Scott Thornbury, author of About Language, has written a second edition of his book. It’s brimming with new activities for teachers, so he popped by to tell us all about it!
What’s so special about language?
When Scott was teaching diploma courses at International House in Barcelona, he created a collection of worksheets. He then took these worksheets and formed a book… now known as ‘About Language’! Years after it was first published, Scott’s completely revamped the content so that it refers to real language as it’s used in today’s global world.
What’s the difference between the first and second edition?
Scott wrote the first edition before the internet existed, so he relied heavily on articles from newspapers and magazines. Now, because of the wealth of information at his fingertips, he’s been able to include lots more about varieties of English. So much so, that there are units dedicated to that very topic. The new content also includes lots of data from the Cambridge Learner Corpus, meaning that there are more real examples of language than ever before – which is something that Scott didn’t have access to when he was writing the first edition.
What is the Cambridge Learner Corpus?
The Cambridge Learner Corpus is part of the Cambridge Corpus and it’s a collection of learner texts, mainly taken from Cambridge English exams. This means that Scott had access to reams and reams of learners’ written language… which is of course incredibly handy when looking for examples of written English to show to teachers like you!
Watch the video
If you want to find out more about why and how Scott created the second edition, have a listen to what he has to say:
If you enjoyed this, you might also like listening to Scott and some of our other ELT professionals about their reactions to the state of teacher development.