Happy 60th Birthday International House! Lots of teaching presents for everyone, as Neil outlines here in another of his series of blog posts about the IATEFL 2013 conference in Liverpool last week.

Neil's following the IATEFL conference from afar - Sandy, Maggie, Penny and Delia vie for his attention...

Neil's following IATEFL for us, join him for some tip top professional development from the biggest EFL conference of the year...

On Friday 25th May teachers from all of the IH schools around the world (over 150 in over 50 countries) will be coming together online to share experiences and knowledge and celebrate the 50th anniversary of the first IH teacher training course, which took place at IH London in June 1962.  If you work for Intermational house, you can find out everything you need to know about the conference here: http://ihworld.com/conferences_and_events/teachers_online_conference/ If you are a friend of International House, you studied with us in thepast or used to work with us, then you are invited to attend the plenary sessions: 10.00 GMT Things to do in your summer holiday by Shaun Wilden

Many schools are reaching the end of their academic year and while work may be the last thing on teachers’ minds as they head off for the summer, now is a good time to consider your CPD plan. CPD seems to be one of the buzzwords of this year in ELT. In case you don’t know CPD stands for Continuing Professional Development; a term for the process of taking responsibility for your own development as a teacher.  With the continued growth of the Internet as a teaching resource you can now attend conferences and workshops online, get easy access to research and enjoy the benefits of a global staffroom. Living in digital times means that it has never been easier to find a CPD path that best suits you as a teacher. IH world recognizes this fact and has recently launched a new initiative to help teachers plan their CPD through their career. This talk aims to open the door to self-access CPD, introduce you to our new scheme and give you some ideas for filling the hours either of your summer holiday or simply until your next class!

Shaun’s Bio

Shaun has been involved in English language teaching for over twenty years. He is currently the International House World Organisation Teacher Training Coordinator but also works as a freelance teacher trainer. Apart from that he maintains several online teaching sites including ihonlinetraining.net and is interested in the application of technology to teaching.  He is a moderator ELTon nominated  twitter #eltchat group which meets every Wednesday to discuss issues and ideas in ELT and membership secretary of the IATEFL Learning Technologies SIG. Feel free to follow him @shaunwilden or read his blogs shaunwilden.com and appedelt.com.  When not sitting at a computer, Shaun enjoys growing food in his garden and then cooking it.

13.00 GMT The Decline and fall of coursebooks? by Simon Greenall

Coursebooks not only continue to get written, but continue to get written about and written off with equal regularity. The Decline and Fall of Coursebooks? will consider the present day polemic in favour of and against coursebooks, and set it against a review of their recent past history. It will examine the dilemmas and compromises which coursebook publishing and writing face today and in the future.

Simon’s Bio:

Simon Greenall has been an ELT textbook writer since 1982, is a past president of IATEFL and is currently an IH Trustee.  He has published many books including exam material, adult and secondary courses, as well as radio and television programmes for the BBC. Since 2000 he has been co-editor in chief of textbook series for Chinese primary, junior high and senior high schools and universities. He also works as a consultant to the ministry of education in Palestine on the teaching of English in state schools. He has given workshops and conference presentations in 45 countries.

17.00 GMT Surviving through songs - words of wisdom for NQTs by Neil McMahon 

The first year or two of teaching post-CELTA or teaching college are usually a wave of hits and misses, successes and insecurities.  In Surviving through song, we’ll look for words of wisdom from the best of the last fifty years of music that will help make our early (and not so early) days of teaching a more comfortable and rewarding experience as we continue to grow as teachers.  At the same time we’ll see a variety of ways of exploiting songs in class to promote engaging and personalised skills and language work and get the students thinking as well as singing.

