The Language Teacher

Off the Presses offers readers a glimpse into what is happening in the world of our publishing colleagues. This month we feature an article by John Lowe of Thomson Learning. For further inquiries about this column, please contact <tlt_op@jalt.org>.

I am delighted that Thomson Learning is the featured publisher in this month's Off the Presses column, and would like to thank The Language Teacher for providing us with this opportunity to tell you something about our company. In this short feature I would also like to mention some of our new materials, their underpinning pedagogy, and explain how we hope to build partnerships with educators across Japan.

Thomson Learning, part of the Thomson Corporation, is one of the world's leading providers of lifelong learning information, with educational content delivered both through published texts and also online through the Internet. Boston-based Heinle & Heinle (which incorporates Newbury House) serves as our principal ELT materials development center, and maintains a strong editorial presence in Asia.

Thomson Learning is currently the second biggest educational college publisher in the United States, and has considerable authorial and editorial expertise. In the last year Thomson Learning has decided to focus this expertise more on ELT publishing and launched a major initiative, which will provide teachers and learners with exciting new materials, and will lead to new developments in our field.

The first of these new materials is the three level series Expressions written by David Nunan, the world-renowned theorist and course book writer, and one of Thomson's outstanding lineup of eminent figures in the language teaching field. The central unifying concept behind the series is that of meaningful English communication and the series itself is built around meaningful communication tasks. Expressions is specifically designed to provide learners with Professor Nunan's vision of the three essential elements to success in learning a foreign language. The first of these is access to language data, that is samples of spoken and written language. The second is information about the language and the culture, as well as information about learning processes. The third is providing opportunities for learners to practice the target language.

Other new titles include the Tapestry series (Rebecca Oxford), a 12-book integrated curriculum, ranging from low intermediate to advanced and covering all four skills. An exciting feature of this series is the accompanying CNN videos, which contain authentic broadcast extracts related to topics in the units. Diane Larsen-Freeman is the series editor for the new platinum edition of the best selling four-level grammar series, Grammar Dimensions, which takes a more communicative approach to grammar than usually found in "traditional" grammar texts. Bruce Rogers has written a new Complete Guide to the TOEFL CBT edition with CD-ROM, which provides electronic practice through tutorials, TOEFL exercise types and a test bank of TOEFL questions. These are just a few of the titles we are able to offer in a range of skills across the ELT spectrum.

In Japan we now have six ELT staff, with more than 30 years of Japan teaching experience, and we are always delighted to arrange visits, workshops, or book displays at your institutions. We also invite and sponsor key authors to give presentations in Japan, and are sometimes able to arrange special visits for such authors to give workshops at your school or college.

Publishing quality ELT materials such as the titles above involves a continual dialogue between educators and publishers, and your comments and ideas help us prepare materials that are suitable for your classrooms. For this reason, and because of the many publishing projects we are working on, we are setting up reviewer groups and are currently seeking members. Again, please contact us for more details.

As a result of our ELT expansion, we are also actively seeking potential authors for workbooks, teacher's guides and textbooks. Please contact us or visit our websites for more information:

Thomson Learning, Brooks Bldg. 3F, 1-4-1
Kudankita, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 102-0073
Tel: (03) 3511-4390; fax: (03) 3511-4391

<Japan@thomsonlearning.com.sg>

<www.heinle.com>

<www.thomsonlearningasia.com>