ETpedia Vocabulary: combining knowledge

When I was asked to be involved in writing the new ETpedia Vocabulary book, it was a no-brainer. Having started my ELT publishing career working on learner's dictionaries, although I've branched out into writing a whole range of different types of materials, vocabulary is still my first love.

For those of you not familiar with the ETpedia titles, they're resource books aimed at teachers, each of which contains 500 short teaching tips around a particular topic; young learners, exams, Business English, etc. There are 10 books in the series so far and ETpedia Vocabulary is the latest.

Drawing on a mix of expertise:

I co-wrote the book with Fiona Mauchline and Stacey H Hughes, making a writing team who brought very different skills and perspectives to the party. Our different areas of expertise came out right from the very first meeting in which it turned out to be surprisingly easy to divide up the chapters we'd sketched out for different areas of vocabulary teaching. Fiona is an expert in teaching teenagers, she has a fascinating knowledge of the psychology and neuroscience of language learning and she's full of ideas for sparking creativity. Stacey has a background in teacher training and seemed to come up with an endless supply of varied and creative practical classroom activities and tools. She made me think more about all the stuff that doesn't (and can't) appear on the pages of coursebooks, but goes on in classrooms amongst teachers and learners. For my part, I was happy to fill the language nerd role focusing on explaining terminology, looking a dictionary skills, corpus tools and some of the nitty-gritty of morphology and lexicogrammar. I think our different inputs have led to a fabulously rounded resource which will be relevant to lots of different contexts and appeal to teachers with different teaching styles.

I should also add that blending the input from the three of us, dealing with the inevitable overlaps and differences in style was no mean feat, but was ably handled by crack editor Penny Hands and the guiding hand of series editor John Hughes.

Digging deeper into my own knowledge:

The actual writing process was an interesting challenge and quite different from my usual work of writing classroom materials. It forced me to dig around in my brain and think about the why and the how of vocabulary teaching rather than just the what. It allowed me to rove around all the different aspects of vocabulary teaching that I've touched on over the past 20 years or so. It prompted me to go back and read up again on a whole range of areas, as well as checking out the latest developments in corpus tools and other online vocabulary resources. And inevitably, it left me with way more I wanted to say than would fit into the ETpedia style of short, concise teaching tips! At times, that was frustrating, but it was also a great exercise in trying to pick out the key ideas that were really worth passing on and cutting the waffle.

I hope the resulting book will be a useful resource for teachers to dip into and flick through when they're short on inspiration and want to try something new, when the way they approach vocabulary is perhaps feeling a bit stale and repetitive, or when they're tackling a different type of class (EAP, advanced learners, students with dyslexia or colour-blindness). I certainly picked up lots of great ideas from my co-authors in the process of writing the book and re-invigorated my own approach to vocabulary teaching.

ETpedia Vocabulary is available from the Pavilion ELT website as well as the usual places.

Key Words for IELTS

Last week, I received advanced copies of three books I worked on earlier in the year - Collins COBUILD Key Words for IELTS. I was involved with the books right from the early stages; planning the layout, developing the features and putting together the word lists, so it was quite exciting to see the finished product.

The books kind of bridge the gap between a vocabulary practice book and a specialised dictionary. Each of the three titles (Starter, Improver and Advanced) contain vocabulary that's aimed at helping students move from using general English towards the more formal, academic-style language needed for the IELTS exam. The words are presented in expanded dictionary entries, with definitions relevant to the academic usage of the word, examples, collocations, synonyms and usage notes.

I know that my own IELTS/EAP students sometimes find standard advanced learner's dictionaries a bit frustrating because the more formal and academic senses and derivatives of words often get little or no coverage - because they're less frequent in everyday usage. In these books, the more unusual senses and formal parts of speech (such as the abstract nouns so common in academic English) get equal coverage and IELTS-style examples.

Also at this level, it's often the case that the first word a student comes up with doesn't quite work in the context, so they need to be able to play around with vocabulary. For this reason, we've shown different parts of speech together (because sometimes a noun form works where a verb doesn't fit) along with possible synonyms that might fit in better.

The books are out in January and I'm going to be really interested to see how they go down with teachers and students. As a writer/editor, you really hope that all the ideas you put into a book will be obvious to the user and that they'll get as much out of it as you'd hoped. Keeping fingers crossed and looking forward to feedback in the New Year.

Royalties

This morning, I received my annual royalties statement for a couple of little books I wrote for CUP a few years ago (Common Mistakes at Proficiency & Common Mistakes at IELTS Advanced). Neither were particularly huge bits of work (in fact, I think I spent much longer doing corpus research for the rest of the books in the series than I did on writing these two), so I find it rather strange and miraculous that they still provide one of my best sources of income. It feels rather like free money!

When my statement arrives, I usually have a quick browse through then file it away. But as it's now been five years since the first was published (3 years since the second), I thought I'd add up how many copies have been sold altogether. I was quite surprised and, in some little way thrilled, to find that there are more than 85,000 copies of books with my name on the front floating around the world somewhere. I've no idea if that's good or not, but it sounds quite impressive to me!

On the downside though, it does make me rather sad that more of my work doesn't involve royalties. It seems a bit odd that the amount I earn for the work I do doesn't seem to bear any relation to the amount of work, effort, time or creative input it involves. I've worked on more than 50 publications since I went freelance some 10 years ago - either writing, editing or researching - and for all of the rest of them, I've got no more than a rather basic hourly rate. Obviously for most of them, including the dictionaries, I've been no more than part of a team effort, but there have been a few bits of solo writing too. Over recent years, I've been pondering how to move from being a mere ELT writer to being a proper ELT author (with its accompanying rewards!). Asking around though, it seems that you either have to be lucky and in the right place at the right time (as I was with the two Common Mistakes books) or just incredibly pushy and prepared to put an awful lot of effort into potential projects that may or may not ever come to fruition. Much as I'd like to embark on the latter plan, I just can't afford to - it takes all my time (and energy) to plough on with the work that I'm offered. So I guess, for the moment at least, I'll just have to be content with my hourly rate and the tag of ELT writer.

ella minnow pea

I've just finished the most wonderfully lexico-nerdy novel - ella minnow pea by Mark Dunn. It's about an island nation where people gradually lose the right to use letters of the alphabet and, of course, those same letters gradually disappear from the novel itself. It's a fascinating concept but one which could lead to a rather pretentious bit of clever-clever literature. I love writers who play with language - I was totally captured by David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas - but I'm also wary of writing that tries to be too clever - I hated Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveller and gave up on Will Self's Book of Dave. But ella minnow pea has a totally compelling story, with wonderful characters which sweeps you along towards a gripping ending. It's a great little novel, that I'd recommend to anyone - language geek or otherwise!