I should like to acknowledge my special indebtedness to Hugh L’Estrange who read this book and made lots of useful suggestions (and who also helped out with the typing when one finger proved too slow!).
I should also like to thank Frances Newman and John Johnson of Kingsway-Princeton College of Further Education, London for their excellent ideas (see particularlypage 87 and page 80) and also Dr David Thomas of the University of Bristol, Department of Drama.
… for the Second and Third Editions (2011, 2013)
Many thanks to Bob Janes for his tremendous support and encouragement, and for all his hard work in putting the book together and giving it a more modern and attractive look.
Also to Andy Cowle for his enthusiasm and committment to making this series available to teachers again years later, and to HarperCollins for taking it under their wing.
Jane Revell is an award-winning ELT author who has worked globally in ELT as an educator, manager and trainer since the early 70s. She is widely known in many countries and is greatly respected for her continued contributions and inspiring workshops. Jane is also a Master Practitioner and Certified Trainer of NLP, and a Pilates instructor.
www.janerevell.com
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