Teacher Discussion Forums

Do any of the more experienced of the posters out there have any suggestions on books to help me develop as a teacher? I'm not talking about activity material or textbooks, but rather books to work on my theoretical understanding and methodology. (Please no recommendations for the Jeremy Harmer book that you buy on the CELTA/cert.TESOL course.) I'd like to read something relating to teaching listening skills, but please don't limit things to this area. (I should add I'm primarily interested in adult stuff.)

Things I've read recently that I thought were worth the effort were:

C. Nuttal: Teaching Reading Skills in a foreign language

Krashen: The Natural Approach (which I've actually not quite finished yet)

Any suggestions welcome
Stephen

Well, Stephen, you already seem pretty well-read judging from the quality of your posts.

However, since you ask, here are a few of the titles I've read and which consistently inform my thinking in this wonderful area of language acquisition. They are in no particular order.

1. Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct, 1994, Wm. Morrow Publishing, New York.

2. Michael Lewis, The English Verb, 1987, Language Teaching Publications, Hove, England.

3. Michael Lewis, The Lexical Approach, 1993, Language Teaching Publications, Hove, England.

4. Mark Baker, The Atoms of Language, 2001, Basic Books, New York.

5. Michael McCarthy & Ronald Carter, Language as Discourse, 1994, Longman, London.

6. Mark Bartram & Richard Walton, Correction, 1991, Language Teaching Publications, Hove, England.

7. Steven Pinker, Words & Rules, 1999, Orion Publishing, London.

Some of these you may have already read, but perhaps there is something here you will find interesting and which you've not yet had the pleasure. Happy reading.

Larry Latham
P.S. If you've read all of these, drop me a PM. I've a few more suggestions if you're interested.

Thanks for the quick reply. I shall definitaley be trying to find the Lexical Approach (immediately post-payday), it comes up so often on this forum that I figure it must be worth a read. Are any of the books particularly strong on listening skills methodology?

Have you (or any of the other posters) heard of something called ARC (the teaching methodology not necessarily the book) by an author called Scrivner? I understand it's supposed to be something like PPP version 2.0.

Cheers for the advice
Stephen

The LEXICAL APPROACH has been warmly recommended to me, and I have in fact received a few emails from the publishers. It does sound interesting!
I am afraid, I have never had a chance of reading any of the works mentioned by Larry - Pinker is a very famous name, apparently!

Stephen and Roger, Michael Lewis is most certainly an advocate of developing listening skills. In fact, he believes they are more essential than speaking skills, which he feels will come later when students are ready. I guess Krashen would agree.

If my memory serves, I think there are a few sample exercises in The Lexical Approach (and also in the sequel, Implementing The Lexical Approach) that might get you started in the right direction, but the book is not a methodological manual. It is a theoretical treatise, but one which he clearly ties into teacher training and classroom behavior and method. Lewis seems to be more of a teacher than a linguist, and a heck of a smart one.

I do highly recommend his work. The English Verb is responsible for my considerable interest in the language. It is by far the most illuminating explanation of how verbs work that I've ever encountered. There is so much info in such a small book. (I've read it eight times, learning more each time.)

Good luck with your reading. I hope you find some of these titles worthwhile.

Larry Latham
And BTW, Roger, Pinker is good reading. Among other things, he is an excellent writer and has a way of fascinating his readers with his subjects. As hard to put down as a good novel.

Almost forgot, Stephen,

Never have heard of ARC, nor Scrivner, nor PPP version 2 (unless by PPP you mean the Present, Practice, Produce paradigm --which Michael Lewis says has been thoroughly rejected in modern theory).

Larry Latham

Teaching Listening Comprehension by Penny Ur is one of those CUP books that has about 20 pages of theory and then a bunch of activities. A book that is mostly theory but not all listening: Teaching English as a second or Foreign Language.

