"Look," Dave said to a room of skeptical 50-year-old tenured professors. "You are tired of the photocopier. You are tired of the CD-ROM that doesn't work on Macs. With Flex , you choose the topic. The AI builds the worksheet. You control the difficulty."
The fluorescent lights of the Hotel Sunroute Plaza in Shinjuku hummed a low, anxious tune. It was August, which meant one thing for English teachers across the Kanto plain: the ELT Book Fair.
Dave smiled. "The homework is ChatGPT. We teach them how to prompt the AI. We teach them how to fact-check the AI. We stop fighting the future and start riding it." eltbooks japan
To the casual observer, ELTBooks Japan looked like just another publisher. But to the sensei —the battle-hardened university professors and nervous eikaiwa (conversation school) managers—ELTBooks was a legend. They weren't the biggest (that was Oxford University Press). They weren't the flashiest (that was National Geographic Learning). ELTBooks was the craftsman . They specialized in books for the "Silver" generation—retirees who wanted to learn travel English—and for technical colleges where students needed to read maintenance manuals for German printing presses.
Dave clicked a button. Two seconds later, a worksheet appeared. The professor stared at it. She cracked a smile. "Look," Dave said to a room of skeptical
Kenji’s star employee was a 34-year-old Canadian named Dave McGregor. Dave had come to Japan fifteen years ago to "find himself" and had ended up finding a career in copy-editing. Dave was the ghostwriter. He was the one who turned Kenji’s rigid, Japanese-style grammar explanations into natural, conversational English. He was the one who wrote the listening scripts, always ensuring that the Australian character said "G’day" and the American said "Howdy."
Six months later, at the winter ELT conference in Yokohama, the ELTBooks Japan booth was packed. With Flex , you choose the topic
Dave walked in. "We did it, boss. Fifty licenses. Plus, the technical college wants the old printing press manual. We convert it to Flex ?"