Brian Browser's book-filled trousers

[fluffyhamster]

Was browsing the Uni of Chicago Press website and came across two books, one forthcoming in April 2009:

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/presssite ... kkey=24472 (Fillmore, Kay, Michaelis and Sag, Construction Grammar),

and one published over a decade ago:

Steven Cushing
Fatal Words: Communication Clashes and Aircraft Crashes
Paperback edition published May 1997

Synopsis

On March 27, 1977, 583 people died when KLM and Pan Am 747s collided on a crowded, foggy runway in Tenerife, the Canary Islands. The cause, a miscommunication between the pilot and the air traffic controller. The pilot radioed, "We are now at takeoff," meaning that the plane was lifting off, but the tower controller misunderstood and thought the plane was waiting on the runway.

In Fatal Words, Steven Cushing explains how miscommunication has led to dozens of aircraft disasters, and he proposes innovative solutions for preventing them. He examines ambiguities in language when aviation jargon and colloquial English are mixed, when a word is used that has different meanings, and when different words are used that sound alike. To remedy these problems, Cushing proposes a visual communication system and a computerized voice mechanism to help clear up confusing language.

Fatal Words is an accessible explanation of some of the most notorious aircraft tragedies of our time, and it will appeal to scholars in communications, linguistics, and cognitive science, to aviation experts, and to general readers.

( http://www.press.uchicago.edu/presssite ... kkey=44900 )

[J.M.A.]

This is a good thread and I'm disappointed there aren't more people posting on it! Here is a quick summary of some of the books I've bought recently.

From Oxford University Press:

Conversational Interaction in Second Language Acquisition. - I quite enjoyed this as I like the Interactionist school in general. This is a recent (2007) collection of empirical studies edited by Alison Mackey. You will find lots of reference to Michael Long's Interaction Hypothesis and emphasis on recasts. As a teacher I found I started paying very close and analytical attention to any sort of feedback my students gave me in the classroom as a result. This book took a while to get through but I thought it was worth it. Very Empirical!

Task-based Language Learning and Teaching. This is a classic by Rod Ellis and really helped me put Tasks into perspective. I now have the ability to conceptualize why certain activities elicit greater student involvement and am much more efficient at designing tasks. This book is really good and a must read for teachers! This book is more theoretical than practical; I understand that Jane Willis has recently published a OUP title called Doing Task-based Teaching (or something similar) which is more practical and which I intend to buy very soon.

Controversies in Applied Linquistics. Edited by Barbara Seidlhofer, this is also a fascinating book which documents exchanges (sometimes rather heated) between Applied Linguists. This book was excellent! It covers many issues: my favourites included Robert Phillipson's merciless review of a David Crystal book , Pierce's excellent article on Postmodern social identity and Podromou's criticism of Corpus driven teaching represented by authors Carter and McCarthy.

Onto the Cambridge Language Teaching Library:

As a general aside, I do not enjoy this series as much as OUP Applied Linguistics.

The recent titles on motivation I bought were rather "disappointing" Both titles involved Zoltan Dornyei. As I understand it, he is almost ready to release a title in the OUP Applied Linguistics series on Learner Psychology, which I hope is better. Anyway, the 2 titles I picked up were:

Motivational Strategies in the Language Classroom. Quite frankly, this was not worth the money I spent. Nothing of any note to really say here.
Group Dynamics in the Language Classroom. This was the better of the two, and was co-authored with Tim Murphey, that crazy juggling teacher in Japan. This was interesting enough to read, but I'm not sure it led to any change in my teaching practice. Ditto for the above mentioned title.

Ok, I also picked up I.S.P. Nation's Teaching Vocabulary - Strategies and Techniques (Heinle Cengage). This is a best practices book and is not bound to any particular methodology. Definitely practical, but I think I will have to re-read it several times and make a conscious effort to adapt some of the techniques.

Finally, Learner Autonomy in the Foreign Language Classroom - Teacher, Learner, Curriculum and Assessment, published by Authentik and edited by David Little, Jennifer Ridley and Ema Ushioda. I found this book to be very well written and motivating. It really emphasizes the importance of Learner Autonomy (no surprise!) and adopts what the authors term a "constructivist" approach, the idea being that learners must construct their own understanding. This may sound like a truism but I found it to be quite poignant. I really enjoyed this book and recommend it.

