Dear Liu Binyou

Thank you for such a interesting and informative study. You offer me such useful insights into traditional learning techniques and this leads me to suggest that you look critically at some of the texts I am recommending on communicative language teaching on the home page for the Guyuan group. I recommend that you do not necessarily reject traditional teaching methodologies - look for what was of value in them and learn how to develop from them - otherwise there is a danger that (as we sometimes say in England) you might throw out the baby with the bath water!In my experience as a language teacher and teacher educator for thirty years I see how fashions come and go in language learning -some methodologies are rejected only to be reinvented later on...The passion for communicative language teaching which I shared as a young teacher led (mistakenly) to rejection of grammar teaching and learning and this had to be reintroduced formally.

I am very interested by your use of the word' friend' as teacher. How far do you feel this is possible, given the need (presumably) to retain a professional distance from your students as assessor?

You provide me with wonderful insights into the need for and use of humour in learning situations - as a way of sustaining motivation and collaboration between the teacher and other learners.

I am struck by your infectious enthusiasm as a relatively new teacher and I wish you all the sustained delight I still hold after 30 years! You have enormous creativity and clearly bring such motivation to the learning situation. One of the books I recommend in the reading list is a Pathfinder by Steven Fawkes - I think you will enjoy reading 'With a song in my scheme of work.'

I really enjoyed seeing Chinese sayings in your writing - this brings your context to life for the reader as it says so much about the values that people hold and how they live their lives by them.

I learnt so much from you about the implications of the New Curriculum in China - similarly in Japan there is a new curriculum which replaces the Fundamental law of Education. This is leading to an interest in integrating mentoring and action research to improve and revitalise teaching and learning in schools and colleges. I am looking now forward to my fifth visit to Japan in November!

I think your reflections on the restrictions that can unwittingly be imposed on learners unless teaching strategies are a springboard for creative engagement (which benefit so much from an injection of humour) is so profound and has a significance well beyond your subject area and your immediate teaching context. As I read your work and the way you have introduced music as language learning, I can imagine the delight your students must feel - how about including some tape recordings of your students singing with your writing and possibly some photographs too?

Your way of weaving narrative into your writing puts me in mind of Jean Clandinin's work on Narrative Enquiry -I think you might enjoy her writings and thoroughly recommend them to you.

Most of all, I sense in your writing a highly significant emergence of research in a creative and fluid process that can and does improve both teaching and learning - I look forward to more!