Understanding the Language Classroom

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 contributors are Mike Breen, Antonieta Celani, Hywel Coleman, John Fanselow & Roger Barnard, Donald Freeman, Simon Gieve & Ines Miller, Adrian Holliday, Roz Ivanic & Lydia Tseng, Elaine Tarone, Tony Wright, and Devon Woods. Kathleen Bailey 's Foreword sets the scene. The collection problematizes prescription, efficiency, and technical solutions as orientations to classroom language learning. The ideas that have found most resonance in contributors' attempts at understanding language classroom life are the inherent complexity and idiosyncrasy of classroom life, the central importance of participants' own understandings; the relationship between classroom life and teachers' and students' lives, negotiation between teachers and learners, the relationship between the local and the global, and the 'quality' of classroom life. These themes are addressed in the contexts of language learning, adult literacy education and language teacher education.

Table of Contents:
List of Figures Foreword; K.M.Bailey Acknowledgements Notes on the Contributors Introduction Six Promising Directions in Applied Linguistics; D.Allwright What Do We Mean By 'Quality of Classroom Life'?; S.N.Gieve & I.K. Miller What Happens Between People: Who We Are and What We Do; A.Holliday Managing Classroom Life; T.Wright Who Does What In The 'Management of Language Learning'? Planning and the Social Construction of the 'Motivation to Notice'; D.Woods Darwin and the Large Class; H.Coleman Recognizing Complexity in Adult Literacy Research and Practice; M.L.Tseng & R.Ivanic Language Lessons: A Complex, Local Co-Production of all Participants; E.E.Tarone Take 1, Take 2, Take 3: A Suggested Three-Stage Approach to Exploratory Practice; J.F.Fanselow & R.Barnard Collegial Development in ELT: The Interface Between Global Processes and Local Understandings; M.P.Breen Language Teacher Educators in Search of 'Locally Helpful Understandings'; M.A.A.Celani Teaching and Learning in the Age of 'Reform': The Problem of the Verb; D.Freeman Index

About the Author :
SIMON GIEVE is Lecturer in Applied Linguistics at the University of Leicester, UK. He has taught EFL for many years in Japan and later in Britain. His interests are in classroom language learning, teacher education, critical discourse analysis, and the social relationship between first and second language speakers. INAeS K. MILLER is Assistant Professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio), Brazil. Her research focuses on language teacher education and development. She is a core member of the Lancaster University-based Exploratory Practice Centre (EPCentre) and co-ordinates the Exploratory Practice Group in Rio (EPGroup-Rio).