Using a framework based on principles of teaching and learning, this guide for teachers and teacher trainees provides a wealth of suggestions for helping learners at all levels of proficiency develop their listening and speaking skills and fluency. By following these suggestions, which are organized around four strands – meaning-focused input, meaning-focused output, language-focused learning, and fluency development – teachers will be able to design and present a balanced program for their students. Teaching ESL/EFL Listening and Speaking, and its companion text, Teaching ESL/EFL Reading and Writing, are similar in format and the kinds of topics covered, but do not need to be used together. Drawing on research and theory in applied linguistics, their focus is strongly hands-on, featuring easily applied principles, a large number of useful teaching techniques, and guidelines for testing and monitoring. All Certificate, Diploma, Masters and Doctoral courses for teachers of English as a second or foreign language include a teaching methods component. The texts are designed for and have been field tested in such programs.

An updated, expanded edition of the authoritative book on the teaching and learning of vocabulary in another language.

The second edition of this bestselling text, Teaching ESL/EFL Reading and Writing, is a fully updated and expanded guide for teaching learners at all levels of proficiency how to develop their reading and writing skills and fluency. Practical and accessible, this book covers a diverse array of language teaching techniques suitable for all contexts. Updated with cutting-edge research and theory, the second edition is an essential and engaging text. Key insights and suggestions are organised around four strands – meaning-focused input, meaning-focused output, language-focused learning, and fluency development – to allow teachers to design and present a balanced programme for their students. Bringing together research and theory in applied linguistics and education, the text includes useful examples and practical strategies and features new topics related to technology, assessment, and genre. The second edition includes new tasks and further reading sections in every chapter. Teaching ESL/EFL Reading and Writing is designed for practising and pre-service teachers of all levels, and is ideal for certificate, diploma, masters, and doctoral courses in English as a second or foreign language.

Crystal-clear and comprehensive yet concise, this text describes the steps involved in the curriculum design process, elaborates and justifies these steps, and provides opportunities for practicing and applying them. The description of the steps is done at a general level so that they can be applied in a wide range of particular circumstances. The process comes to life through plentiful examples of actual applications of the steps. Each chapter includes: examples from the authors’ experience and from published research tasks that encourage readers to relate the steps to their own experience case studies and suggestions for further reading that put readers in touch with others’ experience Curriculum, or course, design is largely a 'how-to-do-it' activity that involves the integration of knowledge from many of the areas in the field of Applied Linguistics, such as language acquisition research, teaching methodology, assessment, language description, and materials production. Combining sound research/theory with state-of-the-art practice, Language Curriculum Design is widely applicable for ESL/EFL language education courses around the world.

From leading scholar and applied linguist Paul Nation, this book describes and explains the 20 most effective and efficient language teaching techniques and why they work. Backed by decades of research and expertise, Nation examines the principles of learning connected to these techniques, as well as the factors affecting their choice and usage. These techniques are organized around the four skills of listening, speaking, reading, and writing. For each skill, there is an opportunity for learning through meaning-focused use, an opportunity for learning through deliberate study, and a window for fluency development through working with easy material. Each technique is described and analyzed to demonstrate its learning goals and the principles of learning in use. In demonstrating key techniques and methods for language learning, this book is particularly useful for pre-service teachers and students in applied linguistics, TESOL, and language teaching. Each chapter also has a substantial list of research topics for projects or theses.

Word lists lie at the heart of good vocabulary course design, the development of graded materials for extensive listening and extensive reading, research on vocabulary load, and vocabulary test development. This book has been written for vocabulary researchers and curriculum designers to describe the factors they need to consider when they create frequency-based word lists. These include the purpose for which the word list is to be used, the design of the corpus from which the list will be made, the unit of counting, and what should and should not be counted as words. The book draws on research to show the current state of knowledge of these factors and provides very practical guidelines for making word lists for language teaching and testing. The writer is well known for his work in the teaching and learning of vocabulary and in the creation of word lists and vocabulary size tests based on word lists.

Estimating native-speaker vocabulary size is important for guiding interventions to support native-speaker vocabulary growth and for setting goals for learners of English as a foreign language. Unfortunately, the measurement of native-speaker vocabulary size has been one of the most methodologically contentious areas of research in applied linguistics, with estimates of adults’ vocabulary size ranging from 12,000 words to well over 200,000 words. This book reviews over one hundred years of research, critically examining the methodological issues and findings at each age level from young children to adults, and suggesting solutions. It presents a model organising the factors involved in vocabulary growth and is rich in well-researched suggestions for supporting native-speaker vocabulary learning. It concludes with topics for further research. The research shows that we now have a more stable and coherent picture of what and how much vocabulary native-speakers know, and how this knowledge grows throughout their lives.

Case studies are a powerful pedagogical tool for illuminating constructs and models in real-life contexts. Covering a wide range of teaching-learning contexts and offering in-depth analyses of ESL/ELT language curriculum design issues, this casebook is distinctive and unique in that each case draws on and is clearly linked to a single model presented in Nation and Macalister’s Language Curriculum Design (www.routledge.com/9780415806060), giving the book a high degree of coherence. A short commentary by the editors after each case highlights features of note and/or issues arising from it. This is a versatile text, designed to work as a companion to Language Curriculum Design (adding meaning and depth to the model presented there by relating it to a range of applications), as a stand-alone text, or as a resource for language teacher trainees, teacher educators, practicing teachers, program administrators, and materials writers in the field.