English language teaching has its stars—and its superstars. Here are some of the latter, who have contributed so much to the present state of the profession.

Martin Lemming. Legendary Editor of the British Organ of Research in English and renowned for his trenchant editorials on punctuation. Also lectures part-time at the University of Northeast Colchester.

Denise Beaver. Pioneer of the ground-breaking Oxbridge Graded Readers series, Denise’s iconoclastic approach to ELT publishing radicalized and transformed the industry. Has since commissioned such cutting-edge textbooks as Teaching Grammar Using the Overhead Projector and Lower Intermediate Writing Tasks 3.

Jeremy Hamster. Doyen of the IAWAFL conference and renowned for his mesmerising keynote addresses on Cuisenaire rods. A part-time consultant to the McLanguage Organization. Co-authors the legendary course book series, New Aspects (Cambridge), with Kathryn Coypu.

Emma Vole. Doyenne of the supplementary resource book. Her ground-breaking Fun with Adjectival Participle Clauses (Longman, 1975) is now in its 18th imprint. Has recently written a book on ELT and the Internet with Martin Lemming.

Stephen Gerbil. Often described as “the conscience of the profession”, Stephen’s trenchant attacks on bourgeois complacency in ELT are legendary. To show his identification with oppressed tribal peoples, he once spent a week in a wigwam in his garden in Walthamstow, only popping out to use the toilet and buy croissants.

Sarah Pacarana. Ask anyone in the know about American Business English multimedia resources and before long they will be sure to mention Sarah Pacarana. Under her leadership the legendary business video company Club Class Inc has published almost half a dozen ground-breaking titles.

Ken Bandicoot. Legendary grammarian renowned for his trenchant denunciations of “grammar dinosaurs”. Among his controversial claims: English has no verbs as such, and there is a secret fourth conditional known only to him and the Queen.

Kathryn Coypu. With her partner, Jeremy Hamster, Kathryn has authored the legendary coursebook series, New Aspects. Her trenchant criticism of Stephen Gerbil at the 1989 IAWAFL Conference still reverberates in ELT circles.

Clive Agouti. Doyen of concordancing and corpus studies. Has proved that the future perfect continuous tense is seldom found in corpora of online texts such as the Bible. Also lectures part-time at the University of Southwest Colchester.

Susie Sewellel. Actually Susie is not famous at all, but we needed another woman for balance. She is an ADOS in Mexico and once had a letter published in English Teaching Professional. She likes gardening and cats.

Nigel Marmot. The satirical enfant terrible of ELT. His legendary website mercilessly lampoons the follies of the profession (continued on next page)