Teacher Discussion Forums

Okay guys, now that you've convinced me to read it, I'm having trouble finding it. So far the only place that I can find that sells this book is amazon.com.uk. Does anyone know where I might order a copy in the U.S. ?

This is maybe the most direct (paying in US dollars) method you'll find:
http://www.ltpwebsite.com/cgi-telt/cour ... number=301

Thanks a lot Fluffy! I ordered it.

Great! Hope the service is good, and that it reaches you soon!

I finally ordered it too. I look forward to reading it.

Just read the first chapters and am so impressed so far. Why didn't we get this book somewhre in our teacher education?

It was required reading for my RSA Diploma course (which was just about the only good thing about doing the Dip)

Yes, the Dip seems to be a very expensive way of acquiring a "required" reading list (some of the books should be read by everyone even if they don't go onto do a DELTA, some of the books on the DELTA lists aren't that good, other books could've been included as well as or instead of those listed etc).
http://www.thedistancedelta.com/informa ... oklist.cfm

It would be interesting to know how many of the books on that list the average teacher owns (or has at least read or referred to enough to be reasonably familar with the work) within a few years of completing a CELTA-level qualification.

As for me, I own all of the Grammar and Lexis texts, with the exception of Thornbury 1997, 1999 and 2002 (that is, I only own his 2001 Uncovering Grammar).

Regarding Pronunciation, I own just the Kenworthy, but I do take quite an interest in the "fit" between sound and spelling, writing systems, orthographic reform etc and have other works to refer to on phonetics generally than the ones listed. I do not and cannot claim to be an expert of teaching "pronunciation" at this stage in my career, but I do feel that the EFL approach to this area is rather selective and not of much interest or help beyond beginner (student) level (and then it can make a meal of things). Noticeable by its omission is e.g. Jenkins (OUP 2000), but of course, she is critical of teacher training and offers no easy or pat answer on what and how to teach (drill?) things.

I have both of the Discourse books, although I did not have time to read the Cook.

Listening, I have the Rost, and White. I am not keen on Cambridge approaches to the "skill" of listening (that whole top-down/bottom up dichotomy), and there are some things in native speech that aren't really ever addressed satisfactorily if at all, regardless of approach (e.g. irony, "implicature": where is there a serious examination of what exactly can be and therefore sometimes is spoken of in ironic tones, and what are the exact phrasings, prosody etc - there's a study proposal that could take at least as long as a Dip to complete!).

Reading and Writing, I must admit I have NO books in these areas (well, at least not the ones listed). I suppose I have held off from buying any because so far I've only taught "conversational" (spoken English with forays into "speech as writing" (scripts) or informal writing e.g. letters to friends reporting about some event, which can include a newspaper story or book that the student has read). I want to be serious about reading from the bottom up (letters-"segmental phonology"-syllables-words etc - see 'Pronunciation' above), and tackle the complexities of authentic written texts e.g. academic texts, EAP, rather than faff about with only "creative writing" (creativity in their L1 might be a problem for some students, but creativity in the L2, English, is a problem for all students). I recall reading somewhere that Nuttall was worth a look. Bowen and Marks's Inside Teaching looks at skills work to some degree, however.

Speaking, I have the Brown and Yule. People rave about the OUP 'Conversation' book, but I didn't think there was much in it, and recall it became progressively more scattershot and disorganzied (uninspiring) as it progressed. Perhaps ultimately it has at its heart a quite basic "structural" take on the subject? You obviously need more than a 100-page sparsely-printed-big-margins recipe book to do justice to the "topics" possible in "conversation" (what people talk about, and how/where/when/to whom etc they go about talking about things in general and specifically etc). I should look at it again maybe, though, to be fair.

Learning and Teaching, have everything except for the Baxter, Ellis (have some of his other books, though), Hedge, Larsen-Freeman, Richards (his The Context of LT seemed much more valuable), and Swan and Smith (always toying with the idea of buying this last one).

Course Design/Materials, I have the Nunan. There are quite a few more titles available than these three.

The most interesting books on the list to me would seem to be:
*Grammar and the Language Teacher
Exploring Grammar in Context
The English Verb
Teaching Collocation
Vocabulary in Language Teaching
Teaching the Spoken Language
Correction
*Inside Teaching
Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching
*Challenge and Change in Language Teaching

There is some controversy (by that I mean they challenge the reigning beliefs - not that the reigning beliefs themselves aren't ever uncontroversial, it's just quite a few people seem to mindlessly/all too willingly accept the reigning beliefs) to be had in the books marked with an asterix (the ones that aren't marked seem to have been acknowledged at least), but HEY it's not controversy I'm necessarily after (that just creates its own boring same old same old arguments, ideas and then orthodoxies), just expertise. I think there is too much separating things out, use of dichotomies, and not enough honest-to-goodness state-of-the-art knowledge. A couple of hard linguistics books would be nice, and a stonking great grammar and dictionary wouldn't go amiss either.

