Welcome to our 2003 summer school edition. A community of thirty tutors and participants gathered in Kraków between Jun 22^nd and Jul 4^th with the aim of producing a Food edition of the webpages. We came from 11 different countries - Poland, Britain, Hungary, Serbia, Bosnia, Macedonia, Romania, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Croatia and finally Brazil - to give our pages a truly international ‘flavour’. It was the fourth in a series of Polish summer schools (see our Heritage and The Countryside editions) but the first to have gained Hornby sponsorship.

The items you will find in this issue are the result of their activities. You will find a great deal on the theme of Food, quite a lot about Kraków and plenty more on the methods we used to produce the materials. For the first time on our pages you will find some video clips of interviews to complement the full audio recordings available for listening activities.

From these links you can find out more about the summer school itself

·         Kraków Summer School: description and approach

·         Participant diary

·         Participant list and comments

·         Summer school gallery

·         Summer school programme

·         Summer school report

·         Evaluation summary

The local dimension

Kraków was a great location for researching this theme. Its multicultural past and present mean an extraordinary range of food and cooking were at hand from being a centre for Jewish cuisine (see Kosher food) to housing the Polish headquarters of the Tesco supermarket chain. You will find the city appearing again and again on these pages e.g. Food and the Senses and Salt – Wieliczka and elsewhere, as it was a leading participant and indeed character on our school.

The group outside Tesco		The centre of Kazimierz

The international dimension

This can be found throughout the edition reflecting the wide variety of countries represented for instance Food and Festivals and Our Daily Bread. While from last year’s summer school Food Identity Heritage gives a perspective on how significant food is to how we see ourselves.

Participants from Bulgaria, Poland, Macedonia, Romania, Bosnia and Croatia

The internet dimension

This is an extra dimension which has become increasingly valuable in investigating culture adding a wealth of ideas, materials and information to our work. Sessions were held to introduce participants to the potential the web offers and you will find evidence in almost every item. Particular mention can be made of (Un)Healthy Food and How to … search for information on the web. 

Searching the net for material

Living voices

We have UK Food Interviews with several natives on their impressions of British food today (audio with video clips) while we also have further eye witness accounts (audio) from unusual angles, for instance Working as an au pair in an orthodox Jewish family. Trips to the UK can provide a wealth of material with a strong sense of reality e.g. English Food - Impressions of a Polish Student and Host family impressions of English Food.

Food items on our pages

To ‘whet your appetite’ and to give you some ‘food for thought’ here is a review of our items. Food as a theme in FLT shows how a topic once disregarded in British Studies, and left behind with beginners in FL learning, has now become a central theme for both - and an excellent way of linking language with culture.

British food

You can find out more about food in the UK in Contemporary Food in Britain and a view of attitudes in Poland to it in Food in Britain/ British Food - attitude survey results. The keeping of food diaries while in the UK is a very productive source of information about what people in the UK really eat - see Food Diaries as an Intercultural Ethnographic Method. We are reprinting some items from the FCO publications The United Kingdom: 100 questions answered and The United Kingdom: a modern tradition: Festival Food, Tea, The Pub and Food in Britain. Finally we have a website review of a new British Council site - UKinfocus - an online magazine dedicated to updating views on Britain whose first issue was devoted, tellingly, to the theme of food.

Food and language

Food is a very good theme to illustrate cross-cultural difficulties in communication. The available vocabulary in English is highly culturally specific and does not adapt easily to the food of other cultures. Fortunately English customarily absorbs lexical items from other languages and thus there is no need to translate untranslatable names, e.g. bigos, only to describe. Such a description however is quite a challenge. You will find discussion of this issue in Food as a theme in FLT, and on individual terms in Confusing food words, as well as numerous activities requiring practice of these skills in individual items.

Impressions and aspects

Under Impressions we have items on Food and Nostalgia, Food and the Senses and Food and Festivals, while under Aspects there are items on (Un)Healthy Food and Kosher Food, as well as others - you should find something ‘to your taste’.

For younger learners

If you are interested in materials for younger learners (aged 10-15) we suggest you try the activities on Salt - Wieliczka and elsewhere and Our Daily Bread which have been written with the needs of such learners in mind.

Quizzes and games

We have a variety of these and they are found in many of our items. Look especially at Food Fun but you will also find them in Salt - Wieliczka and elsewhere and (Un)Healthy Food.

Recipes

From both this and past editions you will find a number of recipes e.g. for pancakes (Shrove Tuesday style) in Festival Food and a number connected to baking in Our Daily Bread. Other recipes from past webpage editions can be found under Webpage recipes.

Other items you will find

We have a number of articles from The Week magazine to introduce you to some of the issues connected with food e.g. Is it really Healthier to eat Organic Food?.

In our academic angle you will find articles on Food and Ethnography and Food and Literature.

Finally in our Useful links and ELT food bibliography you will find many sources for following up the theme especially with regard to Britain.

Trainer materials

For the first time at the summer school we had a special section for trainers working to produce guidelines on practical techniques. The items have been assembled under How to … on the contents page where you will find a How to … an introduction outlining their purpose. They present a series of techniques valuable for investigating ‘culture’ in a FL context such as How to… conduct a successful ‘in-depth’ interview, How to… do basic fieldwork and How to … search for information on the web. Each contribution will discuss the value of the technique, give procedures - stage-by-stage guidelines, and link to a model of the technique in use from among our summer school items.     

It has been obvious from wide experience that there is a real need for some ‘intermediate’ level guidelines on such techniques and the items are addressed to teachers who want some reliable background for guiding students, to students themselves to enable the writing of successful, quality projects, and they are designed to be ‘trainer friendly’ for use in INSETT and PRESETT. 

An interview with Henryk Halkowski

Some of our visitors

Jane Cliffe (BC Assistant Regional Director, North and West Europe), with Alicja Dudziak (Kraków centre manager) and Małgorzata Zdybiewska (summer school organiser)		Mike Solly & Tamaś Kiss introducing the ELTeCS bidding process to the participants

The summer school tutor team

All the training team - course tutors/ computing tutors/ organisers - were full time college ELT teachers. Although their names do not appear, all the items you will read have been written with their active support in the role of item tutors.

Special thanks to the team without whose professional attitude and commitment both this edition and the summer school itself would not have been possible. The course tutors (who also acted as item tutors) were Slobodanka (Boba) Gligorić from Serbia, Gyöngyi Végh from Hungary and Ewa Bandura from Kraków itself. The computing tutors, Wojciech Korput from Bydgoszcz and Mariusz Marczak from Zgierz, provided direct tutoring as well as the necessary technical support, and have prepared the material in the form in which you are now reading it. The organiser who so impressively got us to the end of the summer school on all practical matters as well as organising all the social events was Małgorzata Zdybiewska from Radom. Thanks are also due to Wojciech Drajerczak the BC ELT/ Education Manager who acted as the Hornby representative, and to Barbara Włoch his assistant, for their ‘hidden’ background support.

Richard Bolt - DoS