Through the words of more than 100 practising language teachers, The Experience of Language Teaching provides a detailed picture of teaching and learning in communicative classrooms. Using a teacher-generated framework it covers a range of aspects of classroom life: how teachers create environments suitable for language practice, how they get students 'on-side', how they manage tricky students, how they enhance the learning experience, how they develop and maintain a spirit of community.
The book demonstrates how paying attention to both the learning and social needs of their class groups enables language teachers to behave in flexible ways that promote learning.
This book will be of interest to teachers, teacher educators, researchers and to anyone interested in finding out what it is like to be a language teacher at the present time.
The Experience of Language Teaching was winner of the Ben Warren International Trust House Prize in 2005.
This is an exploratory paper that uses the construct of connectivity to examine the nature of effective language teaching and learning in both face-to-face and online learning environments. Broader in scope than Siemens’ notion of connectivism, the term connectivity accommodates both transmission approaches to teaching and learning and social constructivist views of teaching and learning that accord with Web 2.0’s dialogue-building and social networking tools. The paper identifies five dimensions of connectivity, ranging from the connections that effective teachers make with their students in conventional classroom situations to the ways that effective teachers intuitively seek to meld their students into learning communities in blended and distance learning environments. The notion of connectivity also focuses attention on the complex and changing roles of teachers and their relationships with their classes in both traditional classrooms and more loosely-connected, virtual learning environments. The paper concludes by suggesting that, far from being redundant in a world increasingly shaped by socially-driven online interactions, classroom language teachers have a vital role to play in building and maintaining learning communities in which students are both supportive of, and feel supported by, both their teacher and their peers.
This paper reports on an Australian study that was conducted in two distinct phases. Phase One examined the belief systems of 28 experienced language teachers, while Phase Two used the theoretical framework generated by the teachers to document the social evolution of eight intensive English language classes containing adult learners from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Phase One revealed that language teachers place high value on class cohesion, believing that classes that operate as cohesive groups provide safe environments for language learning. Phase Two described a range of individual and collective classroom behaviours and identi ed a variety of strategies used by teachers in their attempts to develop and maintain class cohesion. The study has implications for pedagogy because it foregrounds the importance of class cohesion and identi es the kinds of classroom behaviours that can enhance the development of cohesiveness in language classes. It also raises the question of the degree to which students do actually feel safe in "safe" learning environments.
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