There’s a very interesting discussion taking place on Scott Thornbury’s blog right now, sparked by his brilliant “feel” post. The central question he attempts to address is one which has been incessantly nagging at me for at least fifteen years:
ELT methodology
ESL textbooks – the current orthodoxy
What do modern EFL/ESL textbooks look like?
This is a post I wrote before I became a full time author, back in 2011.
Over the past few months I’ve analyzed dozens of EFL / ESL textbooks (I’m using the terms interchangeably) put out by the mainstream publishing houses. For better and for worse, all these EFL / ESL textbooks have more similarities than differences, which means that it’s becoming increasingly harder to choose title A over title B. Here’s a summary of what I’ve found so far:
Learning styles – yes, it’s complicated.
People are different and learn in different ways, of course, perhaps regardless of whatever unique language-specific mechanisms we might believe are at play in the process. It’s only natural, then, that the teacher should strive to meet her students’ learning styles in the best possible way.
Or is it?
Is it OK to use translation in class?
This post is my answer to an agony letter I received a while ago. The question was “Is teaching through translation a good idea?”