The ELT Workshop Manifesto

The ELT Workshop is a publishing company for anyone who has ever felt let down by traditional books and resources for English language teachers. We provide teacher-empowering, innovative and high quality teaching resources, written and published by teachers for teachers. 

Flexible

Teacher resources can be great. Textbook writers typically have years of experience and training and can provide you with imaginative tried and tested activities. Using them can free your Sunday afternoons from planning for Monday morning and try out new things you would never have imagined.

Teacher resources can also be a drag. If there is an expectation that you’ll complete every page of the book, you end up as a teacher on a set path with little creative control over your work. If the textbook is designed to teach ‘Grammar McNuggets’, you might end up with a teaching experience that feels more fast food than a la carte.

The ELT Workshop aims to produce teacher empowering resources. What would a teacher empowering resource look like? It would be flexible: Teachers should be able to pick and choose activities for their classes without feeling compelled to use the rest of the book. It should be adaptable; every class is different, so classroom resources shouldn’t only be usable in one way. It should be a time saver: Some types of activities can be very time consuming to produce; we want to give that time back to teachers. Finally, It would inspire teachers to try new things and teach in different ways.

Innovative

Next time you’re in the bookstore, flick through the pages of a few popular ELT coursebooks. You’ll find that a lot of them are trying to do very similar things. We’re interested in making a diverse range of ELT books, because that’s what we’re interested in reading.  As a small publishing company, we’re in a position to publish niche books that a larger company wouldn’t go near. The ELT Workshop won’t make books that rehash something that exists. We’re committed to seeking out books and authors that experiment with ELT and push it forward.

High Quality

There are some coursebooks that look terrible on the outside but I come back to them over and over again because they’re full of useful stuff. There are some textbooks that are all style and no substance. There are much fewer textbooks that get both of these things right. We want to make the textbook that you pick up first at the bookstore because it looks and feels fantastic, but we also want to make the textbook that ends up tattered because it gets used so often.