Happy New Year!

I got back this week from a Christmas/New Year trip to Cambodia (above at Angkor Wat) and I've spent a couple of days trying to get over the jet lag and pottering about; doing lots of washing, sorting out photos, dealing with my inbox and sending out a few work messages. It's also inevitably a time for thinking back and looking forward ...

Highlights of 2010

• 2010 started with the publication of Global which had been a big feature of my working year in 2009. There was the launch at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford in February and then in November, the trip to Buckingham Palace to pick up the ESU award for the e-workbook along with several of my Global co-writers - a day to remember!
  
• The summer saw the publication of the latest edition of the Oxford Dictionary of English - the first big native speaker dictionary project I've worked on, so an exciting milestone.
• This year's big project though was work on the Collins COBUILD Key Words for IELTS books. It was, in many ways, a dream project for me, combining my lexicography skills with my recent interest in EAP and IELTS. The project also marked a bit of a step forward in career terms as I was working as senior editor for the three books; a challenging, but really interesting experience.

Resolutions for 2011

Well, there's only one really and that's to break out of the cycle of getting involved in one big project in the year that ends up being more work than I can cope with in the time available, so that my RSI flares up really badly, leaving me in lots of pain and frustrated, and then having to take time off to recover. I don't want to give up those 'big' projects, because they're usually the most interesting. But there really has to be a way of working that means that I can control my hours and work through something at a reasonable pace - as opposed to the usual promises to start on a particular date which then moves and moves and moves, until I'm left with the same amount of work to do (and usually more than expected) in half the amount of time!

So here's looking forward to an interesting, productive and sensibly-paced year ahead in 2011.

A trip to the Palace!

On Tuesday, I got to visit Buckingham Palace to collect the ESU President's award from the Duke of Edinburgh for the Global eworkbook, along with other members of the Global team. There was quite a group of us because the Global students' book also won the ESU book award! Everyone keeps asking me what it was like and it's a bit difficult to put into words. There was definitely a kind of childish excitement amongst everyone as we waited outside and then made our way across the forecourt and into the palace. I'm no great monarchist, and to be honest, the bit of the palace we got to see wasn't especially any grander than your average National Trust country house, but there's undeniably something exciting about getting to go somewhere with so much historical significance. Lindsay articulated it well in the taxi later when he said that as a Canadian, the shape of his country was probably decided in that very building! He also pointed out that Prince Philip has probably met anyone who's been anyone in the twentieth century, from Gandhi to Churchill, the Beetles to Obama ... quite a thought.

Sadly, we couldn't take cameras inside the palace, so I've only got a few pictures outside (in the wind and rain!) and at the ESU reception afterwards. There was an official photographer snapping away, so if I can find out what happened to those pictures later, I'll add them or link to them.

It was also a good chance to meet up with lots of colleagues and talk 'shop'. As a freelancer working away at my desk, although I really enjoy what I do and I am proud of a lot of the stuff I produce, I don't spend as much time talking about it and getting caught up in the whole thing as the in-house folk. I tend to see myself as a jobbing writer who just gets on with whatever the current project is. At these sort of events, I find all the talk of markets and trends, the future of publishing and digital content rather goes over my head! Which perhaps goes to show why it is so important to get out and keep in touch.

All round, it was a fun day, a great excuse to dress up and very nice to hear so much positive feedback on Global from so many different quarters. Thanks to everyone for a great day!

An award for Global

As a freelancer sitting in your little freelance bubble at home, you don't often get much feedback on things you've worked on, except at the occasional conference. So it was quite exciting to find out that the Global eWorkbook that I worked on last year has won an award. It's won the English Speaking Union President's Award for "innovation and good design in the use of technology for the teaching, learning and advancement of English".

When I was plodding away helping to develop and write the language practice materials for the pre-intermediate eWorkbook last spring, it was certainly a lot of hard work and much of that effort went into trying to make it more than just a 'traditional' workbook. The e-format gives lots of room for innovation in terms of presentation - attractive graphics, lots of extra audio and video - plenty of interactive features when it comes to navigation and connections between features (linking language practice to a dictionary and grammar help) and of course, instant feedback on activities. There's even the facility to download audio and video material to listen to on the bus.

