American English File

At around the time when we were writing New English File, i.e. the second edition, we were told that OUP had decided to ‘Americanise’ it and bring out American English File.

I was extremely excited mainly because OUP’s American office was in New York, and I thought I might get a trip to New York, which I had never been to (I did, and loved it).

 Americanising the books involved:

·      Changing some texts and listenings so that they were less Eurocentric

·      Changing a few grammar points and a lot of vocabulary items

·      Redoing all the pronunciation

·      Re-recording all the audio

·      Re-designing the cover

Clive and I were very much involved with the first thing, i.e. researching new texts, changing the tasks to suit the new texts, and basically overseeing and approving any changes to the actual content. As regards the grammar and vocabulary, I learned a lot about American English. I knew all the obvious things like I’ve gotten, movie, cookie etc., but it had never occurred to me that Americans say across from where we would say opposite, that lovely is a total anglicism, and many many more things like that. So it was a very interesting learning curve for me.

The cover design was also changed completely. For the first edition, it had oranges on it. Clive and I never quite understood the link, apart from the fact that he and I were both living in Valencia at the time, but I think it was something to do with segments of language! Then they decided to go for images of people but designed to create a central image, which I quite liked, and then third editions improved on that idea. It’s currently my favourite!