Communicative Language Teaching in Action: Putting Principles to Work

by Klaus Brandl

Communicative Language Teaching in Putting Principles to Work is designed as a basic text that intends to demonstrate principles and practices of communicative language teaching and task-based instruction. Its primary purpose is to serve as a guide for second and foreign language teachers in training or for those who have embarked on a new career as language teachers.

Genres: Education, Reference, Linguistics

472 pages, Paperback

First published November 2, 2007

Reviews

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first encountered this book when I was studying for a graduate degree in teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL). It served as the primary resource for our Methods I and II courses. At the time, I was a transfer student who had already undergone pedagogical training from another institution, which made a lot of this book's content redundant. Because of that, I had a tendency to check out during classes when I probably should've given the book more credit.

Fast forward a few years, and I decided to revisit the book to see what I had overlooked. Suffice it to say, I'm glad I did as Brandl takes a clear approach to translating communicative principles into each domain of an integrated-skills approach to language instruction. I'll be curious to see what the updated version of this book looks like in light of sociocultural/distributed and usage-based theories in second language acquisition. Hopefully he's done some work to reconcile those with CLT.

[Ashley · Rating 2 out of 5]

It has some great ideas and insight into communicative language teaching however it is difficult to follow and incredibly boring. Without my professor's reading guides and lectures to go along with it I don't think I would've gotten much out of it. Definitely not a pleasure read.