Sponge Chats – Materials Writing with Riccardo Chiappini and Ethan Mansur

This blog post is part of the Sponge Chats video series.

In this Sponge Chat, I was lucky enough to sit down with Riccardo Chiappini and Ethan Mansur, two people who have taken the ELT world by storm with their drive to bring more attention to mediation in ELT, and show how useful it can be in the classroom. Together they wrote the recently published Activities for Mediation, and they are both still working on various materials writing projects.

It was great to see a new side to the materials writing world – collaborative writing. Both Riccardo and Ethan had a lot to say about the challenges as well as the advantages of writing as part of a team, which I am sure that you will find most interesting. We also looked at some of the challenges in general with materials writing as well as teacher training.

And, as usual, there were some book recommendations! Take a look at what they put forward:

• ELT Teacher2Writer series (these are mentioned in every materials writer Sponge Chat, so definitely worth checking out!)
• ETpedia Materials Writing – Clandfield and Hughes
• On Writing well – Zinsser

Rachel Tsateri has also spoken with Ethan and Riccardo – you read what they said and her thoughts here!

I do hope you enjoy this Sponge Chat. If you do, please let me know in the comments or by leaving a like 🙂 Remember that you can catch all the Sponge Chats on both YouTube and Spotify.