Learning Languages, Learning Life Skills: Autobiographical reflexive approach to teaching and learning a foreign language

✍ Scribed by Riitta Jaatinen (auth.)

• Publisher: Springer US
• Year: 2007
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 231
• Series: Educational Linguistics 8
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Learning Languages, Learning Life Skills offers an autobiographical reflexive approach to foreign language education. The orientation of the book is practical, containing rich descriptions of language learning situations including authentic language use and student stories.

Teaching techniques, including planning, methods, classroom work and evaluation, case studies of "good" language learning and illustrations of how dialogue based on reminiscing can be used to promote students’ well-being in the language classroom are described in detail. Many practical examples of how to develop an autobiographical reflexive approach, based on the phenomenological philosophy and methodology, are presented. Learning Languages, Learning Life Skills significantly enhances the communicative approach and goes beyond it into a new paradigm, whereby foreign language teaching and learning are seen as foreign language education.

Learning Languages, Learning Life Skills offers unique ways of developing vocational language teaching as an integrated holistic approach combining language contents with vocationally relevant topics and the interactive, dialogical processes of working in language classes. Presented in a "common sense" way and accessible to non-native English readers, Learning Languages, Learning Life Skills will be of interest to teachers as well as researchers in the areas of applied and educational linguistics.

✦ Table of Contents

Front Matter....Pages i-xi
Introduction....Pages 1-13
Personal Knowledge of Being a Teacher....Pages 15-34
A Paradigm of Meaning, Language and “Silence”....Pages 35-46
Explicating Methodological Commitments....Pages 47-52
Autobiographical Reflexive Approach in the Context of Teaching Language and Culture for Specific Purposes....Pages 53-70
Exploring and Implementing the Autobiographical Reflexive Approach....Pages 71-145
Three Stories Exploring What a Good Foreign Language Learning is....Pages 147-181
Epilogue: Teaching as Hermeneutic Phenomenological Investigation....Pages 183-189
Back Matter....Pages 191-227

✦ Subjects

Language Education; Teacher Education; Sociolinguistics