Creative Teacher's Compendium, The

Creativity is an exciting concept in learning and teaching today, not least in the field of ELT, with numerous books, publications, conferences and websites dedicated to exploring ideas around the theme. The Creative Teacher's Compendium offers teachers an extensive repertoire of creative ideas and techniques to work with in the classroom, each one clearly linked to a language point with easy-to-follow teaching notes, and also to a section which provides further reflection and teacher development. The A-Z format provides a memorable and easily-referenced manual for teachers, with a large variety of low-preparation, practical teaching ideas.

Through its clear links to specific language points and also to teacher reflection, The Creative Teacher's Compendium is significantly different in both its approach and content from other resource books on creative language teaching. Antonia and Alan do a lot of teacher training in various countries around the world, and regularly speak at conferences. The teachers we meet are forever asking us where they can get hold of all these lovely ideas, so they decided to put them in a book.

The book provides an alphabetical list of chapters with topics related to creative language teaching, covering themes such as Art, Beginnings, Conversations, Dictation, Emotions, Film etc. Each chapter begins with a relevant quote related to the topic, followed by a short discussion of why this area is important for creative language teaching. This introduction provides a clear rationale and directs teachers to relevant research in the area.

Then follow a series of creative activities which can be used as they are or easily adapted to suit teachers' and learners' needs. The creative activities are always clearly linked to suggested language points, and sample materials show how these can be explicitly exploited. The chapters end with ideas for reflective teacher development and tasks which can be used for workshops.