And time for another talk on the topic of materials development!

Johanna is going to talk about the nuts and bolts of self-publishing. It’s really the why, what and how, but it just didn’t fit! We are looking specifically at print books.

We’re going to look at why you might want to self-publish to start with and Johanna starts by telling us about the experience of holding her published book for the first time!

Johanna’s baby! 😉

She used print-on-demand, which means she did almost everything herself except for the cover (an ex-student graphic designer did that!).

Why did she self-publish?

• She had complete autonomy – no compromises had to be made. She was able to avoid publisher requirements (e.g. for a series – she had 70 activities, they wanted it if she could produce 300!)
• Also for a bigger share of the profit. 70-75% of royalties is what you can get.
• The biggest thing was SATISFACTION!

Why did other people self-publish?

Nicky Hockly

• traditional publisher wouldn’t take it because the audience would be too small
• wanted the speed of getting the book out which isn’t possible with a publisher
• she feels much more sense of ownership with this one than ones she has traditionally published.

Jamie Keddie

• no need to fit into a series (which methodology books usually need to do)
• no need to wait to be commissioned (which usually is the case)
• can make reference to “taboo” topics (not possible with publishers!)

Rod Bolitho

• a deal with a publisher fell through and they couldn’t find another
• wanted editorial control
• wanted to retain the integrity of the book

But it’s not for everybody…not for you if…

• you don’t know what to do. (If you just want to get into writing, better to start with a publisher…)
• if you need deadlines (or you need to be incredibly disciplined!)
• think you want to write another Grammar in Use book. (you need a niche!)
• want to write a coursebook
• haven’t been published before (previous experience with publishers is invaluable)
• are technophobic (or you’re going to have real problems because you have to rely on technology for a lot of things and use a lot of different tools)
• need money NOW from it!

If it is for you, then how?

You need The Big Idea. The ones that work best:

• fill a niche: where there isn’t much else; focusing on a small area, really specific e.g. Nicky Hockly’s webinar book.
• meet a need: something that teachers need.
• are new or different in some way
• are something that you know a lot about and are passionate about!

What about writing?

The most important thing is the content, everything else is peripheral. (Plug: From September, NILE will be doing a materials development course)

Something that Johanna found quite hard was finding her writer’s voice for this. How formal should it be? How academic should it be? Even down to things like to contract or not contract. She wanted to be consistent. It took a long time.

Organisation (of chapters, units, parts) also took a long time.

Saving and storing what you write is very important. But you can get confused about which version is which. So every day, Johanna saved her book as a new day, with the date in the title. After three days, old versions were deleted unless there was a particular reason to keep it. This made it easier to be able to find the latest version more quickly!

Johanna wrote in Word, no fancy packages. She sat down one weekend and went through all the menus and learnt what it did. E.g. it will do your indexing for you. (Link to Sandy’s friend’s Word tutorials)

For the cover design, if you are not a designer it is hard to get it right – worth paying for. As is a proof reader. When it came to the layout, Johanna looked at other books and looked for a layout that she liked. She liked the Dummies (yellow and black) book layout, so she copied that but for e.g. logos in the margins, Word couldn’t do. For layout, she recommends  The Non-Designer’s Design Book by Robin Williams.

In terms of editing, her one real regret is not using an editor. She could have saved a lot of money by spending it. She took three years rewriting it, but if she had someone look at it and make suggestions, she could have taken on other work at that time, paid work! Information on prices can be found on a website called Joanna Penn, The Creative Penn e.g. novel £7.50/1000 words. For Johanna’s book that would be £500. (Plug: Karen White, White Ink Limited, get  in touch in order to find out about costs, which are often by the hour for this kind of project)

Regards printing and production, there are 3 main companies that print on demand: Lulu.com, createspace by Amazon and IngramSpark (a relatively new kid on the block). With Lulu, Johanna wrote her book in word, converted it to a PDF and then uploaded it to Lulu.com and the cover as well, as a pdf. As simple as that. As it is print on demand, you can order one book and they will print one book. You pay what one book costs. You don’t have to buy a fixed number of books, just the number you want. You can get your one copy to be photographed with it. Then you find all the mistakes, you can correct it, re-upload it and there you are! You can keep doing it till you are happy. It’s the writing that is difficult…

If you want to sell it in bookshops or on Amazon, you need an ISBN. You can either buy your own or get a free one. There are various advantages and disadvantages to both – look into it when you get this far! For pricing, look at similar books and set your price somewhere in the middle of them. Distribution can be online, or bricks and mortar (even if they just order it in on demand)

The work does not stop here. Marketing is important. E.g. blogging (Johanna has the Spelling Blog), social media – the more connections you have the better, word of mouth, flyers (sent out to people – electronic and paper – to libraries), award nominations (e.g. ELTons), talks e.g. at conferences (Johanna has done talks on spelling), articles for teachers associations newsletters or journals. The more work you do on this, the more you sell and vice versa…

Good luck! says Johanna. 🙂  It’s not just an alternative to traditional publishers. There are many other reasons to do it!

