Macmillan English Campus. (2010) One stop English Number one for English language teachers. Retrieved from www.onestopenglish.com
One Stop English: EFL material developers in contact with the users of their products
One Stop English is a teacher’s resource website published by the Macmillan Education Group. In its subscription version (available for about 60$ a year) the website offers a large amount of fairly good quality resources in all skills of EFL teaching. Materials are designed from a Communicative Language Teaching paradigm by “ELT authors” with Macmillan who also keep their own blogs on the site or link out to other relevant one on different tips and resources for teachers (like one on web resources to improve your classroom practice (http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/2011/04/17/visualization-update/ and another one by the author of “An A-Z of ELT”, a McMillan dictionary of terminology on English language teaching who felt his publication would benefit from an online update and enrichment from practicing classroom teachers. (http://scottthornbury.wordpress.com/). All activities have a section for users’ comments which according to their authors shape activities update and design. Materials address all skills as well as grammar and vocabulary work and have some sort of agreement to use news published issues from the british newspaper The Guardian, whose stories tend to feature lesson activities. Materials offered on this site are highly multimodal with an emphasis, however, on aural than iconographic information. They come in multiple-level versions and can be searched and retrieved according to age of learners, levels of proficiency, age of learners, ESP areas, skills, and assessment purpose.
A feature of particular interest from an intercultural competence as well as World Englishes perspective is their brief (3-5 minutes) “Live from… authentic interviews” podcasts which gather the views of all kinds of English-speakers (native and non-native) around the world on specific topics (e.g., What stereotypes about Spanish and Spanish people annoy you?, addressed to people in Andalucía). Exposing students to non-native accents of English seems particularly valuable in an EFL, particularly if the teacher is a NS.
Another potentially valuable aspect of this website is its emphasis on work around the written language and the integration of reading&writing with listening practice and other aspects of communicative and interpretive competence development. Three of this website’s features stand out in this respect: the “Serialized Macmillan readers” with downloadable read-alouds, transcripts and accompanying activities; weekly episodes of the soap opera “The road less traveled” (with podcast, transcripts and exercises), also featuring NS and NNS speech; and “mini-plays” aimed at giving students insights into “relevant modern day UK society and associated language”, again reaching beyond national standard dialects and resorting to various modes beyond verbal language.
In terms of CALL the site does not seem to particularly promote the use of computer and internet-mediated language learning but its lesson plans and general materials include fairly well-prepared “Webquests” on specific topics, which give students enough structure and guidance on web research (with links which actually work!) and yet also encourage a certain degree of individual and further exploration of other topics. As to the approach to language learning, I found that the way in which questions and webquest tasks are prepared seemed to allow for a fairly good integration of language skills through a literacy-based approach to FL learning emphasizing reflection, interpreting and analysis of different approaches to the topics researched. Finally, a last feature of the site which seems interesting from a multimodal, i-mode (language) learning and new literacies perspective is the “video projects” model lesson plans posted under the site’s “integrated skills” subsection, under the major “skills” section. Here an ‘ELT author’ guides teachers and students to develop their own multimodal texts (going from movie reviews to be posted on the web to short promotional videos or oral history documentaries local themes or community members) through comprehensive teaching notes and student worksheets as well as tips for recording and downloading videos. Students are requested to work with personal digital cameras or mobile phones. Sharing the products on sites like you YouTube and Google video is one of the final goals of these activities. Emphasis is put on not relying excessively on writing and combining it with sound and (moving) images.
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