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38 - Book Reviews
Recipes for Tired Teachers edited by Chris Sion Alta Book Center Publishers 2004 1-932383-00-X According to the curious note on its inside cover, this book is ‘dedicated to all those language students throughout the world who are just sitting there in class’. My own interpretation of this is that Sion and his colleagues aim to get those students doing much more than just sit there. Another of their goals is that this book be ‘user-friendly for language teachers’. They just might have achieved both those worthwhile, ambitious objectives. The book, a new edition of an old favourite, has activities for every language level, labelled helpfully ‘Low intermediate and above’, or ‘Advanced’, or ‘All’ and so on. Moreover, these labels appear prominently throughout the contents pages, as well as at the top of each ‘recipe’ page. The contents page itself is segmented, so that activities for ‘Group dynamics’ are chunked together, whereas ‘Creative writing and thinking’ are chunked together in the following unit; all told, there are eight such units (the last being ‘Fun and games’), comprising 81 activities. The contents page also directs your attention to the index, which has these three important sections: ‘Instant Recipes’ (activities which require no preparation), ‘Recipes by Level’ and ‘Recipes by Language Function’. This intensely user-friendly map-routing of the book is its best feature, regardless of the quality of the ‘recipes’ themselves (which I’ll come to in a moment). Imagine yourself, rushing toward school for a lastminute substitution. You pick up this book as soon as you get to the staffroom, and within, I reckon, 45 seconds, you’ve identified two or three decent activities that you can take into class. The activities themselves really are as heralded: ‘well-seasoned activities for language learning’. Experienced teachers might read some of these recipes and think they’ve seen it all before. Nonetheless, it’s still wholesome fare to serve up for your students on those days when you might be a bit tired, uninspired, late or disorganised. Some of the recipes are a bit wordy, so inexperienced teachers may need to allow themselves at least 15 minutes to get their heads around them. Bear that in mind. In any case, though, each recipe has two important info-boxes, ‘materials’ and ‘before class’, emblazoned across the top to help you get a feel for what’s below (and to help you decide whether you really have time to digest this recipe properly before class, or whether you should instead carry on scanning the rest of the menu). Whether you’re a puffed-out old practitioner or an overwhelmed newcomer, you’ll need a book like this more often than you might admit. David Hogg Barcelona, Spain Stepping Stones by Eva Hoffman and Susan Norman Saffire Press 2004 1-901564-09-6 ‘This book is for everyone who wants to work with children in a more mind-andheart- friendly way ... promote the personal growth and improve the children’s ability to learn.’ This is the foundation on which the two well-known authors have based this fabulous book, which guides the teacher through seven essential topics of Accelerated Learning: Building Self- Esteem, Developing Emotional Intelligence, Thinking Creatively with Mind Mapping, Moving to Enhance Learning, Discovering your Amazing Brain, Maximising your Multiple Intelligences and Using your Senses for Learning. Additionally, each topic offers lesson plans at three progressive levels. Right at the beginning, the authors have a very important message for all teachers: before you give an exercise to children, do it yourself! In other words, learn how to be a positive, friendly, understanding and helpful teacher who not only teaches English but also develops mutual respect, self-esteem and emotional intelligence, guiding the learners through the meanders of different learning techniques; a teacher who takes the best out of learners and makes their learning process more effective and more fun; a teacher who actually believes in and practises all the principles of friendly learning. My favourite lesson is Mistake Monsters (Lesson 8). Here the authors draw our attention to the fact that in a positive learning environment mistakes should be treated as a necessary part of learning, and it is the teacher’s role to take fear away from the children and make them realise that making mistakes is natural, everybody makes them and they are not bad learners because of them. Although this may sound like a cliché to many good teachers all over the world, in practice, however, we are still very often confronted with the opposite situation. I have seen too many children in tears at the mere sight of a red marker, the terrifying symbol of a monster called MISTAKE. Therefore I really like the idea of making friends with our mistakes by creating personal, funny ‘mistake monsters’ with silly names like Squeak or Assa Drassa. They make you smile and take the stress away. Whenever you make a mistake, you just say ‘Oh Squeak!’ and laugh or ‘Oh Assa Drassa! Thank you for helping me learn!’ Children should think of their own funny-sounding names for their mistake monsters which will make them laugh every time they think of them. They can press their thumbs on their drawing of the ‘Squeak’ mistake monster, make it look small and unimportant, laugh, relax and learn better. My second favourite idea in the book is that of letting go of labels. Labelling people is a kind of a mental short-cut and I dare say each of us, even the best and most experienced teachers, have been tempted to do so, at least once! But labels are destructive; they cause harm – sometimes for a lifetime – so they should be avoided. The authors suggest that teachers, together with their pupils, should learn and always remember to label actions rather than people: to say ‘You haven’t done the work’ rather than ‘You are lazy’; to say ‘That answer was wrong’ rather than ‘You’re rubbish at maths’. Further on, the authors suggest a few interesting activities, such as A day without labels, when all name-calling is banned and posters are made, or Labelproof armour, which includes some useful advice on how to defend ourselves against others outside class who might tease us and call us bad names. Last but not least, the sections on moving to enhance learning offer some useful ‘wake-up’ exercises to be done in class. Cross-patting or Crossed wrists and ankles will be a blessing to all those hyperactive children stuck motionless in classrooms for hours as well as providing a short break for tired teachers; Brain buttons is a useful stimulation for the brain. All these socalled ‘integrated movements’ make our brains work more efficiently, reconnect both brain hemispheres, maintain existing connections and create new connections between grey cells. All in all, I think it is a great book, which should not only be widely used in class with students but also on teacher training courses. Irena Köstenbauer Vienna, Austria Task-based Language Learning and Teaching by Rod Ellis Oxford University Press 2003 0-19-442159-7 Rod Ellis is one of the best-known authors in the field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) and language pedagogy. As such, in this book he writes with expertise in an accessible and reader-friendly style, offering an updated view of this important area of language teaching and research. For those who are not well-acquainted with task-based teaching, the book brings a glossary and a warning: this is not a ‘how to’ book. On the contrary, the book attempts to answer a number of key questions in the field, looking at the problems as well as the advantages offered by the approach. There are ten chapters, each of which has a specific objective. The first chapter, for example, offers a framework for describing tasks and provides an overview of the key issues through the examination of tasks from the perspective of both SLA research and language pedagogy. The author concludes the chapter with a short but inspiring discussion of the relationship between researching and teaching tasks which touches on the half-century-old question of the gap between research and pedagogy. The other chapters can be divided into two main areas, corresponding to the areas presented in the title, that is, language learning (Chapters 2 to 6) and language teaching (Chapters 7 to 10). Chapter 2 deals with the relationship between listening comprehension and language learning, and how listening tasks can contribute to both teaching and research. Chapter 3 deals with interaction tasks, which are said to have a potential relationship with language acquisition. The author discusses how tasks are carried out in interaction, focusing on three major areas of importance to the relationship between task and language use: negotiation of meaning, communicative strategies and communicative effectiveness. Chapters 4 and 5 deal with tasks in relation to learner output, that is, how tasks affect the learners’ overall fluency, accuracy and language complexity. While Chapter 4 is concerned with the production that results from unfocused tasks, Chapter 5 considers learners’ output in focused tasks. Still concerned with language learning, Chapter 6 adopts an alternative view based on the Sociocultural Theory of Mind (SCT). First, the author provides a short but consistent outline of the main tenets of SCT and then reviews some task-based research which draws on this theory and its constructs. Chapters 7, 8 and 9 are concerned with language teaching and, therefore, with more practical issues for those teachers who want to adopt the taskbased approach. Chapter 7 deals with the design of task-based syllabuses and Chapter 8 with the methodology of taskbased teaching. The use of a task-based approach for language assessment – a topic that could not be missing from such a comprehensive volume – is dealt with in Chapter 9. Finally, in the last chapter, the author discusses why the task-based approach has not been very much used as the basis for language pedagogy, although it has clearly proved itself as an effective tool for language learning. He also tries to address several theoretical criticisms that have been made of task-based teaching and suggests that teacher training programmes can help to make task-based teaching methodology betterknown to teachers and thus help to spread the approach in language pedagogy. This is, certainly, a highly recommended book. Andréa Machado de Almeida Mattos Belo Horizonte, Brazil |
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