Author

Something about my professional life

(For the potential reader: I dont think this text is of any practical use whatsoever…but it may interest some people.)

I have worked in the world of language teaching for many years as a teacher, as an author, as a storyteller and storymaker and as a teacher trainer. My books are published by Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press and Pearson Longman. These publishers have then licenced the publication of the books to many publishers in the world and so they can be found under different imprints and often translated into other languages.

All my work has been of a practical nature. I first worked on the topic approach, the ancestor of CLIL, in the late 1960s and early 1970s and then I focussed on the use of pictures and then on the use of games in the 1970s and 1980s. About 1990 I decided to focus on stories in language teaching. This topic is enough for me to be getting on with!

I don’t really distinguish between my work and my life. Language teaching can be about life! Amazingly! I love both!

I began my life as an artist and I studied painting at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. I studied painting because it was the only subject at school which invited me to be creative. But my head has always been full of ideas expressed in words and I soon found myself writing as well as painting and this lead me to writing and illustrating stories for television in the 1960s and 1970s. I wrote story boards and did all the graphics.

I joined the Nuffield/Schools Council Project for producing an audio visual course for teaching French in primary schools in the 1960s. I joined as an artist who knew France and could speak in French. I was lucky enough to do that job for nearly ten years. It was, at the time, the leading edge institution for language teaching methodology. Then I got a really wonderful job, at the University of York. I was asked to write a course for teaching English to children aged 8 to 12. The audio visual course had been based on trivial stories and a few games. During the 1960s I felt more and more the need to make language teaching about something more than just langauge. How can we separate language from life. Is a dead butterfly a butterfly?

Together with David Betteridge and Nicolas Hawkes I wrote the first topic based course (essentially CLIL) for teaching English as a foreign language and we published it with Macmillan. Looking back I think this was a point when I can fairly claim to have done something pretty special.

After that, in the mid 1970s I got a really wonderful job as Principal Lecturer at Manchester Polytechnic (they call it a university now). I was director of a course for media people who wanted to work in education. That was such a refreshing change and yet still related to my work in language teaching.

During this time at the Polytechnic (fifteen years) I continued to work in language teaching, publishing books for: Longman, Collins, Cambridge University Press and later Oxford University Press. I also began to get more and more invitations to work with teachers in other countries. What a priviledge! I learned so much! I earned less than I learned! Ho! Ho!

In the early 1990s I came to live in Hungary. Professionally I carried on writing and illustrating my books and articles and travelling as a teacher trainer.

And here I am still working away and now hugely lucky to have some health and to have the internet as well. And the internet allows me to continue to work with teachers without always having to travel.

And that is what this wordpress site is for.

Here are the books of mine still in print, just in case someone is interested.

The wordpress gremlin does not want the neat lists below to appear when saved! Please forgive ME and blame the gremlin!

Five Minute Activites (with Penny Ur) Cambridge University Press
Pictures for Language Learning (Cambridge University Press)
Games for Language Learning Third Edition 2006 (with David Betteridge and Michael Buckby) Cambridge University Press

Storytelling with Children (Oxford University Press)
Creating Stories with Children (Oxford University Press)
Arts and Crafts with Children (Oxford University Press)

Spellbinder series of six readers (Oxford University Press)

I Can’t See My Feet Level I Reader Hairy Tree Man Level 1 Reader The Diamond Level 2 Reader Oh No, I’m a Cat! Level 2 Reader Space Entertainer Level 3 Reader The Prince and the Spaceship Level 3 Reader

1000+ Pictures for Teachers to Copy (Longman Pearson)