Read all about it! The January Spotlight

The January edition of Spotlight goes on sale next Wednesday. Eamonn Fitzgerald spoke to Editor-in-Chief Inez Sharp about the next issue.

Fitzgerald: I'm looking here at the colourful cover of the redesigned Spotlight, and I'd like to ask you how you feel about it, now that the hard work has been done and the readers will soon have the new magazine in their hands.

Sharp: The whole team are really excited about the new content and layout in Spotlight. Although we based a lot of new elements in the magazine on information from our most recent readers' survey, we also thought in more general terms about how a (language) magazine should look and work in 2010. This is not an exact science, and so it'll be interesting to see how the readers react. Certainly, when I picked up the January issue for the first time this week, it felt like a magazine for a modern language learner: interesting, motivating and accessible.

"Spotlight has become a real eye-catcher"

Fitzgerald: What was the thinking behind the new look and feel?

Sharp: The aim of the Spotlight team is to make learning English an enjoyable experience. We believe it is important to make the magazine visually attractive. If you want to pick something up and look at it, that will make all the difference to what you learn. With the help of our excellent layout team, Vor-Zeichen, we think Spotlight has become a real eye-catcher. The magazine has always provided in-depth material for learners, but with all our lives becoming busier, we have looked at ways of getting you faster learning results. For this reason, two sections — A Day in My Life and Press Gallery — now include "Info to Go" elements. These will allow you to pick up useful language and cultural information more quickly and easily.