Understanding the Language Classroom

✍ Scribed by Simon Gieve, Ines K. Miller

• Year: 2006
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 298
• Edition: annotated edition
• 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

Cover......Page 1
Contents......Page 8
List of Figures......Page 10
Foreword......Page 12
Acknowledgements......Page 18
Notes on the Contributors......Page 20
Introduction......Page 24
1 Six Promising Directions in Applied Linguistics......Page 34
2 What Do We Mean by 'Quality of Classroom Life'?......Page 41
3 What Happens between People: Who We Are and What We Do......Page 70
4 Managing Classroom Life......Page 87
5 Who Does What in the 'Management of Language Learning'? Planning and the Social Construction of the 'Motivation to Notice'......Page 111
6 Darwin and the Large Class......Page 138
7 Recognizing Complexity in Adult Literacy Research and Practice......Page 159
8 Language Lessons: A Complex, Local Co-Production of All Participants......Page 186
9 Take 1, Take 2, Take 3: A Suggested Three-Stage Approach to Exploratory Practice......Page 198
10 Collegial Development in ELT: The Interface between Global Processes and Local Understandings......Page 223
11 Language Teacher Educators in Search of 'Locally Helpful Understandings'......Page 249
12 Teaching and Learning in 'The Age of Reform': The Problem of the Verb......Page 262
C......Page 286
G......Page 287
L......Page 288
P......Page 289
W......Page 290
Z......Page 291
C......Page 292
E......Page 294
L......Page 295
P......Page 296
T......Page 297
V......Page 298