Generally, from the above kind of list you get the idea that teachers (or rather, their trainers) just engage in arguing and playing around with language during training, rather than getting down to the nitty-gritty intricacies of English (or, indeed, other, often contrasting languages). The Grammar and Lexis books should be a given in any serious teacher's library; and shorter crash courses on e.g. utilizing concordancing programmes, corpora and doing some even halfway-serious empirical investigation would probably be of more use than what's in UCLES's bag of tricks.

I know most of the hard work of studying about grammar etc is the teacher's task, but these periodical, supposedly ever "more advanced" rounds of empty methodological musing and pedagogical pushups we have to do in order to "progress" (or rather, prove to people who as it turns out are more often than not ultimately only very remotely interested i.e. not really that interested in whether we have, in fact, progressed much at all) all rather distract from those serious, central concerns and goals and do precious little to aid the serious teacher to pull it all together in trying to improve upon just "teaching" (blindly following) the often crap and almost always relatively unambitious textbooks. As I've said before, even that darling of more enlightened teachers, Michael Lewis, hasn't exactly produced the sort of course we were hoping for (but to give him credit, he has perhaps done enough and has certainly done more than most to help teachers).

Yikes, if this is what makes a good teacher then I am far off the mark. I only have "The English Verb". Our books were considerably different. Guess I will try and make a list but Devon Woods was high on our list as we had the real author as a professor. Vivian Cook is my favourite. Now I am interested in Halliday and his followers, particulary Beverly Derewianka. We actually had a compilation of papers that the professors gathered together before the course and printed off as a course pack which I found much more up-to-date and relevant than any book. Vygotsky and other Russians are really the fashion at the moment. I will check my bookcase for titles.

Assuming that the above reading list's selection was fitting and sufficient for a teacher generally, knowing all those books from cover to cover (especially the "Grammar" and "Lexis" ones) of course wouldn't automatically make a teacher "good": a lot of the knowledge that reference books contain is still not in an obviously teachable form (unless your students are the type who would e.g. enjoy chasing up unknown words in definitions or examples in their dictionaries, contextualizing and authenticating those words for themselves etc), and this is where the kind of stuff you're good at comes into play, Sally!

But I still think knowledge (of English) is a very overlooked factor in teacher education and the general (low, unambitious) beliefs and expectations that many seem to have about what should constitute "professionalism"; although it is fun (and easier!) to talk about options and make methodological generalizations, getting to grips with the nitty gritty intricacies of English shouldn't be neglected (as much as it is, and unforgivably so on longer courses where much more could be being done to inform trainees and guide them through things), for from knowledge comes ideas, inspiration, and with it confidence, ability, in a word knowledge-ability.

The sort of facts that reference books (especially dictionaries) contain aren't all just irrelevant tidbits that a teacher "simply" has to know (and then never use and forget), but should be viewed as a treasure trove richer than e.g. general treatises on the methodology of tree-hugging or light-switch switching exercises (not that you have ever struck as doing these specific silly kind of things, Sally), that can lead into some great activity and materials ideas ("language-inspired methodology", "data-inspired teaching and learning" etc); that is, what they contain is the English language (to which one could add 'and no more', but one can equally as well say 'and no less').

I like what Stephen Jones had to say over on the International/Job Discussion Forums:

Having a good knowledge of English grammar is necessary for teachng EFL, not because it enables you to explain more, but because it gives you the confidence to explain less.

http://www.eslcafe.com/forums/job/viewt ... 929#215929

A link here to something I wrote:
http://www.eslcafe.com/forums/teacher/v ... 5392#15392 (follow onto page 4 of the thread)

The main reason you may not own and/or be familiar with a lot of those books is probably because they are almost all from British publishers and with an EFL or ELT focus, which I guess can sometimes lead to somewhat differing emphases and concerns to ESL.

Actually I have a great co-operative game for the outdoors on tree hugging that I love to play with teenagers and I do switch the lights off and on when the kids get too noisy in groups. I once played a game where when I switched the lights on and off the two people talking in the pair (one was native speaking English teacher and one was a Greenlandic teacher) had to switch languages, so if the native English speaking teacher was speaking English he/she had to switch to Greenlandic. You can vary it so they are both speaking the same language or switch to the other language they are learning at the switch of the light. It was hard at first but fun and I learned that from Devon Woods.

