Philip Kerr
As an adolescent, my thoughts were concentrated on leaving the dreary suburbs of London where I grew up. I left school when I was 16 and moved from job to job, working as an accounts clerk, a factory packer, a doughnut seller and a goatherd, among other career experiments. Returning to my studies, I qualified as a teacher with a post-graduate Certificate of Education from the University of Oxford.
My first experience of ELT was in a secondary school in Casablanca. There were 45 students in a class and technology was limited to a smashed-up blackboard. For a recently qualified teacher, it was a challenging experience, to say the least, but with excellent in-service support provided by CfBT, I knew that I had found what I’d been looking for.
Returning to Europe, I took a Diploma in Teaching English as a Foreign Language. I spent a few years in Belgium teaching business English and a short spell at Eurocentres in London, before becoming director of studies at a language school in Bilbao in the Basque Country.
Leaving Bilbao with many happy memories, I next worked as a teacher and teacher trainer at International House in London. My colleagues in the school included many ELT authors (Peter Moor, Sarah Cunningham, Jon Soars, Richard Acklam, Jon Naunton, Chris Redston, Sue Mohamed , Ruth Gairns – to name but a few) and it was natural that my thoughts began to turn towards producing my own materials.
For a number of years, I tried to combine my competing interests. I became more and more involved in teacher training and worked as an assessor and consultant for Cambridge ESOL in the development of the CELTA award. I began to publish articles in journals and books, worked as a visiting lecturer at a number of London universities and presented regularly at international conferences. I piloted books and wrote editorial reports for all the major publishers. I acted as a judge for two prestigious ELT book competitions (the ESU Duke of Edinburgh’s English Language Award and the Ben Warren International House Trust Prize). I was an examiner for the Cambridge examinations and I served on the Education Committee of ARELS . In 1995, I became director of studies at International House, and my time was even more cut out. Something had to give!
In 1999, I decided to concentrate on teaching and writing. I left London and returned to Brussels with my family. I wrote the Practice Book for Rising Star and four workbooks for Inside Out as well as co-writing Inside Out Pre-intermediate with Sue Kay and Vaughan Jones. I also became involved in the Teacher Trainers and Teacher Educators Special Interest Group of IATEFL building up their website with Gavin Dudeney and contributing articles. It was through my work with IATEFL that I first met Lindsay Clandfield, a major contributor to onestopenglish, and the author of Straightforward Elementary.
Lindsay, Ceri Jones (the co-author of Straightforward Intermediate and Upper Intermediate ) and I all hope that you will enjoy our new series. Writing these books has made our lives even more hectic than they were before, but we trust that they will make yours easier.