James Trotta
http://www.eslgo.com

To whet your appetite just a bit more for Pinker, here is an excerpt from a peer review of The Language Instinct written by Daniel Dennett (Professor and Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University):

Pinker's [book] includes fascinating excursions into somewhat more far-flung curiosities and controversies about language. I particularly recommend his witty--but not mean-spirited--debunking of the "language-mavens," those self-appointed authorities on the proprieties of language who have worked for centuries to get us all to give ourselves airs when we use words. Pulling the rug out from under these well-meaning scolds is not the independent digression into social criticism one might think; Pinker grounds his criticisms firmly in the undeniable facts about language as a biological phenomenon that have emerged in recent research. He introduces the topic with a deliciously apt comparison:

"Imagine that you are watching a nature documentary. The video shows the usual gorgeous footage of animals in their natural habitats. But the voiceover reports some troubling facts. Dolphins do not execute their swimming strokes properly. White-crowned sparrows carelessly debase their calls. . . . Who is this announcer, anyway?" (p.370)

Yes, a grammar is a normative system, which quite sharply distinguishes between proper and improper formulations, but it is also a natural phenomenon, designed over the eons by evolution. The comically shortsighted attempts by old-style grammarians to give Mother Nature a little assistance in the quality control department betray a fundamental misapprehension about language that Pinker seeks--successfully--to dispel.

Perhaps that will give you just the nudge you need to buy the book and read it. I promise you'll not regret having done so, even if you disagree with Pinker's ideas. It's a terrific read just for the passion he brings to his field, which happens to be closely related to ours.

All the best.

Larry Latham

Larry

Thanks for the reply. By PPP I did mean Presentation, Practice, Production, the PPP version 2.0 was my feeble attempt at an anology with computer products. I personaly do not use it too much, fascinating as the use of gap-fills is. However, I think that for someone starting out it gives some form of useable structure. Of course, I'm really interested in looking at the range of alternatives out there. What interested me about the ARC idea is that I've heard that it allows the PPP process with the components in any order. This sounds a bit like how I handle first and second conditional. Controlled practice (no gap-fills!!)(eg. sentence completion, question answering, chaining), Production (eg. negotiation via mediators) and then when we have dealt with both first and second I get the students to explain them to me, including how they are different.

Anyway, thanks for the help and the reading list.

Cheers
Stephen

PS. You've definitely put Pinkler on my list too!!

James

Thanks for the recommendations. I have Ur's Grammar Practice Activities, which is excellent. I will definitely be on the look out for her book on listening.

Thanks again
Stephen

I'd like to counterbalance the enthusiasm for Pinker. Not because I don't think he's a good writer, but because I think he's wrong. My interest was piqued a couple of years ago when I started doing some reading on language acquisition (starting off with The Language Instinct).

It seems to me that if we want to understand what language is, we have to have a coherent theory of where it comes from, and it rapidly became clear to me that Pinker's account of where language comes from evolutionarily is full of holes - on account of his being generally Chomskyan in his approach. Terrence Deacon's The Symbolic Species, while not being an easy read (there is quite a lot of neurobiology which I wouldn't claim to understand) gives, for me, a much more sensible account of the origin of language and, therefore, what it is.

I would also like to second (or third? ) the nominations of Michael Lewis' work. I don't think he's 100% right, but he's a couple of steps closer than the majority of ESL/EFL textbooks...

Hmmm. You've whetted my appetite for looking into Terrence Deacon, szwagier.

Larry Latham

LarryLatham wrote:

"Imagine that you are watching a nature documentary. The video shows the usual gorgeous footage of animals in their natural habitats. But the voiceover reports some troubling facts. Dolphins do not execute their swimming strokes properly. White-crowned sparrows carelessly debase their calls. . . . Who is this announcer, anyway?" (p.370)

Absolutely right! It's more to language than just "logic" and "correctness". It's a natural phenomenon, not some kind of dead robotic construction. This might explain the failure and ultimate futility of Esperanto and all the other "perfectly logical" artificial languages (there have been hundreds of attempts so far). Although Esperanto does certainly seem tempting with regard to its logic and easyness to learn (although even here it begs a question - FOR WHOM it is easy to learn?), I should say that its a lifeless edifice. No LIFE, just DEAD CORRECTNESS, DEAD LOGIC, nothing that gives life to all the LIVING languages! I guess this is one of those attempts to find fault with the Nature's ways that Pinker describes.

Steven,

I think "Lexical Approach" is too much of a theory. "Implementing the Lexical Approach" should be much more helpful to you in developing your teaching strategies. I happen to have a copy - if you care to drop in, you could borrow it from me

Vytenis

I'm probably stating the obvious, but the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English is a splendid reference work on how English is actually used by native speakers of the language (across four different registers - interestingly, the authors point out in the introduction that grammar varies much more widely across register than it does across dialect).

Whether or not one believes that learners of ESL (and still less EFL) should learn to use the language like native-speakers, the book has enough info to keep an active reader busy for years!