I thought our courses were to prepare us for the EFL teaching. I am making up the list of books that we had but it is very different from the Dip list.

Does anyone actually take all these books when you teach abroad or is it only teachers who are near to home that can lug all these books with you?

I don't mean Mr Woods or you any disrespect, Sally, but that language switching exercise tells us little about e.g. how, when and why people e.g. codeswitch (presuming that was one of its aims, the others being...to have "fun"? Realize that speaking a foreign language is difficult?), in the same way that I argued Rinvolucri's exercise* told us very little about how people actually linguistically elicit spur of the moment thoughts from people, or introduce and pursue topics according to certain beliefs and expectations.
http://www.eslcafe.com/forums/teacher/v ... 3391#13391

Of course, if the exercise had a convincing point to it, please tell me what it was! I know very little about e.g. code-switching, but I doubt if it is a totally random process. (One thing I do know is that I take things too literally sometimes).

It'll be interesting to see your list! The DELTA list is certainly a bit sparse, few "feeder" disciplines, but then again, what can you expect from a relatively short (full-time) course offered by a relatively blinkered institution?

I used to lug a load of books around with me, but that had to stop after 9/11. I was returning home from Japan via Hong Kong in August 2002 (the first flight I'd taken since 9/11), and I had some books in my suitcase (which was slightly over the limit) and a carry-on full of books (I guess that would've been quite a bit over the overhead storage weight limits but what the hell). I'd posted most of my books, and only had really expensive ones like e.g. the LGSWE and the CGEL in the holdall. Anyway the airline insisted on weighing every last thing I had apart from my coat (should've crammed some books into that!) and I had to pay $500 in excess baggage. (I'd've posted the books, but it was midnight at the airport, and because they'd overbooked the flight, it took so long to get to the counter after the hordes of irate Chinese, then to get some more money changed etc that I had no time to find out if there were couriers operating outside PO hours etc).

*Basically, 'Each time you switch an electrical switch on or off, notice how you are feeling and what you are thinking about' is an order, and a strange one at that, that a serious student would do well to ponder the use of answering, and 'You're turning the light switch on - tell me what you're thinking!' isn't much of an improvement. As I said to Larry, the natural (and admittedly plain and direct, though oh so very useful and potentially interesting, because it is so open) question is simply 'What are you thinking (of (right now))?' (asked if and when a person is e.g. sitting looking thoughtful, not literally miles away at their home, where the questioner wouldn't be able to see them, and "doing", of all things, switching on a light?!), which not only gives the student a usable form (Can we assume R teaches simple things?), but also ensures nobody is under any misconceptions about what constitutes a relevant topic in English conversation, or about the relevance and worth of answers (the R exercise could elicit a lot of boring save-the-whales guff, precisely because it doesn't say 'Please give genuine(ly) interesting and unexpected answers to this rather silly exercise's question/order'). All that being said, I would still accept that R's exercise could be more productive than Wood's!

Sorry, I only get 20 minutes on the computer these days once or twice a week and so am not able to go into the detail that would be useful in this discussion. I will try and compose something at home for my next session. I think we all do something for a good reason though and not usually just to fill time although this does realistically happen occassionally. I personally can't see that one activity is "better" than another though or one person's ideas are "better" than another's except as they catch my imagination. It does seem to me that we don't know enough yet of how these things work and teaching is such an individual occupation because of our personalities and situations.

Sally Olsen wrote:I personally can't see that one activity is "better" than another though or one person's ideas are "better" than another's except as they catch my imagination.

I agree that the main deciding factor in whether a teacher uses an activity is whether it catches his or her imagination; the more important questions, though, surely are 1) will the activity catch the imagination of the students and 2) even if it does excite them, will it result in them coming up (easily) with or learning much linguistically? Oh, but then the purpose of Wood's activity (and to a great extent R's) was probably not "linguistic" in the (serious, actual teaching) sense that I usually if not always mean it.

Given the limited time available in most classes for the average "communicative" teacher to sift through student notes, to correct improvised language, and to come up with helpful exponents for filling perceived linguistic gaps in communicative ability (usually off the top of their head, which is a problem compounded by the fact that the teacher may not have thought much about the required language before and therefore be at a loss as to how to help), I think the second question above is quite an important one to consider if we are seriously trying to help our students improve in an efficient manner.

Again, Sally, I am talking more in general terms than attacking you personally, and the exercise you mentioned is only one of many that you'd do, so please don't think I am tarring you with any nasty gooey brush totally from head to foot (I've just dabbed at your little toe a bit is all ). I appreciate the replies, helps keep the forums alive!