Skip to main content

Review: Key Issues in Language Teaching

Key Issues in Language Teaching is an impressive 800 page volume by veteran ELT writer Jack C. Richards and published by Cambridge University Press in 2015. Although Richards is from the ELT field, this book would be of great interest to modern language teachers.

The book is divided into four major sections:

1. English language teaching today
2. Facilitating student learning
3. Language and the four skills
4. The teacher's environment

The 21 chapter titles include:

Second language learning
Approaches and methods
The language lesson
Age-appropriate methodology
Grammar
Vocabulary
Listening
Reading
Speaking Textbooks
Technology
Testing and assessment

Chapters usually include an overview of the main theory and research in the area, practical ways of applying theory in the classroom, teacher testimonies, lesson plans and other resources.

For example, his chapter on listening discusses approaches to teaching listening, one-way and two-way listening, features of listening which cause difficulty, top-down and bottom-up processing and strategies, the listening lesson and assessing listening. He gives just the right amount of detail before rounding off, as with other chapters, with a handy summary of key points.

Richards has a very clear written style which is well suited to his target readership of teachers. Although he makes frequent reference to research, quoting the leading scholars in each area, e.g. Paul Nation for vocabulary and John Field for listening, the reader never feels overloaded with detailed references. The style is always easy and, no doubt, the result of some excellent editing.

His coverage of different approaches is balanced, allowing equal weight to audiolingualism, natural, communicative and oral-situational approaches, task-based teaching and project based learning. Trainee teachers would find this an excellent overview (even obviating the need to buy Richards' other excellent book on approaches and methods).

One way in which the book manages to avoid being dry is the inclusion of teacher testimonies - boxes where individual teachers talk about their own experience. there is a brief bio of each of these contributors at the back of the book. In addition, the lesson plans, while relating to ELT, could often be adapted for MFL teaching.

One chapter which may be less relevant to classroom MFL teachers is the final one on professional development, which specifically targets EFL teachers.

Overall I can thoroughly recommend this manual. It's a book you can dip in and out of and one which provides a firm theoretical and practical foundation for both novice and more experienced teachers who wish to deepen their understanding. At around £40 on Amazon it is not cheap, but the price is justified by the length of the book and the huge amount of work which went into it. Jack C. Richards is one of my favourite writers about second language learning and this might be his magnum opus.

Here is Jack talking about the book.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

What is the natural order hypothesis?

The natural order hypothesis states that all learners acquire the grammatical structures of a language in roughly the same order. This applies to both first and second language acquisition. This order is not dependent on the ease with which a particular language feature can be taught; in English, some features, such as third-person "-s" ("he runs") are easy to teach in a classroom setting, but are not typically fully acquired until the later stages of language acquisition. The hypothesis was based on morpheme studies by Heidi Dulay and Marina Burt, which found that certain morphemes were predictably learned before others during the course of second language acquisition. The hypothesis was picked up by Stephen Krashen who incorporated it in his very well known input model of second language learning. Furthermore, according to the natural order hypothesis, the order of acquisition remains the same regardless of the teacher's explicit instruction; in other words,

What is skill acquisition theory?

For this post, I am drawing on a section from the excellent book by Rod Ellis and Natsuko Shintani called Exploring Language Pedagogy through Second Language Acquisition Research (Routledge, 2014). Skill acquisition is one of several competing theories of how we learn new languages. It’s a theory based on the idea that skilled behaviour in any area can become routinised and even automatic under certain conditions through repeated pairing of stimuli and responses. When put like that, it looks a bit like the behaviourist view of stimulus-response learning which went out of fashion from the late 1950s. Skill acquisition draws on John Anderson’s ACT theory, which he called a cognitivist stimulus-response theory. ACT stands for Adaptive Control of Thought.  ACT theory distinguishes declarative knowledge (knowledge of facts and concepts, such as the fact that adjectives agree) from procedural knowledge (knowing how to do things in certain situations, such as understand and speak a language).

La retraite à 60 ans

Suite à mon post récent sur les acquis sociaux..... L'âge légal de la retraite est une chose. Je voudrais bien savoir à quel âge les gens prennent leur retraite en pratique - l'âge réel de la retraite, si vous voulez. J'ai entendu prétendre qu'il y a peu de différence à cet égard entre la France et le Royaume-Uni. Manifestation à Marseille en 2008 pour le maintien de la retraite à 60 ans © AFP/Michel Gangne Six Français sur dix sont d’accord avec le PS qui défend la retraite à 60 ans (BVA) Cécile Quéguiner Plus de la moitié des Français jugent que le gouvernement a " tort de vouloir aller vite dans la réforme " et estiment que le PS a " raison de défendre l’âge légal de départ en retraite à 60 ans ". Résultat d’un sondage BVA/Absoluce pour Les Échos et France Info , paru ce matin. Une majorité de Français (58%) estiment que la position du Parti socialiste , qui défend le maintien de l’âge légal de départ à la retraite à 60 ans,