Materials writing update ‘for the real world’.

Sorry, this is in a scatty order but it’s all there!

National Geographic Learning webinars

I was looking for a link to the National Geographic talk on ‘intercultural skills for the real world’. Ended up flicking through the NGL webinar list and noticed some relate to materials writing, have a look here. Also amusing that the intercultural skills one had ‘for the real world’ This has become THE go-to phrase to include in webinar titles. Here’s my old review of another ‘for the real world’ titled webinar.

Turns out there’s a demo lesson on the intercultural stuff in May, part of the promo for Voices.

MaWSIG PCE

MaWSIG pre-conference event for IATEFL is titled ‘Exploring dichotomies, bridging gaps and joining the dots’. Sponsored by TransformELT. More here.

New releases

This Primary resource from Jennifer Peek. There’s also been promo for a Cambridge Primary Science book in the same series (Naomi Hiscock), and one on computing too.

This English for Gymnasium (series of) book(s) by Annie Altamirano and others.

New Science readers from Collins Educational and Mike Gould.

Middle school resources for Italy market via Pearson Italia and Sarah Gudgeon.

Bhavna Gupta creating content for Readable.

And Sue Leather too.

Pre-primary, Pippa and Pop. Via Cambridge and Mike Tomlinson.

The Owl Factor – Reframing your teaching philosophy. Via Andre Hedlund. Click here.

This too from Trish Reilly. My advice when sharing promo on new books is to add level AND target market in first two lines of post, coz I don’t know much about this one and was no link.

Tania Pattinson does half here, I assume this is for adults though:

That is the most NGL cover, isn’t it?

Jeez, looking back at my new books screenshots. It’s never ending. Jeremy Day with a CAE thingy…

Michael Lacey Freeman of Egghead fame, and James Styring of ‘digital breaks’ fame, collaborated on this new book for Oxford.

Take the Lead from Annette Flavel.

Big up Hall Houston and his new book, I love this guy. Will pick this one up for general interest.

Something else that’s special about this one is it’s published through itdi.pro. Check out their new publishing opportunities for community members here.

Standard John Hughes appearance

‘10 secrets no one ever tells you about materials writing’. A webinar from John Hughes for the Teacher Development Webinars series.

Mildly interesting…

It was all kicking off a few months ago regarding the value of phonics screening checks (English NC). Loose crossover here for those writing for VYLs. Greg Ashman shared views here.

Useful images

Reshot for royalty free images. Click here.

Selling rights

Never seen a post like this one about selling rights to resources. Interesting. It’s from Rhiannon Ball at Silva Education.

For future reference maybe…

Obvs the deadline has passed for this fellowship for Latinx editors, but sharing anyway in case it’s an annual thing and you didn’t know about it.

The Peter J Fullagar 30 seconds

Peter Fullagar’s review of ‘How to write inclusive materials’ see here.

Also an interesting resource from Fullagar along with a rationale for how the resource aims to be inclusive. See here.

AND Fullagar was recently a guest on Jane Ritter’s show on Teacher Talk Radio. I need to catch up on these and on Harry Water’s ones too as I really haven’t listened to many (any of Jane’s yet and like 1.5 of Harry’s!). Ritter recently spoke with Scott Thornbury too about Dogme, bookmarking that one to prompt me to catch up. See here.

Fullagar again, contributing among others to the growing body of lesson plans on Labour English. Recent additions include ‘Gender Equality in the Workplace’ and ‘Sexuality and Employment’.

Writing drama resources

Shared this last month with our drama teacher. Sounds like a cool opportunity for any Ken Wilsony type people.

Routledge handbook

Routledge Handbook of Materials Development for Language Teaching is out, and expensive as you might imagine from that range. But there’s a couple of chapters in the Google Books preview which is good!

I’m deeply offended that they didn’t contact me to write a chapter on including puns in resources. Maybe they didn’t know it was my niche. I’m therefore going to promote some of my other niches to make sure Routledge are aware for the 2nd edition:

• Resources on parkour

• Shoehorning communication breakdowns into dialogues

• Writing passive aggressive emails to project managers

Iffy content on my language learning app

Oooooof. Ling App these weren’t the smartest…

LinkedIn Live

LinkedIn Live with Jake Young and Rachel Roberts. Check Rachel’s thread for that one, I couldn’t dig it out.U

Update: here it is.

Sponge chats

Sponge ELT chats materials writing with Silvina Mascitti.

Speaking of Silvina, she is now guest writing for Peachey Publications. Here’s her latest lesson hot off the press.

Katherine Bilsborough

Katherine Bilsborough on (I think 2) FB Lives: Creating ELT Materials. Haven’t listened to every minute as got distracted by the kids but some sound advice. Click here.

Blog post from Bilsborough too, on whether we should talk about war with our students.

ELTcpd

A new series on editing from ELTcpd. The first one is on being an ELT editor – an interview with ‘The Two Karens’. I think these updates got a mention in it actually. Click here.

Dictionaries

What’s your go-to dictionary as a writer? Tim Warre asked for dictionary recommendations on Twitter – people recommended Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English. I’ve switched to it – I used to fall back on other learner dictionaries for quick leveling but I like the examples in this one.

Emily Bryson

Download ‘A Quick Intro to Graphic Facilitation’, from Emily Bryson here.

Ukraine

Various publishers pledged support for Ukraine when the conflict began to unfold. Example from Pearson.

Research

I’m going old-school here to re-reference Banegas. I came across this old CLIL post again when preparing an article on, well, CLIL.

Some excellent points in the lit review, and I’ve felt similar about soft-CLIL being kinda ‘CLIL for marketing purposes’ at times (not sure that’s Banegas’ exact wording but think that’s what he’s getting at). Anyway, well worth a read.

Also, one for those in my region and research area at the mo – attitudes towards curriculum innovation in Vietnam.

What I’ve been doing on the writing front

Super busy.

• Wrapped up a consultancy project. Got to work alongside my MA tutor for it – crazy cool.

• Just finished an ESP workbook. I hope it ‘scores’ big for the publisher 😉

• Been writing for ESL Library who have rebranded as Ellii. Pleasure to work with as always.

• Been writing some super CLILy curriculum-aligned stuff, mostly science. I’ve learnt quite a bit about organelles off the back of it. Pretty niche!

• Delivered some whole (Secondary) school CPD on tweaking materials for EAL learners. It’s good to apply some of those materials development skills to my teaching context.

• Didn’t get one IGCSE ESL writing contract but probs repurpose the sample, make it better and send it off to a few indies perhaps. We’ll see.

If you only read one materials writing related thing this month…

A MOOC on content-based instruction. I’m keen.

Categories: General, materials writing

Tags: elt, materials writing, news and views