Understanding the Language Classroom

This edited volume problematizes prescription, efficiency, and technical solutions as orientations to classroom language learning. The ideas that have found most resonance in the contributors' attempts at understanding language classroom life are the inherent complexity and idiosyncrasy of classroom life, the central importance of the participants' own understandings, the relationship between classroom life and teachers' and students' lives, negotiation between teachers and learners, the relationship between the local and the global, and the 'quality' of classroom life. These themes are addressed in the contexts of language learning, adult literacy education and language teacher education. The starting point for this collection is an original paper by Dick Allwright in which he outlines his view of Six Promising Directions in Applied Linguistics. The other distinguished contributors respond to this discussion with their own interpretations and from their own experience. The contributors are Michael P. Breen, Maria Antonieta Alba Celani, Hywel Coleman, John F. Fanselow and Roger Barnard, Donald Freeman, Simon Gieve and Ines K. Miller, Adrian Holliday, Ming-I Lydia Tseng and Roz IvaniAi, Elaine E. Tarone, Tony Wright and Devon Woods. Kathleen Bailey's Foreword sets the scene.