Hello Everybody,

 I am writing to you at the end of the  first day of the Azeta Conference here in Azerbaijan. Two hundred Azerbaijani teachers have been sharing their energy with each other all day! I write to you with their energy!

In recent postings I have suggested that a single word will impact different minds differently and that this is also the case with single sentences. My article on comprehension questions suggests that no two people in the World listen to a story in the same way. One of the major myths of EFL is that 20 students can be expected to engage in the same process round a text simply because they are sitting in the same room at the same time.

Tonight I want to suggest to you that a text type and an outline situation will generate marvellously different texts in students' heads. Here is a wee exercise:

 Tell your students to take an empty page. Tell them to look carefully at the blank page which is a letter found in the attic and written by a grandparent. Explain that the writing is very very faint with age but that if they really look hard they will be able to make out the odd word or phrase here and there on the page. Tell them to write these words and phrases in.

The students now swap pages. Using their clasmate's words here and there on the page they  reconstruct the text as they imagine it to be.  After the writing phase the partners read and discuss each other's texts.

Round off with the students up and milling, reading their grand parent letters to each other.

Warmly yours,     Mario