(February 2018) Message from the Coordinator 

Dear MW SIG Members,

The last issue of Between the Keys has been emailed to you and is available on the website. If you are interested in making a submission for an upcoming issue, please see the Submissions Guidelines and Information on the SIG’s website: http://materialswriters.org/joomla/index.php/publications 

Presentation opportunity

Plans for the MW SIG Forum for JALT2018 are already underway. This year’s conference theme is “Diversity and Inclusion”. In alignment with this theme, the forum will be titled Diversity and Inclusion in Teaching Materials. The description is here:

Diversity is becoming an increasingly important issue in today’s society. It is therefore in our students’ best interests for us to include a wider range of voices in our teaching materials. In this interactive forum hosted by the Materials Writers SIG, a panel of writers will share how they incorporate diverse voices and related topics into the teaching materials that they create. Both theoretical approaches and practical considerations will be discussed.

 If you are interested in joining the forum, please contact Lindsay Wells (Our Program Chair) at < wells @ meijiro . ac . jp > by February 9th.

Professional Development (PD) opportunity

iTDi Scholarships

In collaboration with the International Teacher Development Institute (iTDi), the MW SIG is offering 10 scholarships ($69 value) to current members of the SIG for an upcoming course titled “Creating an ELF-Aware Classroom with Katy Simpson” starting February 4th. For more details, see http://itdi.pro/itdihome/advanced-skills/creating-elf-aware-classroom-katy-simpson/

Upon completion of the course, we will ask each of the scholarship recipients to write a short report about their experience. The scholarships are first come, first served, so don’t hesitate! Send me a message < murraysensei @ g mail . com >

Call for guest blog post (From IATEFL MW SIG)

The IATEFL Materials Writing Special Interest Group would like to invite you to contribute a post to our regular blog spot at https://mawsig.iatefl.org/. We are commissioning a series of blog posts about the current state of play in ELT materials writing in various locations around the world. Quite a few writers based in the UK have talked recently on our blog page about trends that seem unfavourable to writers, but we are aware that the writer’s lot varies widely in other regions.

We’d LOVE to hear YOUR take on what’s going down in the world of ELT materials publishing in Japan. Would you be interested in writing something for us? If so, would you be able to send us something by the end of January?In terms of a brief, we used to send out a page of guidelines but I’m not sure it was ever that helpful. Instead, why not read the first in the series written by Tania Pattison about her experiences as a writer in Canada to get an idea of what other people are saying. You can see a preview here https://mawsig.iatefl.org/?p=4213&preview=1&_ppp=e00a075ccc. We are looking for 300–1,000 words and are really interested in reading about your own experiences as a writer in Japan. There’s no need to talk about rates of pay or terms (royalty vs fee), it’s more of a general flavour we are after. We also ask bloggers to send a short bio, and a hi-res head and shoulders photo. We would like to include your post in our annual e-book compendium and hi res works best for this.

Until next time,
Adam Murray
SIG Coordinator