Though classroom instructional strategies should clearly be based on sound science and research, knowing when to use them and with whom is more of an art. In The Art and Science of Teaching: A Comprehensive Framework for Effective Instruction, author Robert J. Marzano presents a model for ensuring quality teaching that balances the necessity of research-based data with the equally vital need to understand the strengths and weaknesses of individual students.

I recommend this book to teachers hoping to energize their literature or writing classes by positioning all students as creative, ambitious researchers capable of critiquing or even transforming worlds outside the classroom. When I discovered it two months ago, it struck me as just the resource I needed for revitalizing my college survey of multicultural literature for freshman and sophomores, a course which sometimes engaged and sometimes bored students. I have since redesigned materials for the course, using Beach and Myers' idea that to fully understand literature-or our own lives-we must think of individual people (whether characters in a story, authors of those stories, or ourselves and others in the real world) as part of larger systems or "social worlds," acting to protect and continue those systems or to challenge and change them. The book clearly delineates the components of social worlds and is full of sample activities and assignments; with these, I have revised my own discussion questions,presentation assignments and writing prompts. I have also shown Chapter 8, "School and Sports Worlds," to several high school teachers who now plan to assign the ethnographic inquiry projects outlined there rather than assigning traditional research papers. This is a practical, accessible, entirely useable book.

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 collection problematizes prescription, efficiency, and technical solutions as orientations to classroom language learning. Complexity and idiosyncrasy, on the other hand, are recognized as central concepts in a move towards centralizing teachers' and learners' own understanding of "classroom life", in the contexts of language learning, adult literacy education and language teacher education.

 

Not another English Book! Indeed, not at all. In this new and exciting text, Dave Hopkins has managed to make the leap from the same old tired textbook filled with the same old tired content, into an important new arena. Smooth Moves is not a text about content, grammar, and language utilization. Smooth Moves is not a "what to teach" textbook, it is an entry into what to do in the classroom, on a daily basis, to facilitate language acquisition.