But for me, perhaps the most significant area of 'innovation' was in the actual content itself rather than just its presentation and funky format. The whole ethos behind the Global project, as plugged evangelically by its originator Lindsey Clandfield, was to be a 'grown-up' course, with information-rich, genuinely interesting and stimulating content. And this idea extended to the workbook too. Having written workbooks and CD-ROM practice materials before, I was well used to fitting in with a format and trying to find creative ways to practise a list of 8 pre-intermediate vocab items yet again, after they'd already been done to death in the coursebook! You try to make it interesting and come up with a vaguely feasible context where you can, but it's usually under pressure of tight deadlines (workbooks get squeezed in at the end of the writing process, yet need to be ready for the same publication dates), so it's generally off the top of your head.

The approach to the Global eWorkbook was quite different though. I found myself researching content for even very simple vocab and grammar activities - finding out about different types of calenders for an exercise on prepositions, or checking statistics for library lending for a vocab activity (on lend and borrow). I wrote reading texts about a Venezeulan music project and a UN population report and created listening activities about zero-carbon houses and Russian 'dachas'. Anything that interested me in the paper or on the radio or TV became a possible target topic.

We tried very hard to avoid the rather bland, contextless and frankly, distinctly unmemorable activities that all-too-often turn up in workbooks, which learners skim their way through rather automatically, taking in little more than the basic lists of items being "practised/tested". The idea of putting so much effort into making the workbook materials interesting and stimulating was not just to make them more attractive and motivating, but for learners to get more from the process in terms of language learning. The hope is that learners will actually take in more of the context rather than just skimming for the right answers, thereby absorbing more about the way the target items are used (collocations, grammatical patterns, register, etc.) and also something of the surrounding language too.

It's always difficult to know whether all the hopes, intentions and aspirations that go into developing and writing materials will manage to make their way out at the other end as you intend them to. I'm certainly aware that all the effort I've put into grammar codes and labels in dictionaries over the years are either ignored or viewed as meaningless by most of my students! But if this award and some of the other bits of feedback I've come across about Global are anything to go by, it seems that at least some of the effort that went into the writing (by the whole team who worked on it) is paying off.

Camera shy

I received a message this week asking me to put together a very short profile and a photo to go in the Authors section on the Global website. It's always odd trying to write about yourself in the third person, especially when you've got such an eclectic 'career' as I have - not quite sure what to say about myself; EFL lexicographer, writer, editor, corpus researcher, EAP tutor ... What's even more difficult though is finding a photo. I've always hated having my picture taken - school photos were a terrible ordeal. And when I did my first conference presentation some 10+ years ago, I had to go to a photographer to get a proper portrait picture done for the blurb. It was the whole school photo thing relived and the resulting picture was truly awful. Thankfully, I don't still have a copy, so don't have to embarrass myself by showing it here!

I've realised over the years that all the 'best' photos of me are the ones taken when I'm not aware and definitely not 'posing'. So I keep an eye out for pictures that come up that I might be able to use for work purposes. There are a couple that I've used on my website that were both taken when I was chatting away to someone - perhaps the most natural state for somebody who's professionally involved in language and communication. One was taken from across the room at a family party and another when I was on holiday in Australia, in full flow (hands in motion!) telling a story to a group of friends in a bar after several glasses of wine. The key to using social photos for professional purposes though is careful cropping - the wine bottles here needed editing out!



Having had a fairly drastic haircut just before Christmas though (from fairly long, to pretty short), I feel like I ought to go for an up-to-date picture for the website, so I can't just pick out one of my existing favoured shots. We're down in London for a visit this weekend, so I'll be asking my boyfriend to snap away with the camera while we're out and about in the hope that something usable comes out of it.

The Global launch party

I've just got back from Oxford and after a rather long, cold, damp journey home which involved two missed trains that I ran for only to see them pulling away from the platform, lots of sitting around waiting for connections and a 45-minute trudge home in the rain, I don't have the energy to settle down to any work this afternoon, so I thought I'd update you on last night's "do" - the launch of Global at the Ashmolean Museum.

First things first, I was quite pleased with the outfit I finally settled on, which bizarrely turned out to match the coursebook colours rather well. Sadly, the few photos I took turned out rather blurry because of the lighting (and a borrowed camera that probably should have been a different setting!), but here's a self-portrait shot taken in my hotel room at about one o'clock this morning ...