Neil’s Bio:

As IHWO Academic Coordinator for Resources and DoS Support, Neil is responsible for developing and editing resources and materials for schools across the International House affiliate network, while supporting DoSes of IH schools in their day to day work.  Neil was a DoS himself for four and a half years, at IH Belgrano, Buenos Aires, before moving across town to become a full-time teacher trainer at IH Buenos Aires Teacher Training.  He also tutors various IHWO courses on OTTI and gives conference presentations for both IH and Macmillan.  Before arriving in Argentina at the beginning of 2002 he worked in Prague for four years, where he began teaching and working for IH.   If he ever gets a break from the above jobs, he loves going for a run, watching football, cricket and opera, eating out or relaxing at home with his wife, two cats, a good book and an Argentine red, all of which he then records for posterity on his blog at amuseamuses.wordpress.com.

If you sign up to receive our alumni newsletter you will be sent all the information you need in order to attend these sessions. http://ihworld.com/teachers/alumni You can also follow events at the conference online leading up to and on the day by following the Twitter hashtag #IHTOC50. Looking forward to seeing you there!

John and I arrived in Cordoba so that he could write and both of us could live on giving English classes. Neither of us was thinking of founding a school. But three weeks later sixty Cordobese people had passed through two patios and knocked on our door. Doctors, lawyers, clerks, waiters, olive salesmen, lace merchants, señoritas, students. We had become a school. At once John laid the foundations: low fees ensuring small earners weren’t excluded; persuading students to join classes according to level not friendship; small classes, since ourrooms were small. The cold rising through the brick floor had everybody cluster round the table, with a brazier underneath, - perhaps the origin of our friendly circular classroom seating. Contradicting the reputation of the Spanish, our Andalucian students arrived punctually, regularly and wrote wonderful homework. On Sundays we’d meet for excursions. We decided to stay. Expansion had already taken possession of John’s mind. In a year we had started Spanish Easter courses for Foreigners and people from England, France, Holland descendedfor a packed three-week programme, also sampling Montilla wine and flamenco dancing with our delighted Cordobese students. Once in better premises, we started a library, a little bar was fitted out, classes of German and French began and speakers from England also stopped by to give talks. We organised ‘International Weeks’ and had ambassadors come down and be fêted by the Town Hall. We became not just a school but a ‘Casa Internacional’. John wrote in the mornings, stimulated by the new enterprise. I was just as gripped by our projects though sometimes wished for longer spaces in between. Six years later, now with two babies, we had to settle and so returned to London. IH London might easily not have happened. After publication of his successful book Babel In Spain, John hoped his writing would take off and we both had journalism in mind but that was precarious with minimal savings. Suddenly the chance of a flat in Covent Garden came by, we grabbed it and the school process began again. How different from Cordoba! By Christmas only six students had found their way to our third floor premises in tatty Endell Street. We tried to cheer up the grim metal stairwayand John also taught ILEA classes in West London to make ends meet. But when they closed for the summer, all John’s students followed him to Endell Street and never went back to the ILEA school. Things looked up when the BBC commissioned John to write a course for English By Radio. Just then he was asked to go to Finland to polish President Kekkonen’s English before his state visit to Britain. In his palace quarters in the dark snowy North, when not tutoring the President, John wrote his BBC course. Back in London, I manned the school, dropping our toddlers in a Greenwich day nursery. I spotted the ideal premises in Shaftesbury Avenue but was rejected, until a note in the Daily Express gossip column about John teaching Kekkonen made the agents smile. It was verycheap except that the lease had to be renewed every six months, pending reforms for Piccadilly Circus. We stayed 18 years. The eight-room flat was grotty but perfectly located at a stone’s throw from the famous Eros. Students filled the school. We needed teachers fast. This is when John thought of a course to train teachers. A tiny ad in the magazine The New Statesman brought our first twelve trainees for two weeks in June 1962. There was a bold new component. Each afternoon, after their theory session, the trainees had to teach real classes watched by fellow trainees and their tutor. It worked, possibly because of the group discussion afterwards. And it was the 60s. At the end, we kept on the best ones as teachers. The course was to