Читать книгу Collins Teaching Techniques for Communicative English - Jane Revell - Страница 6

Teaching Techniques for Communicative English was the very first book I ever wrote and it’s now just over thirty years old. (Unlike me.)

We decided to publish a new edition because the ideas in the book are still valid today and because it contains a lot of useful advice for teachers and a fair amount of food for thought.

When it was first published in 1979 – as the first in a new series of teachers’ books for Macmillan – it was quite radical. The 1970s was an era of great change in English Language Teaching, of attempts to put into practice many new theories about language being proposed by linguists at that time. Today we are very familiar with concepts such as functions, notions, social context, appropriateness and so on but in those days they were fairly new ways of thinking about language. But while the book is no longer ground-breaking, many of the issues it talks about still remain. Creating classroom activities which really get students communicating with one another in a natural and meaningful way is still very challenging. We still haven’t quite cracked it! The classroom is somewhat unnatural by its very nature so perhaps we never will. This book doesn’t pretend to have the answer either but it does attempt to offer some helpful techniques.

Reading through the book for the first time in many years I was struck at how fresh it seems. Fresh and, at the same time, a little bit quaint. I have tried not to meddle too much with either its freshness or its quaintness. I have made a few cuts and one or two small changes, but basically I have left it intact: I have left the original newspaper articles and made minimal changes to dialogues, role cards and so on. I have updated things where necessary – zoo prices, for example, have gone up from £1.60 in 1979 to £16.80 in 2009 – and

I have replaced the photographs, which looked dated, even though teachers will of course be able to download their own visual material from the Internet these days.

The use of the pronoun ‘he’ (practically throughout) irritated me a lot so I have dealt with that. I have also made changes to the tense used in some instances, as what was ‘recent’ then, no longer is. Where the text was too categorical or bossy, I have toned it down and made it more tentative.

And I have added a few things too. Some websites have been added to the ‘Useful Addresses’ section at the end; the original ‘Bibliography’ and ‘Practical Material’ sections have both been left – for historical interest – and there is a new ‘Useful Books / Sources of Ideas’ section … though several of the original books are still included here.

Enjoy!

Jane Revell,