HLT practitioners

Who are HLT practitioners?

Each of the 29 profiles includes a short biographical summary, links to publications, video recordings (and in some cases, podcasts), interviews, a summary of the subject’s place in HLT, and in most cases, a list of the books they would recommend that have had the most significant effect on their professional practice.

The profiles featured here include a few seminal figures, whose ideas and professional practice have had an abiding influence in ELT, together with a  number of people associated with Pilgrims in Canterbury, who wrote for HLT Magazine and were responsible for various ‘recipe’ books, initially published in-house, and many of which gained wider currency as the Pilgrims Longman Resource Books. (‘Recipe’ is not intended to be disparaging – one of the most popular books in the series was actually called Recipes for Tired Teachers!)

In addition to these foundational theorists and early adopters of humanistic principles in ELT, the profiles also include a representative selection of more recent and contemporary practitioners, whose professional practice in fields as diverse as edtech, assessment, critical pedagogy and ELT management might  not immediately be associated with HLT. However, the rationale behind this diversity was to demonstrate the extent to which ELT has been enriched and continues to be nourished by educational thinking that has inspired practitioners since the mid-1970s to question orthodoxies and received ideas about how English (and by implication, other languages, too) should be taught. Inevitably, we will have omitted people that some will think should have been included. And in publishing such an arbitrary number of profiles, we wanted to emphasise that  this section of the website is intended to be open-ended, and we look forward to seeing it expand in the future.