Speak, Memory! Slovenian ELT Coursebooks Through Time(s)

The purpose of this monograph is, in the first place, to document the development of English Language Teaching materials that were produced in Slovenia in the period between 1945 and 1989. It is mainly about paying homage to the pioneers, to those who produced the first local ELT materials and thus did the spadework in laying the foundations of English language teaching in the post-war period. The monograph is of a “snakes and ladders” structure, i.e. a core ladder of the text, which – with the help of foreign language policy documents – highlights the main developments throughout the 1945–1989 period, is intertwined with a spiralling snake of book cover images, and biographies of the authors, including their photographs.

Over the past decades, different social factors, in particular the overabundance and predominance of global (British) ELT course books, have driven the domestic ELT course book heritage almost to the verge of oblivion. The monograph, then, attempts to bring the domestic authors and their textbooks “back to life” and place them into our consciousness again.