- Welcome to New Inside Out!
New Inside Out is the fruit of many years teaching writing and developing material. Everything we wr is informed by the reactions we get from our students. Our aim is simply to produce a set of materials that will help you create optimum conditions in your classroom for learning to take place.
The American linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky once said: The truth of the matter is that about 99% of teaching is making the students feel interested in the material. Then the other 1% has to do with your methods?. While we might want to quibble with the percentages, we would nevertheless agree whole-heartedly with the central message in Professor Chomsky?s assertion: namely, students learn best when they?re interested in the material. It?s as simple as that. A text might contain six beautifully-crafted examples of the past simple, a good spread of high frequency lexical items and exemplify some useful functional language, but if it doesn?t engage the students, if they can?t relate to it, if it feels alien to them, then the most important ingredient for successful learning is missing. In New Inside Out, we?ve drawn on our own classroom experience, and that of our colleagues around the world, to select topics, texts and tasks that engage students both emotionally and intellectually. Students are our richest resource. They come to class with their own knowledge of the world, their own tastes, feelings and opinions. It?s up to us to exploit this rich resource by organising learning around topics that they can relate to ? topics that are part of their life experience.
