Monday, March 29, 2010

Reviews, promotion for Provoking Thought

My second book, Provoking Thought, was published in late 2009. It's a collection of over 90 practical activities for language teaching. The chapters cover five topics: thinking, memory, creativity, critical thinking, and organizing ideas on paper.

If you'd like to learn a little bit more, here are a few related articles and reviews:

Humanising Language Teaching published a book preview in 2009, which introduces the book and contains 6 sample activities.

ELT Weekly chose Provoking Thought as its "Book of the Month" in February.

It's Magazine gave a number of its authors a chance to introduce their latest works in an article titled "Getting Published". This article features several new ELT titles including Provoking Thought.

Developingteachers.com has "Sharing Thoughts in the Language Classroom", an article related to the main theme of Provoking Thought.

Finally, Hotchpotchenglish.com published this review a few days ago.

Okay, that's probably enough self-promotion for today. Watch this space for more reviews and articles.

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Free stuff from publishers

I've been looking over several ELT publisher websites recently, and I've been impressed with the amount of things offered for free. I don't intend to create a comprehensive list here, but just list a few examples.

Many publishers provide book previews. For example, Cambridge University Press offers a few sample activities from their popular handbooks for teachers series, as well as some handouts and activities from their copy collection. Helbling, Delta and Oxford also offer some similar previews. For example, on this page you can try out four sample activities from Daniel Martin's book Activities for Interactive Whiteboards. And here, you can see an activity from David Heathfield's title Spontaneous Speaking. And this page takes you to several activities from Jamie Keddie's Images.

Another free resource is the unique page (or even site) given to a book. Cambridge offers pages for several of their books, including Working with Images by Ben Goldstein, as well as The Internet and the Language Classroom. Macmillan has set up a very impressive site for Lindsay Clandfield's new series, Global. This site features teaching tips, elessons (by It's Magazine editor Robert Campbell, teacher blogs, not to mention a sample chapter from Global Pre-Intermediate. Pearson Longman also has websites for over 70 of its titles. Moreover, they give out lesson plans and practical articles about teaching absolutely free.

Other offerings include blogs from famous names in ELT, author videos, conference handouts and sample chapters. Over at Delta Publishing, you can find a Delta Development Blog, featuring Scott Thornbury, Mario Rinvolucri, among others. The blog currently features Chaz Pugliese, author of the soon-to-be-released Being Creative. Michigan University Press has a series of videos associated with several of their titles. They also provide sample chapters, such as a web-only chapter, Drills, Dialogues and Role Plays, from Tools and Tips for Using ESL Materials by Ruth Epstein and Mary Ormiston. Alta Publishing has a great page of handouts from conferences with a lot of practical activities.

With this many free articles and activities, I look forward to the day when all ELT titles are available online (and at the same time, authors are offered multimillion dollar salaries). Well, maybe I'm dreaming...

I get the feeling I've only scratched the surface here. Anybody out there care to recommend any free resources by the publishers mentioned above that I neglected to mention? Or maybe an ELT publisher that I haven't heard of yet?