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| Mike Harris, David Mower and Anna Sikorzynska, bestselling authors of Opportunities and of the new Pearson course Challenges, took some time out of their very busy writing and travelling schedule to answer a few questions about Challenges and themselves. |
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| About the books … |
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| Challenges is your latest course, after the great success of Opportunities. How has Challenges benefited from the writing of Opportunities? |
| Firstly, after writing Opportunities we had a team of authors and editors who were used to working together and who understood each other. That’s very important for any project. Our publishing manager, Elana Katz, has been particularly important for us on both projects. Secondly, when we started Challenges we knew where students were going later on in their school career. Having written a course for upper secondary, it was much easier to plan objectives for mid or junior secondary – to provide learners with the kind of communication and learning strategies, as well as language, that will help them later on in their learning. |
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| What makes Challenges different from Opportunities? |
| Challenges is for a different age group – younger teenagers who are particularly difficult to motivate. The topics in Challenges reflect this and we deal with a lot more personal issues about growing up, establishing identity and relating to one’s peer group. For example, in
Challenges there are stories in each level where a group of teenagers has to work together and overcome a different challenge. The topics in Opportunities on the other hand are more related to developing awareness and knowledge about the outside world. Challenges also offers more step-by-step support to learners. You can see this in the Word Builders, Sentence Builders and Text Builders which build up language knowledge bit by bit. You can also see it in the learner development activities in Challenges such as the Study Help sections, the Language Checks and the Learner Diary (in the CD Rom). We think learner development is crucial for this age group. |
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| It is often difficult to motivate teenagers to learn. How does Challenges deal with the issue of motivation? |
| As we said before, the topics in Challenges are related to the things that affect teenagers.
Some of these can be from popular culture (e.g. films, computer games, TV, fashion), while
others are more serious. For example, we look at bullying, anti-social behaviour, health
problems and generational misunderstanding. We also have a lot of educational topics. It is a
myth that students, just because they are teenagers, lose all interest in anything serious.
There will always be some students in a class interested in science and technology, others
into art and music, others into history and geography. Another thing that is very important for
this age group is to have lots of room for students to talk about themselves and to express
their opinions. They need to do this individually and as a group – peer group identity is
crucial. Finally, we need to challenge students, to stretch them but at the same time to give
them support and build their confidence. Both receptive and productive tasks are deliberately
challenging but carefully staged and supported. |
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| Courses are usually seen as purely for the students but you seem to have made a
special effort to think about teachers with the separate Teacher’s Handbook and Total
Teacher’s Pack. Why do you think it is important to do this? |
| Because teaching teenagers is a challenge, teachers need all the support they can get. The
Teacher’s Handbook is a practical, user-friendly book which you can take into the
classroom. As well as answers, it has background information, routes through the material
and extra suggestions. The Total Teacher’s Pack is a sourcebook for extra activities and
ideas as well as fantastic teacher development materials by Melanie Williams and Gillian
Symonds (on citizenship education). There will also be a lot of extra support on this website,
with extra reading, internet activities and more writing and speaking activities. We have also
thought about teachers in the Students’ Book. One of the key criteria for us while writing
Challenges has always been to have clear, well-signposted, user-friendly lessons with
transparent objectives. That may sound easy but it’s hard to achieve in practice! We think that
this makes a lot of difference to the usability of the course. |
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| What part of Challenges makes you proudest as authors? |
| We think that Challenges is a coursebook with a clear identity and with a ‘heart’ as well as a
‘mind’. Many coursebooks nowadays often look the same and do all the same things. We
have tried to go that little bit further, not only by having innovative features such as the Word,
Text and Sentence Builders, but by adding an important element of personal development. In
the input texts, the stories and the tasks, there is a focus on positive values, on overcoming
difficulties and on personal and group achievement. |
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| During the writing of Challenges you investigated a lot of topics. Which topic did you most enjoy? |
(Anna) Actually, most of them. It's incredible how much you learn about all sorts of things
while writing a coursebook. I really enjoyed studying animal communication and learning of
the different means animals used to pass messages. I also found prehistoric people
fascinating – we have a text about homo floresiensis but I've also read about many other
findings. You almost wish you were a palaeontologist.