The evening itself turned out to be really interesting. After some initial standing about like a bit of a lemon looking for someone I recognised, I ended up meeting lots of new people, some who I knew by name but had never actually met before and catching up with some old friends. It was really good to meet the rest of the Global team and to get a sense of the whole project and where my contributions fit into it. I've realised that putting together a whole new series of coursebooks is definitely a major undertaking and takes a large cast of contributors to create all the "components" now expected as standard. There's not just the actual student's book itself, but the teacher's book and its accompanying teacher's resource CD, a multifaceted eWorkbook with not only the expected practice activities - which I contributed to the pre-intermediate level - but videos, extra audio material, etc and that's before we even get onto the ongoing work involved in the website, its e-lessons, blogs .....

After an evening of listening to all the work everybody has put into it and the buzz and enthusiasm surrounding the launch of the finished product, you do get swept along on quite a wave. My only niggling thought though, which I didn't really formulate properly until my train journey home this morning, was whether all this stuff is ever actually going to get used. Back when I was a full-time teacher on General English courses, I used to struggle just to use all the material in the student's book. I was always getting distracted and sidetracked into discussions and ad-libbed activities, or I was itching to use my own material, usually in those days a badly photocopied article from a newspaper with some handwritten questions on the bottom that would act as a starting point for lessons that could head off in all kinds of different directions. And so, no matter how good the coursebook might be, I was always looking for sections I could skip, not extra material to fill up my time. Perhaps I was unusual (that's why I gave up the teaching in favour of full-time materials development!) and I know that many teachers don't have the inclination, the resources, or perhaps for importantly, the time to write their own stuff, so probably welcome a whole range of reliable, well-written supplementary materials to draw on, but for all the extra work and effort that goes in, I do still wonder how much of that extra material will ever really get a serious airing. I'd be interested to find out ...

What (not) to wear ...?

I'm just thinking about getting ready for a trip to Oxford tomorrow for a launch party for the new Global coursebooks; checking train times and deciding what to wear - something smart but not too dressy, classy but not too 'middle-aged academic'!! People who go out to work and have business meetings every day might find this a bit funny, but when you work from home and most of your contact is via email, face-to-face meetings do take on an added significance. As a freelance colleague put it to me recently, it's our chance to remind the publishers we work for that we're real people and not just "service providers".

It's also an excuse to get away from my desk for a day (Hooray!! My RSI 's very bad at the mo) and will be a chance to catch up with 'colleagues' who I don't see very often. I'll post news of how it goes (and maybe photos) when I get back ...

Global

With most of the work I do, for reasons of confidentiality, I don't get to talk about it until months after I've finished and it's been published. So I was quite excited this week to find out that a big project I've been doing various bits of work for this year is now "going public" in preparation for its launch in January 2010.

It's a new English coursebook for adult learners from Macmillan, called Global. When I was originally approached last year to write some materials for an eWorkbook to accompany the pre-intermediate level, I have to admit that my first reaction was to say no. I'd been through a phase of writing a lot of companion-type materials for General English coursebooks and was a bit fed up of writing rather standard, formulaic grammar and vocab exercises on the same old topics. The editor gave me the usual spiel about how this book would be 'different', more grown-up, less cliched, and generally much more interesting to work on. But it wasn't until I saw a sample unit that I was sold on it. I'd always found a lot of coursebooks rather 'naff', aimed at a vague 'young adult' audience; not fun enough for children, too square and plodding for teenagers and rather patronising to adults. So it was very refreshing to see an English coursebook with genuinely interesting content, moving away from the usual, predictable topics and contexts. I was even more encouraged when I later discovered that David Crystal, one of my university lecturers as an undergraduate at Bangor University who first inspired me about the English language, was on board. Check out his video about Global English on YouTube.

It was quite challenging to write for - trying to keep the 'Global feel', but staying within the restrictions of the language level. I spent as much of my time online researching interesting information to include as I did actually writing. Inevitably, that meant going down lots of blind alleys, researching ideas that didn't really work out and having to come up with something different, but it was far from boring work.

I'll be really interested to see how the whole Global concept is received once it's launched in full. When you're working as part of a project, you get to be too close up to it and it's difficult to hold it at arm's length and make an objective assessment.