Recent years have seen rapid growth in the numbers of children being taught foreign languages at younger ages. While course books aimed at young learners are appearing on the market, there is scant theoretical reference in the teacher education literature. Teaching Languages to Young Learners is one of the few to develop readers' understanding of what happens in classrooms where children are being taught a foreign language. It will offer teachers and trainers a coherent theoretical framework to structure thinking about children's language learning.
A major addition to the growing body of work on communicative language teaching, this book provides a balanced introduction to the theoretical and practical aspects of communicative task design. It is targeted toward all second and foreign language teachers, and is ideal for innovative teachers who wish to develop their own tasks, or adopt/adapt those of others. The purpose of the book is to integrate recent research and practice in language teaching into a framework for analyzing learning tasks.
From Corpus to Classroom: Language Use and Language Teaching
The book explains how corpora can be designed and used, and focuses on what they tell us about language teaching. It examines the relevance of corpora to materials writers, course designers and language teachers and considers the needs of the learner in relation to authentic data.
This book documents current reform initiatives in Japan, the United States, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and continental Europe to provide a global perspective on language teaching for communicative competence. Four major themes recur throughout the volume: the multifaceted nature of language teaching; the highly contextualized nature of CLT; the futility of defining a "native speaker" in the postcolonial, postmodern world; and the overwhelming influence of high-stakes tests on language teaching.
