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English File author Christina Latham-Koenig answers your questions!

English File third editionCo-author of English File third edition, Christina Latham-Koenig will be answering your questions in a live webinar on 27 May. You can register and send in your question now.

We are often asked where the idea for English File first came from. The truth is we felt that none of the coursebooks that we had used up to that point really provided what we needed as teachers. It seemed that these books were designed to work in a teaching environment that was very different from ours, and while there was a lot of imaginative, well-planned, and well-organised material to choose from, there was little to help us address the main challenges that we faced day-to-day.

How do you keep students motivated when they are fitting their class into the middle, or at the end, of a busy day at work? How do you maintain students’ attention when they have so many other things going on in their lives? And, what was always most important for us, how can you get students to talk to each other in English if they all speak the same first language, live in the same town, and have often shared many of the same experiences?

And so we needed to spend a huge amount of our preparation time adapting and supplementing the books we were using to make them more appropriate for our classes. We felt that we needed a greater variety of material to help change the focus and the pace of the lessons, we needed activities that helped to get the students’ heads out of their books, and we needed topics where students really would have something to say. The ideas that shaped the original English File series came directly from our own teaching experience and from talking to our friends and colleagues in the staff room about what worked and what didn’t work in the classroom.

Over the last twenty years in the course of researching and presenting English File, we have had the opportunity to go beyond the confines of our own staffroom and have met thousands of teachers from around the world (and had contact with thousands more via emails and questionnaires) and it has been truly enlightening to have been able to share experiences and to hear about the wide variety of challenges they face teaching English to their students as well as hearing their inspiring stories of success.

They have always been very honest in their feedback, telling us about English File lessons that they and their students have enjoyed, but also suggesting changes and improvements, anything from a text that never seemed to work with their group of students to an activity type that they find difficult to set up because of the arrangement of their desks or the acoustics of their classroom. They have shared their views on perennially divisive topics such as celebrities, sport, and fashion, pointed out why particular areas of grammar or pronunciation are especially difficult for their students, and given us a wide range of cultural insights from their countries.

This exchange of information has helped us to grow as writers and has been the inspiration for the second and third editions of English File. We are extremely grateful for the time teachers have taken to speak to us.

On Tuesday 27 May 2014, I will be hosting an English File Question and Answer webinar. If you would like to participate in this event, please visit the Registration Page. I will try to answer as many questions as I can in the time available – and I really look forward to hearing from you.

Best wishes,

Christina Latham-Koenig


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An interview with the authors of English File, Clive Oxenden and Christina Latham-Koenig

English File third editionEnglish File third edition is here! We went behind the scenes to find out what makes the authors Christina Latham-Koenig and Clive Oxenden tick. They tell us about their inspirations, their own struggle with learning Polish and Spanish, and they muse about the future of English language teaching.

What made you decide to become a teacher?

Christina Latham-KoenigTo be quite honest I hadn’t actually thought of becoming a teacher. I studied Latin and Greek at university, and I knew I didn’t want to teach that. When I left university I got a job at the British Council in London, and that’s where I learned about TEFL, as we had to organise courses for people. I then decided I’d like to go and live abroad for a year, and thought that the easiest way would be to teach English. In fact I loved it right from the start, and realised that I had accidentally found the right career path.

Clive OxendenAfter university I worked as a volunteer for a while in the Middle East with a lot of young people from different countries. It showed the importance of English as Lingua Franca and I found that I enjoyed helping people with their English. When I came home I went to the local library to look up English teaching (this was a few years before the internet was invented!)

Where did the idea of writing English File come from?

Christina Latham-KoenigBasically it responded to a need – we didn’t find that the material we were using as teachers was appropriate for our context, teaching monolingual classes abroad. In particular there was very little material that helped to get students talking, which is why we have always really focused on this aspect of teaching in English File.

Clive OxendenWe wanted to write a book that reflected our view of teaching which was that while learning should, of course, be approached seriously and  in a very professional and organised way it is vital that the experience should also be fun and motivating. If not, students quickly get bored and disheartened.

When you were learning a foreign language, what did you find most challenging?

