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Ken Wilson
Ken Wilson trains teachers all over the world and is a prolific author of ELT materials with more than twenty titles to his name, including ten series of coursebooks. Most of his course material has been written for specific regions of the world, including Central Europe, China, the Middle East and Spain. His most recently-published coursebook is Smart Choice (OUP), which was written for students in Japan, Korea, Taiwan and other Asian countries.
In addition to print materials, Ken has written more than a hundred radio and TV programmes for BBC English, including fifty radio scripts for the Follow Me series, thirty Look Ahead TV scripts and a series of plays called Drama First. For a number of years, he also worked for the BBC Spanish and Latin American services, reporting in Spanish on cultural events in Britain. He has worked as a writer or adviser on ELT television projects in many different countries. In 1997, he wrote and presented a series of drama training programmes for Polish TV. In 2005, he wrote a book to accompany Extr@ English, the first ELT TV programme to be commissioned by British TV company Channel 4. Until 2001, Ken was also artistic director of the English Teaching Theatre, a company which toured the world performing stage-shows for learners of English. The ETT made more than 250 tours to 55 countries in Europe, Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and Asia. With co-director Doug Case, Ken wrote more than a hundred sketches, the best of which are available in two books, English Sketches 1 and 2, published by Macmillan. |
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Beyond the coursebook: 'hot' and 'now' topics and how to exploit them.
This talk looks at texts which deal with 'hot' and 'now' topics - material you don't find in coursebooks because it's too hot (in other words it goes into areas that publishers are frightened of) or it's too now, - it would be acceptable in a book but will be stale by the time the book comes out. Despite the care taken by publishers to avoid stale information appearing in their books, of course it happens all the time. We often find factual information (about an international celebrity, for example) which is no longer true or authentic. This happens because the time lapse between the author writing the book and the day you use it can be up to five years. The way to solve this problem is to find more up-to-date information to replace the out-of-date text. Ten years ago, this could have taken hours, even days, to organise. Nowadays, you can provide parallel material from the internet - and it can take you just a few minutes. There is another problem: information about famous people may not only be stale but also bland - inoffensive and dull. Texts about Britney Spears, for example, will probably not contain information about the difficulties in her life, which the students in your class will know about. Which creates yet another problem: do we want to let our students read and talk about hot topics such as the 'excesses' of our pop and sporting heroes? How far down the tabloid path do we go for our 'now' topics? We will also look beyond news and magazine texts to examples from great literature which may be electric to read, but are they also too hot? The material we use may be a little dangerous, but I guarantee it will make your class read avidly, and will start them talking and writing, too. |