[fluffyhamster]

Hi JMA, welcome to the Teacher forums, and thanks for the recommendations! (I'll try to check out at least the Nation, and might get the Ellis then).

I'm not sure that it's fair to compare the OUP AL range to the CLTL*, but I would agree that the OUP AL is arguably more interesting and better presented overall than the Cambridge AL titles (though the CAL Hunston, Nation and Odlin titles are all pretty valuable).

Regarding the Seidlhofer, there seemed to me to be more questioning Phillipson's work than (Phillipson's questioning of) Crystal's, but seeing as I haven't read either P's or that particular book of C's, I suppose I'll just have to take Seidlhofer's editorializing with a pinch of salt. As for the whole "Real English" debate, I'm not sure that either side in Seidlhofer made particularly convincing arguments - learning can certainly appear (and I would argue, only appear - as if a decent teacher just dumps in data and doesn't try to tailor it, or let the students tailor things, at all!) to be in danger of becoming too "driven" by corpora, but corpora are obviously useful for establishing "external" norms that one should be at least receptively made aware of. One obvious way around the apparent "tense" impasse is to empirically investigate what L2 users actually do (especially when speaking), which is what Jenkins and now Prodromou also it seems (see the bottom of Page 2 of this thread) have done (which reminds me, I must check to see if the Pr is now available in paperback!).

You might like to do a search for 'Beaugrand*', most of the half-dozen or so resulting threads are generally related to the above issues and pretty interesting.

*The CLTL to my mind more resembles books in OUP's Teaching Techniques in English as a Second Language, Handbooks for Language Teachers and even its Language Teaching: A Scheme for Teacher Education ranges i.e. the CLTL range is extensive at least, if not in greater "specialized" depth overall, compared to those three "non-AL" OUP ranges, and the CLTL vocabulary, discourse and conversation titles especially are all excellent; then, Cambridge offers the Cambridge Language Education, General Books for Teachers, Cambridge Teacher Training and Development, and Cambridge Language Assessment ranges to boot! Cambrige definitely seems to offer far more actual linguistics titles than Oxford (see for example just the Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics), and the Cambridge Handbooks for Language Teachers to me seem generally better than the "competing" Oxford Resource Books for Teachers (if we're talking actually really basic "teacher" books).

[J.M.A.]

OUP AL is different from CLTL, I agree. I have several titles from Cambridge Applied Linguistics as well (notably Amy Tsui's title on Teaching Expertise, which I enjoyed) and my impression so far is that the OUP AL series is superior. Oxford Resource Books for Teachers are worthless IMO. Unfortunately I own more than half

I have Thornbury and Slade's CLTL Conversation: From Description to Pedagogy. Is that the kind of book you were referring to? I'm new to the AL game but I was impressed with the erudition, especially considering it was written by teacher trainers (good ones, I know!). I saw you write a sort of review of it in this thread but there was no final pronouncement! I do like Discourse Analysis, though I still think there are more pressing issues for me to explore with respect to theory.

Seidlhofer definitely sides against Phillipson but I also think part of the book's point was to leave the readers open to draw their own conclusions. Personally David Crystal and "Hank" Widdowson bore me to tears. So I enjoyed it. It was pretty aggressive for a scholarly exchange. I don't blindly follow Phillipson by any means but I did feel there was some truth to the criticisms being levelled.

Definitely pick up the Nation book (it's practically hot off the shelves) and Ellis's Task-based volume is also essential. Every teacher should have it!

[fluffyhamster]

Yes, I was referring to the Thornbury & Slade (the latter of whom is more an applied linguist in the discourse/CA and systemic-functional mould than a mere teacher trainer, by the way...which helps explain why this seems to be about the best book on "conversation" (CA if not DA) now available at this level:). I kinda ended up skimming parts of it; to do it full justice I'd need to dust it off and make notes, but there are other books ahead of it at the moment on my to read/re-read pile (mainly grammars, and stuff on Chinese), and this thread for me has always been more to just announce and only briefly comment on books that had either caught my eye or indeed that I'd actually proceeded to buy than to provide at all detailed reviews (but if it's reviews you're after, I've looked at learner dictionaries enough to have provided a hopefully not-too-trivial comparison of them by the end of the sticky on the Bilingual Education forum ).

