Introduction

Summary

This book is a collection of some of the best activities that have appeared in the nearly 45 years’ lifespan of the Cambridge Handbooks for Language Teachers series. In order to tap into the phenomenally rich source of teaching practice that the series represents, we have assembled a selection of the most popular activities into a single volume. In this way, teachers who are already familiar with the ideas will have them at their fingertips, while newer teachers will be equipped with a handy ‘starting pack’ of tried-and-tested activities with which to extend and enrich their current practice. Accordingly, each of the series’ authors was invited to submit their personal favourites from their own books, and to provide short comments to explain their choices. From this long list, the editors selected the 100 activities that ultimately make up the book, basing their choices on criteria that are outlined below, while trying to ensure minimal overlap and an ample coverage of teaching objectives. The resulting selection reflects not only the range and quality of the series itself, but, we believe, also represents the essence of good language teaching practice over nearly half a century.

The Cambridge Handbooks for Language Teachers: A brief history

Adrian du Plessis, the first head of ELT publishing at Cambridge University Press, records that the seed of the idea of producing a series of methodology texts for teachers was planted after a fact-finding mission to West Africa in the early 1970s, and further developed in collaboration with Michael Swan (see the Foreword). The intention was to fill a gap in the market that no other publishers seemed at the time to be addressing in any consistent fashion. Accordingly, the Cambridge ELT publishing list for 1979 ‘included the first titles in what was to become an important part of the Press list: practical books for teachers’ (Du Plessis 2013 p. 54). The first of these, Alan Maley and Alan Duff's successful Drama Techniques in Language Learning (1978), established the basic model: ‘a short theoretical introduction with the rest of the book consisting of practical ideas for use in the classroom’ (ibid.).