anyone has one?).

Jobs

I think these covered elsewhere now. Aside from writer groups on FB, Silvina Mascitti on LinkedIn is worth following. She seems to clock most opportunities! The ‘course writers for i-to-i TEFL’ looks like a nice one. Thanks for sharing Silvina!

What I will say, and have to reiterate for the billionth time, is that wannabe-writers need to be on LinkedIn. If you are reading this and are not on L then join, add me, message me to say hi, and I’ll send you a random lead for writing work!

Research

The Adaptive Expertise of Expert ELT Textbook Writers, Atkinson (2020) – here

What have I been doing/writing?

• Onestopenglish Business English lessons. Chuffed, some great feedback so far.
• I can’t remember if I mentioned The International Schools Podcast, but I had a chat with them about the PGCEi. I’ll be doing one on materials writing soon hopefully. more relevant!
• I’ve also been writing development tasks for those wanting to produce their own materials. Here is one on images.

If you only read one materials-related resource this month…

This is an excellent book for teachers but also for writers. A great overview of the science of learning, very relevant to task design. Buy it here.

Categories: General, materials writing

Tags: CLIL, clubhouse, elt, materials writing, news and views, Pearson, publishing