Johanna’s blog (handout available) here.

Frozen in thought? How we think about what we do in ELT

How we use ideas to explain and justify, make sense out of what we do as teachers.

Reasoning has two sides to it. We can reason about something – reason as a verb – and we can give reasons for something – reason as a noun. To reason about something focuses internally, you making sense of something, whereas giving reasons addresses other people. So reasoning has both internal and external dimensions.

Reasons can be seen as ‘myths’ –  they connect us and help us justify what we do. The ‘myths’ we use are anchored in experience. They aren’t right or wrong. They have a grain of truth in them, there are elements of usefulness but also those that are misleading.

In this talk, Donald will look at a set of myths that organise our work.

• The myth of direct causality
• The myth of sole responsibility
• The myth of proficiency as the goal

There is the one dimension of myths which is the shared-ness of the meaning, but they also create communities of people who accept them and consider them reasonable. In this way, they may also freeze our thinking.

The myth of direct causality

This is the myth that teaching causes learning. It’s like a pool shot, one ball propels the other towards the pocket. Not that straightforward. But there is a problem with this problem: we organise schools and teaching as if this myth is true. Teachers are evaluated based on how their students perform. Yearly progress is measured and teachers are evaluated accordingly. Then we aggregate this information to create league tables. The element that is true in this myth is that the opposite also is not true. Teaching and learning are connected but it is not a direct causal relationship. Teaching influences learning, a relational connection. A teacher’s move connects to a student’s move, which connects to a teacher’s move etc. So teaching does connect to learning, but the question is how we understand that connection – as influence rather than cause and effect.

The myth of sole responsibility

The myth that as a teacher I am solely responsible for making learning happen in the classroom. We do act often as if we are responsible for what is going on in our lessons, making critical decisions about what is to be taught, planning, materials preparation. So we view teaching as our responsibility. But the moves that we make open up moves that students make, and these moves re-shape the possibilities of the next moves we can make. And the game of the lesson progresses. Responsibility is distributed. It’s organised in a way that one move/decision/action shapes the possibility of what comes next. This interplay between moves we can think of as opportunities – to teach on the teacher’s side and learn on the students’ side. These opportunities when they line up seem almost seamless. When they don’t line up, things go wrong, the idea of sole responsibility resurfaces.

These two myths could be summarised in a single statement: “As a teacher, you have to manage what you can’t control.”  The question is, how can we thaw our way of thinking about these myths?

The myth of proficiency as a goal

The myth that the goal of classroom teaching is student proficiency. Donald would argue that this is the myth that fundamentally has us in its grasp. What’s right about this? Clearly what we do as teachers in the classroom creates opportunities for students – to learn language. What’s frozen is not that but the relationship between what we do in the classroom and the way we think about how it travels outside. Proficiency has us in its clutches as language teachers. The idea of proficiency is grounded in an assumption of nativeness. That the world of language users divides itself between those who are native users and those who are non-native users. Proficiency is something that those who are born with and use the language a lot have, and those who meet the language through school are striving for.

The problem is that both ideas – proficiency and nativeness – are misleading. Nativeness is geopolitical not linguistic. Similarly, proficiency – an intuitive and appealing idea – is conceptually problematic. A usefully wrong idea. “Usefully wrong” – a practical heuristic from Lee Scholman. Teachers use a particular form of knowledge when they teach – usefully wrong ideas. 25-30 years ago David Nunan pointed out that proficiency is like the ghost in the machine. “assumed to exist because the concept is intuitively appealing” –  Nunan, 1987. How do you actually define that stuff that people get good at in language, when language is so flexible, permeable, like water not like ice? And when getting good at is a function of place and circumstance, not something general and universal? Proficiency is a function of time, place and experience.

Proficiency freezes our thinking because we use the concept of general language proficiency which does not admit to a clear set of boundaries but instead covers a lot of territory. If students can do something in the classroom, in an exam, we assume they can do it on their own in a place of their own choosing. What happens in the classroom is not a reflection of the larger whole. It is part of it, but not a reflection. Horizonal knowledge: What you have to know in the moment and how you project it out into the future. In the language classroom, it is the suitcase problem. In order to capture language and bound it, we have to give it attributes that it doesn’t have and didn’t ask for. Grammar. Four skills. etc. They allow us to chart the relationship between what is inside and what we hope will happen outside. “The strange this funny things happen to language when it comes to school.” Language gets attributes because of the fact that we need to teach it, not because of what it actually is.

