From Experience to Knowledge in ELT. Julian Edge

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      JULIAN EDGE, SUE GARTON

      From Experience to Knowledge in ELT

      Also published in

      Oxford Handbooks for Language Teachers

      ESOL: A Critical Guide

      Melanie Cooke and James Simpson

      The Oxford ESOL Handbook

      Philida Schellekens

      Teaching American English Pronunciation

      Peter Avery and Susan Ehrlich

      Success in English Teaching

      Paul Davies and Eric Pearse

      Doing Second Language Research

      James Dean Brown and Theodore S. Rodgers

      Teaching Business English

      Mark Ellis and Christine Johnson

      Intercultural Business Communication

      Robert Gibson

      Teaching and Learning in the Language Classroom

      Tricia Hedge

      Teaching Second Language Reading

      Thom Hudson

      Teaching English Overseas: An Introduction

      Sandra Lee McKay

      Teaching English as an International Language

      Sandra Lee McKay

      How Languages are Learned (3rd edition)

      Patsy M. Lightbown and Nina Spada

      Communication in the Language Classroom

      Tony Lynch

      Teaching Young Language Learners

      Annamaria Pinter

      Doing Task-based Teaching

      Jane Willis and Dave Willis

      Explaining English Grammar

      George Yule

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      First published 2009

      2012 2011 2010 2009

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      ISBN 978 0 19 442271 0

      Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India

      Printed in China

      To Karolina, as she makes her own way.

      To Enzo, per tutti.

      ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

      Photos reproduced with kind permission from: Agence France Presse 145 (traffic/Dominic Burke); Alamy 46 (mobile phone/D. Hurst); Corbis 144 (bristlecone pine/D.S. Robins), Cyclepods Ltd 118 (cycle stand); Getty Images 145 (old women/Z. Kulunzny), 151 (man with laptop/Bilderlounge), 58 (man at reception); Getty Images/Foodpix 95 (cooked prawns/Burke/Triolo Productions); Oxford University Press 145 (the OED image is reprinted by permission of the Secretary to the Delegates of Oxford University Press); Powerstock Superstock 144 (disaster); Roberstock.com 145 (plane/L. Smith); Jodi Waxman/OUP 95 (student visitor greeted), 95 (student visitor in bedroom).

      Illustrations in extracts by: Stephan Conlin 58 (town plan); Phil Disley 148 (distracted driver), 110 (‘Welcome to Folkestone’); Martha Gavin 120 (noisy party neighbours); Harry Venning 94 (‘I look just like my father’). All other illustrations by Chris Pavely.

      ‘Popular opinions about language learning and teaching’ on page 7 reproduced with kind permission from Patsy M. Lightbown and Nina Spada.

      ‘Weather Report’ chant on page 25 reproduced with kind permission from Carolyn Graham.

      Before it took its own direction, this book had started life as a revision and updating of Essentials of English Language Teaching. It has come a long way since then, but an overall attitude and framework, along with some of the basic content, has survived. Plus ça change …

      Our sincere thanks to Nur Kurtoğlu-Hooton for her dedicated collegiality and her comments on an earlier draft of this book.

      INTRODUCTION

      Who is this book for?

      This book is for people who:

      • are keen to teach and eager to learn

      • realize that their own previous and continuing experience plays an important role in what they learn and how they teach

      • recognize that learning from experience involves more than just having experience

      • believe that understanding a situation is more important than abstract theory, but that learning new concepts and terminology can help them to understand a situation better

      • want to turn their experience (as language learners and teachers) into knowledge, so as to improve the quality of their future teaching.

      If you recognize yourself in any of the above, this book is for you.

      About theory and practice

      You may often hear a teacher say, It’s all right in theory, but it doesn’t work in practice. However, as authors and teachers, our position is that, if something is not useful in practice, then it is not all right in theory, either. In fact, this book moves away completely from the view that teaching is about applying theories. The position