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These articles are taken from the introduction of the Teachers' Guide in all Learning Factory material. We will highlight articles from different series on a monthly basis.

The Importance of Recycling
As EFL teachers and educators we often come across the advice (in EFL literature, in a number of coursebooks, as part of institutional ‘Best Practices’, etc.) that we should recycle what has been taught. Interestingly enough, the wish for recycling is not solely confined to the teachers themselves, it is a demand which also comes from the learners. So, why is it that everyone is so keyed up about recycling?
Lifting the L1 taboo: using the student's mother tongue as a valuable classroom resource
In my early teaching days, I was offered a job at a language school in Indonesia. I knew virtually nothing about the country or the language, but saw the opportunity as a challenge not to be missed and so accepted without hesitation. The fact that I didn't speak a single word of Bahasa didn't bother me at all: I'd only ever worked in Britain, teaching multi-lingual groups where students' L1 was, for obvious reasons, not used and I firmly believed that the English-only approach was the best way to do things.
Priorities in Pronunciation Teaching
The teaching of pronunciation is often a challenge for teachers. This may be due to the fact that there is so much to accomplish – so many phonemes to deal with, so many intonation patterns, connected speech features – that we teachers often feel overwhelmed, and perhaps even insecure of our own abilities to give our learners what they need to develop their pronunciation. We have the aid of our course books, which highlight some pronunciation features, focusing on phonemes and other segmental and suprasegmental features, and providing practice exercises and phonemic charts, which we use, when they come up, as suggested in the books.