The Language Teacher
November 2000
Education, Quality, and Service from Oxford University Press
Alison Kane
Oxford University Press
It is a great pleasure for Oxford University Press to be featured in this month's "Off the Presses" column, and to have this opportunity to let The Language Teacher readers know about some exciting new developments at OUP. There is quite a lot of good news coming out of OUP Japan these days, but we'd like to highlight just a few new services for teachers that we hope will make evaluating and using our materials even easier.
First, we are proud to announce the launch of our new website at <www.oupjapan.co.jp>. Over the past year, we have been developing the site and carefully looking at how to meet the specific needs of teachers here in Japan. It has been an exciting process, and we hope you'll find it a valuable tool for evaluating our materials, plus keeping up to date with news and events that are of interest to EFL professionals.
We'd like to highlight some of the special features of the website and give you a taste of what you can expect when you point your browser to <www.oupjapan.co.jp>.
The site features a comprehensive, fully searchable, online catalogue. The catalogue is searchable by three methods: using key words, a "browse by" function, or by "Asking Oli." Oli is our newest OUP representative and he's available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to assess your needs, and recommend the best Oxford materials for your teaching situation. Oli is short for OLIVER, On-Line Interactive Virtual ELT Representative. Oli asks visitors a series of questions about their teaching situation, including questions about the age and level of their students and the course type they are teaching. He helps visitors define their search so that they can quickly find the products they are looking for.
In addition to the online catalogue, the site also includes product tours of new titles and an online sample request form. The tours include sample pages and sample audio from full units of our latest products to give teachers a clear picture of the level and content of each title. Once teachers have found what they are looking for, they will have the option to place items in a "sample cart." Sample texts will then be sent out from our office, free of charge.
Finally the site includes two special "Members Only" sections with valuable downloads for teachers -- which brings us to our second piece of exciting news! In addition to our popular service organization for teachers of children, the Oxford Kids' Club, OUP Japan is pleased to announce the launch of a new service program for college and university teachers -- Oxford Campus Support Service. This free membership organization offers services tailored to meet the needs of the busy EFL college professional. In exchange for registering and keeping contact and teaching information up to date, members will be entitled to numerous special benefits and services.
Perhaps the most valuable benefit is access to the special "Members Only" section of the website. Here members will find a wealth of downloadable materials to supplement their lessons, teaching tips, extracts from new linguistics and resource titles, and featured articles written by OUP authors. The content in this "Members Only" section will be updated at regular intervals, and we hope that teachers will come back again and again to take advantage of the free support materials that Oxford has to offer.
Members of the Oxford Campus Support Service are also entitled to receive a free Teacher Support pack for Oxford courses that they are using at their college or university. The pack includes a free set of full components for the course being used including a student book, teacher's book, and audio component. We hope this benefit will save teachers time when choosing new books for their classes. For some teachers, this service may be particularly helpful when their institution will not provide these extra components for the teacher free of charge.
Finally members can register to have a Book Look on their campus or through a local teacher's organization. A Book Look is a mini book fair that comes to you. For eight teachers or more, Oxford will provide a display of teaching materials, lunch for all of the participants, free sample copies, and a lucky draw for resource materials. We can also arrange workshops and product presentations upon request. This service should be particularly helpful to teachers who are on a committee and are in need of a way to bring teachers together to look at materials for the coming year.
These are just a few of the great benefits that the Oxford Campus Support Service has to offer. For those of you who would like to find out more please visit our new website or email us at <campussupport@oupjapan.co.jp>.
As a special incentive to sign up, all members who join by February 28, 2001 will receive a free set of 12 Bookworms Readers, along with an extensive reading teacher's guide (in English or Japanese) to help start up an extensive reading program.
We at Oxford University Press Japan are committed to education,
quality, and service and it is our wish to provide teachers with
quality ELT materials and educational support services that are
second to none. Again, we'd like to thank The Language Teacher
for giving us this opportunity to share some of our "good
news" with you.
All materials on this site are copyright © by JALT and their respective authors.
For more information on JALT, visit the JALT National Website