Communicative Language Teaching in Action: Putting Principles to Work

by Klaus Brandl

Communicative Language and Teaching in Putting Principles to Work serves as an engaging and informative guide for second and foreign language teachers in training or for those pursuing a new career as language educators. The text demonstrates principles and practices of communicative and task-based language teaching, equipping readers with an innovative and effective approach to language instruction. The conceptual foundation of the book is based upon theoretical and empirical findings drawn from second language acquisition research, cognitive psychology, and brain research. It emphasizes successful instructional practices in a communicative and task-based approach to language learning. The book features copious examples of learning activities in different languages and lessons developed by experienced language teachers. Dedicated chapters cover the principles of communicative language teaching and task-based instruction; lesson planning; vocabulary and grammar in language learning; feedback and error correction; the development of listening, oral communication, reading, and writing skills; and assessment. The second edition features updated literature review in all chapters, new and dynamic teacher-training tasks, and reorganized and fresh content throughout the text, as well as a new chapter on writing and language learning. Communicative Language Teaching in Action is an ideal resource for courses and programs in foreign language education.

Genres: Education, Reference, Linguistics

522 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.