In place of this myth of general proficiency a a goal, what we need is proficiencies as a plural. All of us are multi-literate, we use different ways of accessing meaning in text. We are more literate in some ways than other ways. As plural, they are always situated in particular contexts. This would apply to proficiency. Then we need to think about how these contexts are bounded, to understand what it is we are proficient in. When we think about proficiency from this point of view, we can recognise that it is an interesting, intricate dance.

How do we create a version of English that teachers can use as they teach so that the boundaries are clear? Donald created a list of ‘teacher tasks’ – e.g. taking attendance, collecting student work, make announcements, discipline. A panel looked at the tasks and looked at how each task could be grouped into functional areas, how they are enacted in routines and what language accompanies them. So this defines classroom language proficiency from the point of view of the teacher. From task to language. If we wanted to help teachers become proficient in this context, general proficiency wouldn’t suffice. This is a very specific proficiency. By bounding it, setting parameters, identifying what it is, we can clearly identify that it isn’t about general proficiency.

Bringing it together

If these are some of our myths, how can we think about them differently? Think about skateboarding. If you watch people skateboarding, you will see there is a relentlessness about it. They practice again and again and again, on and on. So there is direct causality in what they do. They have sole responsibility (for the practice and outcome). It is clearly bounded, you become proficient in specific areas. This gives us a sense of learning but what about teaching? We need to think differently about what teaching is and might be. Learning driven by the learner. Teaching is part of it but the question is how? We know teaching is central but that doesn’t mean we have to think about it in the same way. If we reframe our myths in this way, then we can look at learning from a slightly different point of view.

Caleb Gattegno – “You can be lived by your preconceptions, which will make you a bad teacher”

Eleanor Duckworth – “It occurred to me, then, that of all the virtues related to intellectual functioning, the most passive is the virtue of knowing the right answer”

Think of the myths as our “right answers” – they impinge on our ability to think actively.

“What you do about what you don’t know is, in the final analysis, what determines what you will ultimately know” – Eleanor Duckworth.

Phew! A lot to digest and think about! What an interesting opening plenary. 🙂

I am proud to announce that I have once again been nominated for the Teaching English British Council blog of the month award! 🙂 This time, the nomination is for my Speaking Bingo post, which describes a simple game for encouraging learners to use target words and expressions in speaking activities.

The TEBC blog award is decided by the number of ‘likes’, or votes, each nominee gains: the highest number wins. If you would like to vote for me, please click on the picture below:

My nomination! 🙂 Thank you, TEBC.

While you are at it, why not have a look at the other nominees’ blog posts – you might find you’d rather vote for them! 🙂 – and all the other great links that TEBC shares regularly.

Thank you to all who have already voted for me and to all who read this blog: you make it what it is!

And so this is Christmas, and what have we done? Another year over, a new one just begun…
Already? I think 2014 may have been the fastest year yet?!

The WordPress Monkeys recently sent me a round-up of my blogging year, and as usual it prompted reflection on the year as a whole, as well as what lies ahead.

In 2014 I:

– delivered my first webinar (for the British Council)
– delivered my first online conference presentations (for IH and for BELTA)
– spoke at IATEFL for the first time and also got proposal no. 2 accepted for Manchester this year
– spoke at MATSDA for the second time
– wrote a book chapter (for an edited book hopefully being published by IATEFL Learning Technologies SIG this year)
– taught EAP for the first time at Sheffield Uni
– completed the IH Certificate for Teaching YL and Teens
– finished year 1 and started year 2 in Palermo
– got some self study materials published by Richmond ELT (3 worksheets, CEFR A1 level, reading)
– won an ELTON (yes I remembered it at this stage of the list-making activity!
– won a British Council blog award for the posts I wrote at IATEFL  in Harrogate.
– graduated with a distinction from my MA in ELT
– started the IH certificate for training to be a tutor/trainer
– had my column appear in the 2014 IH journals
– became vegan (not work-related but perhaps my most significant non-work related step) and developed a passion for cooking in the process!
– learnt a heck of a lot of Italian (and a lot about language learning in the process!)

… And thought around November-time that I was slacking and not really achieving enough in 2014. Hmm! Actually it was quite a year, so if academic year 2014-2015 started quietly enough (‘only’ doing the tutoring course and learning how to teach IELTS in addition to the usual work stuff and Italian study) maybe that’s ok, actually! 😉

Here is an excerpt from the WordPress Monkeys’ round up of my blogging year:

Thank you to all who visited me here…

…whichever corner of the globe you hail from!

