{"id":1483,"date":"2011-04-12T10:00:56","date_gmt":"2011-04-12T08:00:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/elanguage.net\/blogs\/booknotices\/?p=1483"},"modified":"2011-03-30T13:18:35","modified_gmt":"2011-03-30T11:18:35","slug":"the-handbook-of-language-teaching","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/?p=1483","title":{"rendered":"The handbook of language teaching"},"content":{"rendered":"<div style=\"margin-left: 2em; text-indent: -2em;\"><strong>The handbook of language teaching<\/strong>. Ed. by <strong>Michael H. Long<\/strong> and <strong>Catherine J. Doughty<\/strong>. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. Pp. xix, 824. ISBN <a href=\"http:\/\/www.worldcat.org\/title\/handbook-of-language-teaching\/oclc\/295556435&amp;referer=brief_results\">9781405154895<\/a>. $209.95 (Hb).<\/div>\n<p style=\"text-align: right;\">Reviewed by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.public.asu.edu\/~gelderen\/elly.htm\"><strong>Elly van Gelderen<\/strong><\/a>, <em>Arizona State University<\/em><\/p>\n<p>As a linguist who teaches linguistics and syntax classes that graduate students in applied linguistics and English language teaching often take, I was looking for a state-of-the-art volume to recommend to my students. This volume admirably fills that need. One of its valuable features is that it includes discussions of many languages besides English (which of course remains the most widely taught language).<\/p>\n<p>The book contains thirty-nine chapters divided into eight parts. After <strong>Michael Long<\/strong>\u2019s overview in Part 1, Part 2, \u2018Social, political, and educational contexts of language teaching\u2019, includes articles on the sociolinguistics of bi- and multilingual situations and issues such as diversity, language variation, planning and first language maintenance, Kachru\u2019s circles, democracy, and access for all. Part 3, \u2018Psycholinguistic underpinnings of language learning\u2019, has five chapters, two of which are noteworthy. <strong>Alan Beretta<\/strong>\u2019s \u2018The language-learning brain\u2019 (65\u201380) is a sensible call for neurolinguists to turn from descriptions based on thousands of imaging studies and think more theoretically about the relation between neurology and linguistics. <strong>Lourdes Ortega<\/strong>\u2019s \u2018Sequences and processes in language learning\u2019 (81\u2013105) provides a useful overview of the systematic stages of an interlanguage.<\/p>\n<p>Part 4, \u2018Program design\u2019, contains articles on the bilingual classroom, immersion, heritage learners, specific purpose programs, study abroad programs, less commonly taught languages, and the acquisition of third languages. Part 5, \u2018Course design and materials writing\u2019, is very practical. <strong>James Dean Brown<\/strong>\u2019s \u2018Foreign and second language needs analysis\u2019 (269\u201393) explains what needs analysis is and how to do it. <strong>Peter Robinson<\/strong>\u2019s chapter on syllabus design (294\u2013310) provides some historical background and a discussion of different syllabi (structural, lexical, skill, and task). In \u2018Advances in materials design\u2019 (311\u201326) <strong>Alan Waters<\/strong> explains the enormity of such tasks as authenticity in textbooks, and in \u2018Corpora in language teaching\u2019 (327\u201350) <strong>John Flowerdew <\/strong>argues that the initially slow application of corpus linguistics to the classroom has been beneficial to current practice.<\/p>\n<p>Part 6, \u2018Teaching and testing\u2019, is the longest section, with thirteen chapters comprising 375 pages. Many chapters discuss the pendulum swings between grammar-based and communication-based teaching. After a methodological overview, the first four chapters examine the various language skills separately, listening, speaking, reading, and writing, followed by <strong>Keiko Koda<\/strong>\u2019s \u2018Learning to read in new writing systems\u2019 (463\u201385). Other chapters discuss teaching and testing grammar (<strong>Diane Larsen-Freeman<\/strong>), vocabulary (<strong>Paul Nation<\/strong> and <strong>Teresa Chung<\/strong>), and pragmatics (<strong>Carsten Roever<\/strong>), among other topics. Part 7 on teacher education and Part 8, \u2018Assessing and evaluating instruction\u2019, complete the volume with, among other issues, a discussion of the proper extent to which acquisition theory should be incorporated in classroom practice.<\/p>\n<p>Overall I found that the current volume compares favorably with the two other handbooks in this series that I have reviewed in being helpful to beginning applied linguistics graduate students. It covers wide ground in a very user-friendly fashion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The handbook of language teaching. Ed. by Michael H. Long and Catherine J. Doughty. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. Pp. xix, 824. ISBN 9781405154895. $209.95 (Hb). Reviewed by Elly van Gelderen, Arizona State University As a linguist who teaches linguistics and syntax classes that graduate students in applied linguistics and English language teaching often take, I was [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1483"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1483"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1483\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1484,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1483\/revisions\/1484"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1483"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1483"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1483"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}