| Dear Book crazy:
Here are some suggestions for you:
First, make yourself known to the ESL/EFL community. Join TESOL, your
local TESOL affiliate and/or other English Teachers' groups or associations
in your area. Register online with publishers such as Longman (Longman.com)
and Heinle (elt.thomson.com). These contacts will result in your receiving
announcements of new teaching materials and invitations to workshops
and conferences.
Workshops and conferences are great places to not only receive (often
free) in-service training, but also to clean up on free books. Typically
you will receive a book in each session you attend, either the book
that was the subject of the workshop or another book written by the
speaker. You will usually find book fairs at these events, permitting
you to peruse virtually all of a publisher's offerings and to request
free books. Generally the publisher will send you 3-5 books of your
choosing, just for filling out a request form.
You can also enlist the assistance of your School Director or Director
of Studies. If you teach at a school that has several English teachers,
your director can request that a book fair be held at your school. If
you don't have many colleagues at your school, perhaps the teachers
from another school or two can be invited. The bigger the audience,
the more enticing the event will be for a publisher. You may even be
offered a free workshop at the same time as your book fair. Once again,
you will have the opportunity to request several free books. Most publishers
will also send "desk copies" (i.e., free copies) of almost any of their
books to a director if a minimum of information about the potential
use is provided. These can be requested online or through your publisher's
rep (now aren't you glad you made those contacts!).
While you are on the publishers' websites you can sometimes download
whole books (I recently downloaded the teachers' manual for Grammar
Express at no cost on Longman.com), and more often whole chapters of
books. You may also find "companion websites" with tons of free supplementary
materials, such as worksheets and grammar tests, to supplement the books
from a particular publisher that are used in your school, or simply
to use as stand-alone materials.
Finally, you might consider-"gasp!"-buying some books-- on the cheap,
that is. If you are located in a place where you can receive books from
an online bookstore at a reasonable shipping price, you might check
out the used books offered at rock-bottom prices. Naturally, we would
prefer that you use Amazon.com, accessed through the BLI bookstore,
but whatever service you use, you just might be able to score that book
you've been coveting!
Thank you so much for your question, and happy hunting.
The Teacher Advisor
Do you have more ideas? Do you have a question for the Teacher Advisor?
Do write and send
them to us for publication in our next newsletter.
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