It is always interesting (for me) to see which are the top-viewed posts of the year. For 2014, I suppose they are fairly representative of what I got up to: I did indeed produce a well-received series of ‘Top 10 resources for…’ posts which have hopefully been helpful to some people, I enjoyed getting my teeth into discussing issues relating to language learning, I have been very busy working on my learner autonomy projects and I did lots of stuff in the classroom too!

Looking ahead

2015 should be certainly an interesting year, with a few things pencilled in already. E.g. IATEFL, another webinar, a journal article due in May, reapplying to Sheffield Uni for the summer. It’s also a year of uncertainty, in that for the second year running I need to decide whether to do another year at IHPA or not. I think I really got lucky in getting my job there from Oct 2013, it’s been a great place to work with a lot of opportunity for development and I was delighted to return in October. However, I don’t know that a third year is for me. I think I want to return to the UK and settle down. Why? Quite simply because I’m not old but I’m not getting any younger and I find it quite an upheaval living between two places – just as you get used to being in one, then it’s time for a stint in the other. It’s the best of both worlds and yet the whole of neither of them. Not conducive to relationships or family building, either, in my opinion. (Teaching is awesome but I want a life outside of it too!) However, because of how it all works, the application timings involved, I would have to relinquish one job with no guarantee of another, which is scary! Fortunately I have supportive family and friends, and an ok CV so even if plan A didn’t work out, I will find a plan B or C (G? K? We’ll see!) somehow or another… Necessity is the mother of and all that. Meanwhile, I have another couple of months to think about it before crunch time!

One thing I do know is that I will continue to seize opportunities as they arise and see where that takes me – it seems to be working ok so far! This year I also want to extend the seizing to opportunities for having fun, and opportunities within my personal/social life, rather than only in the sphere of work: life is short (as my mum’s untimely death in 2009 taught me) and there *is* more to it than ELT (even though ELT is a fantastic part of it!). So, the blog may have been a bit quiet lately but rest assured the time has not been wasted. I’d like to blog more this year, as I do enjoy it and find it a great developmental tool, but I also have to balance all my other commitments AND have a life, so everything in moderation, I suppose… (Otherwise put, it may or may not be a little quiet until after I’ve finished the IH tutor training course!)

Finally, happy new year to you all and thank you for being part of this blog: sharing my posts with you is a real privilege. 🙂

Happy 2015!! Image taken from a Google search, licensed for commercial reuse with modification.

It has been a little quiet here of late, I’ll admit. Conversely, life has been anything but! In the last 11 weeks and 4 days, as well as steadily trying to learn some Italian (most apt phrase I’ve learnt vis-a-vis this summer is “il da fare non manca mai” – there’s never any shortage of things to do!) and experiment with my own learner autonomy, I have:

• been inducted into and worked on a 10-week pre-sessional programme at Sheffield University
• presented at an online conference (The BELTA-TESL Toronto joint effort, themed Teaching Reading and Writing)
• graduated
• attended a wedding (not my own, I hasten to add!)
• written a 4500 word first draft book chapter
• given detailed feedback and then subsequently graded 26,000 words of student projects (so 52,000 words of marking altogether, there!)
• done USEPT (proficiency test for university entrance) examining (speaking) and marking (writing, reading)

and, as of Friday 5th September at 12.45, finally had a break from the world of ELT!!!! It was mainly the project marking and book chapter that put a halt to any blog updating I might have had in mind (there are only 24hrs in a day, and I do need to sleep [and study Italian!] for some of them!)… As they mainly account for the 3 weekends prior to this one just gone, other than the one during which I attended the wedding!

Lack of inspiration to blog, however, is not a problem. So, there will be plenty more posts appearing when I feel ready to return to the world of ELT; amongst others, a post about teaching academic listening and the 4/9/14 update on my Italian learning, as well as an update of my Delta page, to incorporate information about the new module 1 exam format. Of course once I return to IH Palermo, there will be plenty to say on that front too!

So stay tuned and see you soon!  (Just give me a few more days holiday first, please… 🙂 )

Dear everybody who received an email saying I’ve written a new post this evening (all 574 of you lovely people!),

Fear not: the final version of that post, unlike the draft that just accidentally got published – and, swiftly after, deleted! – will actually be readable and coherent! I’ve been experimenting a lot with dictations recently [mostly on myself, as a language learner – who knew doing dictations in Italian could be so fun and informative!] and it’s been an interesting process of discovery. I look forward to sharing what I’ve learnt and some ideas with you all and whoever else stumbles upon the post.

Meanwhile, forgive WordPress and its user’s clumsiness: normal service shall now resume…!

And a happy weekend to you all!  🙂