Last week, to celebrate World Book Day, we launched a competition to win one of our prestigious Cambridge Handbooks for Language Teachers titles. We received lots of wonderful entries across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram – read on to find out if you were one of the lucky winners…
The question we posed to entrants of the competition was:
Which is your favourite Cambridge Handbooks for Language Teachers title and why?
Our favourite entries
From all of the Facebook, Twitter and Instagram replies, we choose a shortlist of entries.
These stood out, particularly for the examples of how their favourite Cambridge Handbook had helped them in the classroom.
1. Jeyrel Alvarez: Classroom management technique. This book has helped me gain more expertise to manage students” behaviour. I use to have a really bad control of students when I was in the classroom. Now I have developed a better reflexive teaching method, able to deal with different problems in the classroom.
It has not only made my classroom environment better but also my concept of teaching has improved increasingly. Since I have been using Crambridge as a tool to teach, I have seen how the way I teach is helping my students.
2. Ya Carion: “Translation and Own-language Activities”, I teach English to 9/10 years old in a bilingual class and we love to build bridges between both languages (and other languages too), it’s essential to motivation and confidence to know there are many ways to understand and translate 😁
3. Amy B: Dictation by Paul Davis and Mario Rinvolucri! Dictation has a bad reputation but this book was a revelation for me.. dictogloss is one of my favourite activities, and YLs love a picture dictation
4. Robert Meszaros: Lessons from Nothing. When this book appeared 20 years ago I didn’t have a lot of resources and I wanted to make my classes more student centred. Now that I have resources and technology these ideas are still relevant and can even be done via WhatsApp or using tools like Padlet.
In fact I’m playing “Spot the Lie” with by students today using WhatsApp. We are on Lunar New Year holiday and it’s one way to keep them engaged and using L2 during the long break.
5. Sam Shepherd: Probably Grammar Practice Activities. Pretty much the cornerstone of most of my grammar teaching for my formative years as a teacher.
6. Clare H: I’ve valued Learner English (Swan) for years. I first used it on my CELTA in 1987 for my Focus on the Learner assignment. Today, it’s my first port of call for info on L1 interference issues when I have a closed group.
7. Hal Medrano: Maley/Duff’s Drama Techniques: inspiring me for 20 years to trust students & remember that their authentic experiences come FIRST!
8. Annie Thomson: Morgan and Rinvolucri’s Once upon a Time is brilliant. Loads of ideas for exploiting stories at different levels. Fave is probably vanishing story.
9. joseanis64: Five-minute Activities by Penny Ur and Andrew Wright. It’s a classic, I ‘ve been using it since 1996 and I never get tired of it. I always recommend it. Lots of ideas.
10. ekirillina: Classroom management techniques. It’s a cornerstone for me these days as my groups are very big (25 students on average) and of different levels. It’s so tricky and challenging to keep all students to be involved during 90 minutes.
11. soulbuyer78: Classroom Management Techniques by Scrivener is a great help for language teachers as it consists of information on all aspects of language teaching from classroom settings to behavior problems. For instance, I used the techniques about how to use the whiteboard during my CELTA course and the observer appreciated the way I used the whiteboard.
The winners
We put these shortlisted entries into a draw, picked at random, and can announce the three winners as:
Ya Carion
Robert Meszaros
Soulbuyer78
Happy World Book Day to you all, and we hope the winners enjoy their new books! If you are interested in finding out more about the Cambridge Handbooks for Language Teachers series, click the link to see more.