Materials writing news and views, July 2021

By Pete on July 13, 2021 • ( 0 )

Euros over. Wimbledon over. Olympics coming up!

New releases

Some more Primary teacher books from Michelle Worgan:

Emily Bryson is running a course on engaging learners with simple drawings. See here.
This digital storytelling project from Vicky Saumell. See here.

New graded reader from Wayzgooze, click here.

Other stuff (not really organised in any way, sorry!)

I missed the second Avallain session through ELT Publishing Professionals. Will catch up soon.

Nicola Gardner is sharing tips for authors via Linkedin:

And also here…

Katherine Bilsborough is writing a series about ELT materials for Modern English Teacher…

And she has a blog coming out soon, according to updates on LinkedIn.

John Hughes interviewed Luiz Otávio Barros about his self-publishing projects. Well worth a watch!

ELTCPD now share lists of job spots. Between that, the ELT Freelancers page and the odd job spot through ELT Publishing Professionals (subscription needed) there seems to be a lot going around.

Event on the future of ELT, co-moderated by ELT Publishing Professionals. See here.

Tyson Seburn’s book on inclusive materials is out:

And here’s a link to Tyson’s extended talk from IATEFL on writing inclusive materials.

Speaking of links to IATEFL talks, this is an interesting one from Steve Brown. You can download the slides to his talk ‘Beyond Empowerment: ELT as a Source of Emancipation’. It offers a take on some current resources and practical tips for taking an emancipatory approach to materials development. These are the main take homes…

Next up, here’s a Sponge Chat on materials writing with Emma Heyderman. I haven’t seen this yet so this is sort of a bookmark. I like the style of these chats though, watched the Thom Kiddle one recently.

IATEFL summaries…

Vicky Saumell via LinkedIn (here, there are two)
Sandy Millin on her blog (Here’s Day 3, there are two more on there!)

Clubhouse

Only attended one recently as been busy. The other day it was Jamie Keddie and Rachael Roberts talking about memberships/subscriptions/etc. Was worth a listen – I might start summarising these on the blog as they are really useful. Jamie was honest about the success/failure of some projects too. He mentioned his videotelling book not taking off. Interesting one, because when that came out, I thought ‘ah, looks really interesting’, then never bought it. His advice was don’t sell to teachers! Haha sounds about right!

Selling to teachers

I won’t harp on about the ebook again too much. I’ll only mention two things:

First, Martin Hajek reviewed it (see here). I’m very grateful to ‘Hajek’ 😉 for taking the time to share his thoughts!

Secondly, the stats for those interested in self-publishing.

Publication date: 26^th June.

Sales target: 40 copies.

Sales so far: 31 copies.

Breakeven: $100

Current earnings: $79

Well on the way!

Interesting blog posts related to writing

Monica Ruda-Peachey’s review of 120 Must Have Verbs for IELTS by Javlon Yusupov.
Sandy Millin’s great summary of the NILE Materials Development course so far! See here.
Congrats to Andre Hedlund reaching 70K views on his blog.
Here’s a summary of Dorothy Zemach’s course on self-publishing (I wrote it just before final week, first part of post). Watch this space for some cool self-published resources from participants – no spoilers though.
Dorothy’s overview of CLIL via Bridge Education.
A very interesting resource for Aviation English via Ljiljana Havran. It seems to follow the TATE model by the way it’s fronted by listening and reading texts. Such a good resource – I wouldn’t have known where to start with Aviation English tbh!
There are four more downloadable lesson from Silvina Mascitti since the last update. See here.

What have I been working on?

I was doing some cool updates to a Teacher’s Guide for Primary. I was adding flipped learning and mindfulness activities. Very fun to write.
From Primary to IELTS(!) haha, about to wrap this up. Note, Jane Turner’s book too!

If you only look at one materials writing thing this month…

Purple Hippo English!

You might know Paul Millard from his awesome British Council videos on drawing. Well, it turns out he has a blog (who knew?!). I love his style of drawing. It looks like there’s still a work in progress but it showcases some of his great illustrations (look in the pronunciation and stories sections). The ant and the grasshopper is the best one IMO. See the site here.