multiply. Against tradition, teacher trainers didn’t stop teaching foreign students and so stayed in touch with classroom complexities, always upgrading the training course. The beauty of short courses was that you could see the result within months, rather than years. Swapping ideas and observing classes became the norm and I remember the excitement at the teachers’ meetings. Being a new school with new teachers made new ideas possible. This was only 1963-4 -5. We never looked back and some of our intrepid trainees have become today’s most popular EFL authors. The teacher-training programme launched, John set off to newly liberated Algeria; bound to need English language training we thought. Some of our newly hatched teachers soon found themselves out there, including Ben Warren and Doug Case. Beirut followed. When a Libya contract was cancelled due to the Gaddafi coup, the teachers happily flew to Khartoum which also craved English. They were valiant and dedicated and brought valuable teaching ideas back to IH London. From Rome, Ausonio Zappa would bring summer students regularly to London and in 1966 he asked us to run a teachers’ course there. In Rome’s unforgettably soft September we met a promising pick of trainees, Roger Gower, Sheila Sullivan, Edward Woods, Cathy Wallace, and other EFL experts-to-be. John was keen to start an IH Rome and a year later a building was found. John just said ‘OK Let’s go out and start it’. It was goodbye to Transinterpreter, my little translation agency, and I had to suspend my Longman pronunciation book, but I couldn’t resist Rome. Our children were taken from their primary school and off we drove. Four months later we were back home, as the school expanded into our lodgings. Three years later it was off to Paris, which we knew well. The Parisians loved the lively and beautiful International House; but John’s wish to create a whole ‘village anglais’, pub and all, hit local resistance. By then International House had some thirty affiliates and 40 Shaftesbury Avenue was a powerhouse of teaching and training, supplying teachers, materials and services to many UK schools too. We offered classroom videos, the English Teaching Theatre, a bookshop, ateachers’ monthly magazine, Salvatore’s restaurant, a students’ welfare bureau, an au pair agency, and the Teachers’ Centre. We never advertised until 1980. What we lacked was some large rooms. In 1976 John happened to notice that 106 Piccadilly was to let (very cheaply) and after nine months’ wooing, he got us this splendid, totally unschool-like Georgian piece of elegance with some magnificent rooms where we still are. Doubting teachers all succumbed. The teaching engine purred. Charles (Tim) Lowe created the DTEFLA distance course in theex-quarters of one footman. In the garret of the other footman, the business school was shaped by Joe Wiersma. And the EFL world, I think, was pleased to have a brilliant centre where teaching ideas could shine. Abroad, the affiliated schools were no longer fledglings: you could now train in Colin McMillan’s IH Lisbon or IH Rome or in Ben Warren’s IH Barcelona or in IH Cairo, also founded by IH London offspring. In 1975 John persuaded the Bell School to run their first teachers’ course, as one of our teacher trainers was moving to Cambridge. In 1978 John told me the RSA wanted to model their new teachers’ course on ours and he’d agreed. I wonder if it ever crossed their minds what a gift that was. John felt education was there to be shared. We seconded teacher trainers to the Institute of Education from 1985 to 1990, at our expense. Slowly the CertTEFLA spread, even to the lofty universities. In the late 80s John told everyone he was re-launching the Modern Language Department. No sooner said than done. Teacher trainer Elaine Walker produced the business plan overnight and Marisol Gower and Ana Palley gave the first TT course for Italian, Spanish, French and German teachers a month later. Japanese followed. It prospered. IH know-how was to bring in schools in Hungary, Poland, the Ukraine and beyond. The dedication continues in more than 120 affiliated schools worldwide. Together, the EFL opportunity and the IH inspiration have crafted an exhilarating and valued international profession. Let me express my awe and gratitude for a fantastic first fifty years. Fifty Years of IH in Broad Brush Strokes By Brita Haycraft This article was written by Brita for the IH Journal and appeared in issue 14 which was to mark the 50th Anniversary of International House in 2003. History - compiled by Brita Haycraft

Do you find yourself behind the eight ball when idioms come out of left field?  Are you out of your depth when idiom-loving friends call the shots? Give yourself a sporting chance to cover all the bases as we dive headfirst into the world of sport-inspired idioms, exploring their meaning and background to give ourselves the inside track in the idiom race, allowing us to paddle our own idiom canoes and put a new vocabulary arrow in our language quivers.   Slides: A Sporting Chance Handout: Neil_McMahon