User:Svetlana Belokopitova/sandbox

Jim Scrivener - is an EFL author. His book Learning Teaching, published by Heinemann, won the ARELS Frank Bell prize in 1995 as the best ELT book by a new author and went on to be a best seller. Jim was a trainer on the first ever RSA Cambridge CTEFLA course held in Malta in 1994. At the end of this course the trainees discussed between themselves and their trainers the question: where to we go from here? They decided to meet six months later, and did so. Over a delicious meal and facilitated by some fine wine, these teachers decided to try and form an association of teachers to share ideas and experiences. MATEFL was born. Three years later when MATEFL decided to invite a speaker from abroad to hold the first ever International Seminar it seemed only fitting that this first “foreign” speaker should be Jim Scrivener whose first CTEFLA trainees had conceived the idea of MATEFL. In March of this year (2001)Jim returned to hold this year's International seminar with an excellent workshop entitled “Poetry as a Foreign Language”. After the seminar I managed to interview him.[]

Biography
Jim lives in Hastings, a historic coastal town in South East England, famous for a battle that didn’t actually take place there! He is married to Noémi and has two grown-up sons – Alex and Ben, a young daughter, Maisie and an even smaller son, Orlando.[]

His works
He has written lots of ELT books, articles and activities over the years, including Learning Teaching (ARELS Frank Bell Prize 1995), Teaching English Grammar (HRH Duke of Edinburgh English Speaking Union 2010 “Best Entry for Teachers”), Classroom Management Techniques (HRH Duke of Edinburgh English Speaking Union 2012 “Overall Winner”) and Visual Grammar (Richmond 2013).[]

The path of becoming a teacher
Jim was head of the team that designed the Euro exams, now widely taken in Central Europe and has been actively involved with Cambridge ESOL exams for many years. He designed and implemented the Bell Online Delta course and every summer he is Academic Director of the Bell Teacher Campus at Homerton College Cambridge, where he welcomes teachers from all over the world on short, exciting, practically-focused Teacher Training courses. An entirely untrained teacher he got a position as a volunteer with VSO (Voluntary Service Overseas) in a very rural school in Kenya, taught excruciatingly poorly for two years and grew my own corn, which was promptly all stolen by colobus monkeys as soon as it got ripe. Not very many years later, after coming back to the UK and getting an initial training certificate, he got a post in the USSR, as one of only about 10 Brits allowed to live and teach in that country under the Anglo-Soviet cultural agreement. So, he achieved his two life ambitions fairly early on and have been floundering for a new purpose ever since![]

Bell Teacher Campus
He designed and implemented the Bell Online Delta course and every summer he is Academic Director of the Bell Teacher Campus at Homerton College Cambridge, where he welcomes teachers from all over the world on short, exciting, practically-focused Teacher Training courses.