Marcos Benevides and Lindsay Clandfield are off to Buckingham Palace as joint winners of the 2010 HRH The Duke of Edinburgh English Language Book Award. Personally, I can't think of two more deserving winners. Image: J.Salmoral
I was over the moon when I heard that Marcos Benevides and his co-writer Adam Gray had been awarded the prize for the English Speaking Union's best English language book for their fantastic Fiction in Action: Whodunit?
I've only met Marcos at one event, but it was an important one for both of us. Marcos' first book, Widgets, and my first (and, erm, only) series Boost! were published at the same time out of the same publishing office in Hong Kong. In a visit to Hong Kong following the completion of my series, I wandered past one of the editors' desks in the adult coursebook section and stopped to pick up this interesting looking book with the name Widgets. I had a quick flick through it and said aloud: "Wow! This is actually task-based! The real deal... this is amazing!" I had a closer look through it and then announced: "Sorry, but this leaves Boost! for dead. This is what we need to see in ELT coursebooks..."
A couple of months later, Marcos and his co-author Chris Valvona for Widgets turned up at KOTESOL's 2007 conference. It was basically the official launch of their book and my series, and over a beer myself and Marcos and Chris hit it off straight away. We were young ELT authors who had just 'made it' and we each thought the other had done a much more amazing thing with the books on the table!
I stayed in touch with Marcos in particular after that, and after using Widgets in both a university setting and for Biz English classes at one of Korea's top companies, single-handedly (slight exaggeration there, perhaps) did my best to spruik it in Korea in particular. It was such an amazing book and had such a significant impact in real classrooms, but I felt terrible whenever I opened up the Longman Asia catalogues or marketing snippets and saw multiple page glossy spreads for Boost! and the odd 'corner' mention for Widgets.
As it turned out, Longman never went ahead with its promise to add more levels and books to Widgets (the main thing they said was holding it back from getting more adoptions). In fact, not all that long after that conference I mentioned, the innovative and courageous publisher responsible for taking on Widgets was gone, and not all that much later the entire adults' coursebook team was gone as well.
Marcos took all this in his humble stride, but didn't give up on trying to make great ELT books. When he teamed up with Adam Gray to write Whodunit?, he tackled the important priorities of intensive and extensive reading, and combined it with his passion for task-based language teaching. This time he went with a small local publisher in Abax, and I was excited when he said he was inspired by my "choose your own fee" model for English Raven membership and was going to try to do something similar with his new book.
And he's done it. Marcos and Adam, with the support of a tiny but brave publisher, have produced an excellent book that simultaneously tackles creativity, reading and task-based learning issues, but they also offer it as the first (that I know of) ELT book with a user-selected fee purchase along with a creative commons license.
What an achievement!
And that's well and truly before this book was selected as the joint winner of the ESU HRH book award, let's not forget.
All I can say is that the award is more than deserved, and it goes to a publisher and writers who will benefit from it much more than the richer, much better outfitted publishers who just wouldn't have had the balls or vision to make a book like this, much less let teachers and students download it under a creative commons license according to a fee they select for themselves.
Sure, the big publishers will say that there's never going to much (or enough) money in something like Whodunit? and the manner in which it is being released. But aside from being a depressingly familiar tune from what is starting to sound like a broken old record player, I'd like to point out to those oligarch-like publishers that there is another kind of currency in this field (which you call an industry), and Abax and its writers now have it in spades.
And then there's the joint winner of the award: Global, and its lead writer Lindsay Clandfield.
Now I've already written about Global a few times on this blog (for example in a review here and just recently in a post where I gave it a starring role in how coursebooks can actually help you teach unplugged). So I won't go into too much more of a spiel about Global itself: it is a very worthy winner of an award of this magnitude, and I think -- considering the somewhat self-imposed limitations publishers attempt to operate within -- it is an admirable example of a very creative and principled series with outstanding expansions into social media and e-products in particular.
But what makes me truly happy about this joint-award is that it goes to Lindsay.
I've never met Lindsay personally, but over the past year and a bit I've certainly got to know him, his work, and his philosophy quite well. He's an absolute gentleman, and what I don't think a lot of people realise is that -- beneath the personality that appears on Twitter and regularly across the ELT blogosphere with helpful but humble comments -- there is a person who is quite possibly the hardest-working and most productive professional in ELT at this time.
And his ears are always open a lot wider than his mouth is.
And yes, I envy him that!
But I truly believe that Lindsay represents a changing of the ELT guard. He's an ELT superstar in the making, still regularly teaching in a classroom or online, and he'll be an enormously influential figure in the future. Unlike some other ELT figures of interest, I can't see this really going to his head. I can't imagine him not wanting to talk to and listen to teachers, at their own level. We, as a profession, will be better for his influence.
He deserves the royal award and recognition as much as Marcos does, even if the reasons (in my own very unqualified opinion) are somewhat different.
Personally, the news of this joint-award was music to my ears.
A great day for ELT, and for the future of ELT.
Well done, guys!
=D
