Understanding the Language Classroom

✍ Scribed by Simon Gieve, Inés K. Miller (eds.)

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK
• Year: 2006
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 298
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

The starting point for this collection is a chapter by Dick Allwright on the language learning and teaching classroom experience entitled Six Promising Directions in Applied Linguistics . The other distinguished contributors respond to this discussion with their own interpretations and from their own experience. The collection problematizes prescription, efficiency, and technical solutions as orientations to classroom language learning. Complexity and idiosyncrasy, on the other hand, are recognized as central concepts in a move towards centralizing teachers' and learners' own understanding of 'classroom life', in the contexts of language learning, adult literacy education and language teacher education.

✦ Table of Contents

Front Matter....Pages i-xxii
Introduction....Pages 1-10
Six Promising Directions in Applied Linguistics....Pages 11-17
What Do We Mean by ‘Quality of Classroom Life’?....Pages 18-46
What Happens between People: Who We Are and What We Do....Pages 47-63
Managing Classroom Life....Pages 64-87
Who Does What in the ‘Management of Language Learning’? Planning and the Social Construction of the ‘Motivation to Notice’....Pages 88-114
Darwin and the Large Class....Pages 115-135
Recognizing Complexity in Adult Literacy Research and Practice....Pages 136-162
Language Lessons: A Complex, Local Co-Production of All Participants....Pages 163-174
Take 1, Take 2, Take 3: A Suggested Three-Stage Approach to Exploratory Practice....Pages 175-199
Collegial Development in ELT: The Interface between Global Processes and Local Understandings....Pages 200-225
Language Teacher Educators in Search of ‘Locally Helpful Understandings’....Pages 226-238
Teaching and Learning in ‘The Age of Reform’: The Problem of the Verb....Pages 239-262
Back Matter....Pages 263-275

✦ Subjects

Language Teaching;Linguistics, general;Language Education;Language and Literature