Clive OxendenPronunciation! I came to live in Spain and at first I had a lot of problems with certain sounds in Spanish, especially ‘r’ and ‘rr’. When I went shopping in the market I sometimes could not make myself understood and I spent several months ordering pork (which I could pronounce) when I really wanted steak (which I couldn’t ). It certainly showed me the importance of pronunciation and how it affects a learner’s confidence and willingness to speak. I think the fact that Christina and I wrote English File while living in a foreign country explains the emphasis we always give to pronunciation.

Christina Latham-KoenigAs I’d studied Latin at university, I have found learning Latin languages relatively easy, in fact I was convinced that I was a very good language learner. Then a few years ago I decided to learn Polish. It was a real shock to learn a language where you couldn’t rely on Latin-based words being the same. It has taken me forever to learn certain basic things, like the months, or telling the time. And the grammar, the different ending for nouns and adjectives, is a nightmare.
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How teachers help to rewrite coursebooks

Blonde woman taking notesHaving given us an insight into the daily lives of materials writers, English File authors, Christina Latham-Koenig and Clive Oxenden, share with us the importance of reader feedback when it comes to writing new editions.

In our last post we talked a bit about the way we work and how we look for interesting material to provide good lessons for our books. This time we thought we would talk a little about how readers’ feedback helps to shape the new versions of English File that we are currently writing.

The way it works is that we send the first draft to a number of readers all over the world. The readers are all experienced teachers, and they tend to all be teachers who have used New English File, because what we want to know is whether they prefer the new lessons to the old ones, and what still needs improving or tightening up in the  new lessons.

It’s always a slightly tense moment for us when the readers’ reports arrive. Normally we feel reasonably confident that readers are going to like most of the lessons, but you can never be totally sure! However, although positive comments are important to reassure us that we are on the right track (and sometimes just to boost our morale!), constructive negative comments really do help us to improve the material, and so we welcome both types of feedback. The feedback we received this time gave us just about the right mix, and it has been extremely helpful.

After reading through all the reports – a stage when the room we work in is almost knee deep in papers – we then have a meeting with our editors where we go through each lesson one by one and discuss all the readers’ comments (not to mention the editors’ comments) and decide how to improve on them. These meetings always seems to take longer than anticipated, but by the end of it we are really clear about what needs doing for each lesson. All that is left to do then is to go away and re-write them!

By the end of the report stage we often feel that we have really got to know our readers, even though we have never met most of them. We know the kind of topics they like or dislike, what aspects of grammar and pronunciation are important to them, even their sense of humour! For example, we once wrote a grammar practice sentence which said ‘England ___ Brazil 3-0 (defeat/beat/thrash) and one reader added the comment ‘In your dreams!’

We would like to take this opportunity to thank all the readers from all over the world, past and present, whose comments have helped us so much in the writing of all the different levels English File. If you have any suggestions for improvements, we’d love to hear them.

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A day in the life of materials writers

Man and woman at table with postcards and coffeeIn this first of a series of posts, English File authors Clive Oxenden and Christina Latham-Koenig give us an insight into their daily lives, the writing process, and reaching out to the community of English File teachers around the world.

Over the years we have met a lot of teachers around the world when we have travelled to give talks or teacher training sessions and one of the things we’ve most enjoyed about travelling has been meeting teachers. We won’t be able to travel much in 2011 because of our writing commitments, so writing this blog will be our way of keeping in touch with English File teachers around the world. And of course teachers themselves will also be able to share their experiences and ideas with each other.

We thought we’d use the blogs to tell you what we’re doing at the moment and tell you a bit about how we work, as it’s something we often get asked about. In September 2010 we started work on the new edition of English File Elementary. We’d had a good long break from writing over the summer, since finishing the Advanced level, so we came back to work feeling refreshed and energetic.

We think we are quite unusual in the way we write compared to other author teams we know. Most teams seem to divide up the books either into units or sections (grammar, skills etc.) and then write separately. We get together every day (from about 10 to 6) and work together on everything. On the one hand this means things take longer than if we simply divided up the book, but on the other hand two heads are definitely better than one and we think that the lessons benefit from the way we work them up together. Luckily we live very near each other just outside Valencia in Spain. We work in Christina’s house (as Clive has two small children), and our working day is punctuated by one of us looking at the other and saying ‘Time for a coffee?’ (or, in Clive’s case, tea).

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