Dear Teachers of English,

Welcome back after the summer holiday, and welcome back to your school and your pupils. We all know that when we say “the new year” we are talking about the new school year, and that’s also our frame of reference for “next year” or “last year”.

Hopefully this “new year” will begin successfully, with energy and enthusiasm, with ideas for our classrooms, and with our minds full of potential activities and projects.

As we move into and through this new century, we as teachers have more responsibilities than ever. In addition to teaching language skills and strategies, discourse and rhetorical style, we need to be aware that our pupils and students of today will be living in the world of tomorrow. What does this mean for us? It means that we need to deal with real world issues such as human and civil rights, the environment in which we live, and a constructive approach to diversity, whether that means ethnic or religious differences, mental or physical differences. These global issues, and they are global, are part of our world. As teachers, one of the best things we can do for our students is to help them be able to talk and think intelligently about these and other social concerns.

As language teachers, we are in a wonderful position to work in our classrooms, using this content combined with language instruction, to give our children strong and appropriate tools with which to work. I wish you all the very best this year, as you embark on your “new year”.

I’d like to end this message by sharing with you a new word for the new year. That word is GLOCAL. It’s a combination of GLOBAL and LOCAL. This is an important word because it clearly tells us that although we need to think and learn about GLOBAL issues, we need to work on them at the LOCAL level. And for us the local level is our classroom. I hope you will discuss this idea in your English classes with your pupils.

Best wishes,
Johanna Kowitz,
English Language Officer, Public Affairs Section,
American Embassy, Moscow,
on behalf of the participants of the “Umbrella” Conference