Background
2
between people who are non-native speakers. Most sections of each chapter start
with focusing questions and a display of defining keywords, and end with discus-
sion topics and further reading.
Contact with the language teaching classroom is maintained in this book chiefly
through the discussion of published coursebooks and syllabuses, usually for teach-
ing English. Even if good teachers use books
only as a jumping-off point, they can
provide a window into many classrooms. The books and syllabuses cited are taken
from countries ranging from Germany to Japan to Cuba, though inevitably the bias
is towards coursebooks published in England for reasons of accessibility. Since many
modern language teaching coursebooks are depressingly similar in orientation, the
examples of less familiar approaches have often been taken from older coursebooks.
This book talks about only a fraction of the SLA research on a given topic, often
presenting only one or two of the possible approaches. It concentrates on those
based
on ideas about language, that is, applied linguistics, rather than those com-
ing from psychology or education. Nevertheless it covers more areas of SLA
research than most books that link SLA research to language teaching, for exam-
ple, taking in pronunciation, vocabulary and writing, among other areas. It uses
ideas from the wealth of research produced
in the past twenty years or so, rather
than just the most recent. Sometimes it has to go beyond the strict borders of SLA
research itself to include topics such as the position of English in the world and
the power of native speakers over their language.
The book is linked to an extensive website:
www.hoddereducation.com/viviancook
.
This contains pages for this book, such as questionnaires, displays, language data,
summaries, lists of links, and so on, as well as a great
deal of other SLA informa-
tion not specific to the book. The pages can be downloaded and printed. The main
entry point is the index. The mouse symbol in the book indicates that there is a
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