[zorro (3)]

and this thread is like kicking a dead whale up the beach?

ha ha (didn't want to say lol )... the imagery, oh the imagery.

But good work though fluffy.

[fluffyhamster]

Heh, thanks Zorro! I'm not sure when I'll next be posting about 'books hot off the presses', but I might eventually get around to starting a thread to discuss some of the "older" books I (at least) have got - sort of capsule reviews, with the occassional more detailed one, something like that.

[fluffyhamster]

"Brian Browser now concentrating on Chinese and no longer recommending as many TEFL books" shock!
http://uhpress.wordpress.com/2009/04/07 ... n-chinese/
(Fundamental Spoken Chinese, by Robert Sanders & Nora Yao. Uni. of Hawai'i Press, 2009).

[fluffyhamster]

Linked to the Asiaticness of the previous post, here's an old Job Discussion thread about Japan-related 'Good reads':
http://forums.eslcafe.com/job/viewtopic ... 416#696416

But a thread that really was asking to be linked to here is my old 'What are you reading at the moment?' (as pertinent a question as ever! Replies can be made on either this, the Brian Browser thread, or there, to the 'What...?' thread:):
http://forums.eslcafe.com/teacher/viewtopic.php?t=4634

I'm finding the Pussycat Dolls' "Beep" ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACA3XLg-pDk ) playing in the background is somehow helping me concentrate whilst studying things Chinese, and I'm planning on reading a few stories in Stephen King's 'Just After Sunset' (assuming it's not too bad!) tomorrow. As for movies, 'Burn After Reading' is waiting in the DVD player (has to be better than 'Love in the Time of Cholera'! If you like Javier Bardem, stick with 'No Country for Old Men' or 'The Sea Inside'!).

[fluffyhamster]

Looks interesting:
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=McB9SppcDdIC (Applied Linguistics and Language Teacher Education, edited By Nat Bartels. "Applied Linguistics and Language Teacher Education is aimed at applied linguists who are interested in understanding more about the learning of novice teachers in their classes. The 21 studies in this volume provide information on the complexity of novice teachers' learning and use of knowledge in a variety of applied linguistics classes such as SLA, Syntax, Pragmatics, Sociolinguistics, Phonetics and Phonology, L2 Reading and Writing, Testing, and Content Based Instruction. These studies were conducted in a variety of contexts, from North and South America to Europe, Asia and Australia, and look at the preparation of teachers of English, Spanish and Chinese. The book also includes a state-of-the-art summary of research on knowledge acquisition and use which provides applied linguists with a solid basis for developing their ideas about their students' learning and use of the knowledge presented in their classes. Furthermore, valuable information for applied linguists interested in researching the learning in their own classrooms is provided by a chapter evaluating a variety of research methods. Each author also provides "insider" information on the advantages and disadvantages of the research tools they used for investigating questions they have.").

[fluffyhamster]

This could rival and even exceed books like the Blackwell Handbook of AL:
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=h9vs ... PP1&pg=PR7
> http://www.readingmatrix.com/book_revie ... eview4.pdf
(Handbook of Research in Second Language Teaching and Learning, edited by Eli Hinkel. Lawrence Earlbaum Associates, Mahwah, NJ 2005).

Equinox have a lot of interesting-looking books forthcoming:
http://www.equinoxpub.com/books/browse. ... d=&order=3

[fluffyhamster]

"Lucky dip" time!
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ZxbU ... q=&f=false

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=n0KV ... q=&f=false

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=3Oym ... q=&f=false

[fluffyhamster]

Sort of a "plug" for (in the form of an excerpt from) one of Richard Hudson's more recent books, along with a brief mention of one of his earlier ones:
http://forums.eslcafe.com/job/viewtopic ... 560#811560

[fluffyhamster]

Got a spare £250?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/de ... even-poole

[J.M.A.]

Got a spare £250?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/de ... even-poole

Nice!