The original Reward Resource Packs were written by Sue Kay in the mid-1990s when she was teaching full time. They were popular with teachers all around the world because they were easy to use and worked well in the classroom. Sue and ELT Teacher 2 Writer took on the challenge of updating them for today’s classroom without taking out the fun or losing the original character which made them so popular at the end of the last century.
KEY FEATURES
This list of key features taken from the original cover are still true for Reward Resource Pack Revival:
• lively and stimulating classroom activities
• ready-made lessons with step-by-step instructions for teachers
• quick and easy to use
• provide practice mainly in speaking, but also reading and writing
UPDATES
The updates we’ve made to Reward Resource Packs Revival reflect the developments in ELT over the intervening period:
• increased use of authentic material. In the 90s there was no internet for finding authentic material online.
• attention to word frequency and CEFR level. Corpus-informed dictionaries didn’t become mainstream until the early 2000s.
• importance of DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion). A flick through any coursebook of that era shows that there was room for improvement.
• emergence of ELF (English as a Lingua Franca). In the 90s it was assumed that students wanted to visit an English-speaking country, sound like a native speaker or learn about UK/US culture.
We didn’t need to make changes to:
• activity types based on personalised responses.
• the communicative formats which are as relevant and as generative in the classroom now as they were in the 90s: pairwork, groupwork, class mingles, information-gap, board games, quizzes, etc.
Sue Kay
Sue started out as an ELT teacher in France in 1980. When she moved back to the UK she worked at the Lake School of English in Oxford where she was responsible for materials writing. Some communicative activities that she’d written for teachers to use at school became the Reward Resource Packs and were published by Heinemann. The copyright has now reverted to Sue, so she and ELT Teacher 2 Writer are updating and republishing them.
Sue now writes with writing partner Vaughan Jones and they’ve written coursebooks Inside Out and New Inside Out for Macmillan, two editions of upper secondary course Focus for Pearson, the video lessons for Language Hub for Macmillan, and writing and speaking pages of Repetytorium for Pearson.
Sue is one of the co-founders, along with Karen Spiller and Karen White, of ELT Teacher 2 Writer and co-founder of ELT Publishing Professionals, a dynamic online directory that brings together publishers and freelancers.
