Abax is an award-winning and independent publisher of ELT materials with offices in Tokyo, Japan and in San Francisco, California. Abax texts are in use in universities, colleges, high schools and private language schools around the world.

Adult ELT Materials

Our main focus is on making skills and two-skills materials for classroom use with adults and young adults.

Enjoyable to Use, Based on Research

In creating materials our goals are pretty simple—to make English language learning materials that teachers enjoy using and that learners both enjoy learning from AND learn from. No magic bullets. Just a desire to ground our materials in what is known about how people learn language.

And in the larger scheme?

A world where more people can talk with one another. A world where people have greater understanding of one another.

American Plus

The format we follow is American Plus—that is, while American English is the main element in all our texts, we also expose students to other World Englishes, increasingly important in a world in which English is more and more the way people from different nations communicate. In other words, we aim our texts at students who wish to learn American English as a tool for communication but as a tool they are likely to use in an international setting.

Best-sellers

Our best-selling texts are Communication Spotlight: Listening Skills & Speaking Strategies, a 4-level series, and Top-Up Listening, a 3-level series.

Award-winning materials

Fiction in Action: Whodunit won the The Duke of Edinburgh's English-Speaking Union English Language Award 2010. It is the first book out of Asia to win this prestigious award. In 2011 the same book won the ELTons Cambridge ESOL Award for Innovation. Again this was a first for a Japan-based publisher.

+ other great stuff

In addition to having our own materials, in Japan Abax is also the representative for ELB Publishing and its collection of reissued classics and for Helbling Languages with its innovative Resourceful Teachers series and its ever-growing library of Helbling Readers.