Reviewer's Guide

Why write reviews?

• It looks great on your CV.
• It's a good way of motivating yourself to try out new material and ideas.
• You receive free, brand new materials, sometimes before they are available on the market (and therefore become very popular with your school!)
• If you are an aspiring author, it's a great way of finding out what makes good EFL materials.

What we review:

Each month we review a variety of EFL materials, including:

• textbooks
• photocopiable resource books
• teachers' resource books
• Applied Linguistics books
• self access materials
• software
• games
• websites

At the moment, we are especially looking for people to review textbooks, Business English materials and materials for young learners.

How to review for TEFL.NET

Just write in with details of your experience and interests, and we will contact you as soon as possible with a proposal of something you might like to review. If you would like to review something for us, please complete the form below with brief details of:

• your present teaching situation: ages, class size, monolingual/multilingual classes, General/Business English etc.
• which of the categories of materials listed above you would be interested in reviewing (e.g. textbooks)
• one favourite book of yours from this category
• a particular interest in the field of teaching, e.g. task-based learning, the phonemic script, process writing
• contact email and postal address

What to include in a review

Reviews should be about 500 words in length, and should concentrate on the following:

• What is new/different about the materials?
• What purpose is it written for, and does it achieve its aims?
• What did you especially like about the materials?
• What were you not so keen on?
• In summary, for whom and in what teaching situation might the materials be most suitable?

Please start your review with:

• full name of the materials, author(s) and publisher
• what the material consists of (e.g. student's book, workbook cassette)
• your name
• a one line summary of your review

In addition, you may add a short summary of your own name, position, experience, interests etc.

Please note that as we are only able to review a limited amount of materials, we are most interested in publishing positive, constructive reviews. If you are unable to find anything positive to say about the materials, we will be happy to find you something else to review.

What next?

As soon as we receive details of some material we think you might be interested in, we will contact you to make sure of your interest. The materials should normally arrive within a week or two of your positive reply. Generally, reviewers find that 6 weeks is long enough to read and try out the materials, and submit a draft review. The reviews editor will give you a link to a page where you can submit the review directly. If you would like any advice on what to cover in the review, or would like help structuring an early draft, we are always ready to help. It is not important to submit a highly polished piece of written work, but simply show other readers the usefulness of the materials in the light of your own teaching experience.