(David) I enjoyed working on the ‘Performers’ module in Challenges 2. Liam Mower is my
nephew’s son, so I was able to do a real interview with him. I also enjoyed finding out about
the giant mammals in the ‘Discoveries’ module of Challenges 3. I was never taught about
them when I was at school, and when I first saw the BBC’s Walking With Beasts series I was
amazed.
(Mike) I really liked doing the Across Culture spots like the ones on dance and traditional
costumes in Challenges 2, the one on nomads in Challenges 3 and the one on Easter Island
in Challenges 4. |
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| What motivates me most about teaching English is … |
| (Anna) The fact that English changes all the time, new words appear, and even the grammar
is not stable. This means you have to learn yourself all the time, which is very motivating.
Also, most modern culture is in English so students just want to learn English to get access to
all new songs, films, books, etc. They are internally motivated and the teacher just has to be
there. |
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| A word / expression I use a lot is … |
| (Anna) I'm not a native speaker so it's hard to say, but I can say which words in English I like.
I like 'delicious' because its sound ideally reflects its meaning, I like 'nice' because it's so
flexible, you can use it to describe anything. |
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| What are you terrible at? |
(Mike) I’m terrible at DIY. It takes me hours to assemble a bookshelf from IKEA. When I
finish, I usually find out that it is crooked. My hands also end up full of cuts and blisters so the
scene looks like something out of Pulp Fiction.
(Anna) Drawing.
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| What are you good at? |
(Mike) I‘m quite good at chairing meetings. I’m involved in a couple of local environmental
groups and I always tend to end up as the ‘facilitator’. Conversation management and turntaking
is rather different in Spanish from English and everybody tends to talk at the same time
very loudly. So it’s a real challenge, but fun.
(Anna) - logical thinking … It compensates for my poor memory
(Anna) - cooking … I've been thinking of opening my own restaurant
(Anna) - swimming … I used to swim in a students' club |
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| What food do you like best? |
(Mike) I love fish (Spanish fish is unbeatable), soups (especially those from Poland like zurek)
and game. I was brought up in the country in South Shropshire on the Welsh Marches and I
love jugged hare, roast pheasant and well-marinated venison.
(Anna) I like most food, especially trying new dishes. |
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| What book has made a big impression on you? |
(David) Catch 22 by Joseph Heller.
(Mike) A book which made a big impression on me recently is called Collapse: How
societies choose to fail or succeed by Jared Diamond. It’s a book about historical ecology
and looks at examples of how societies destroyed themselves by being too greedy. Very
relevant nowadays.
(Anna) To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. |
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| What is one of your favourite songs? |
(David) Almost anything by Bob Dylan.
(Mike) One of my favourite songs is Downtown Train by Tom Waits. |
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| What is your most prized possession? |
(David) My Martin acoustic guitar.
(Mike) My most prized possession is my collection of books. At the moment, the builders are
in the house so my books are stuck in cardboard boxes under layers of dust and I miss them. |
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| What did you want to be when you were younger? |
(David) A doctor, would you believe?
(Mike) When I was younger I wanted to be a writer – but not the kind I am now. I wanted to write great novels while starving in a garret.
(Anna) A Psychologist. I even studied psychology for five years and obtained an MA |
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| Who are your favourite authors? |
| (Mike) My favourite contemporary novelists are Paul Auster, Margaret Atwood, Peter Carey,
Javier Marías and Ian McEwan. I am also getting to the age when I can start re-reading
classics like Dickens, Fielding and Sterne. Tristram Shandy and The Pickwick Papers are alltime
favourites. I like reading travel and history books too especially about the middle ages.
At the moment I’m reading Microcosm by Norman Davies and Roger Moorhouse. It is about
the history of Wroclaw/Breslau in Poland and is very well-written and documented. |
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| If I have a spare hour, I like to … |
(David) Play the piano or guitar.
(Anna) Read or go swimming. |
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| A film I really enjoyed was … |
(David) Gandhi, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Don’t Look Now, Mississippi Burning …
it’s impossible to choose just one.
(Anna) The Sting, with Robert Redford and Paul Newman. |
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