Understanding the Courses We Teach is a collection of pieces by teachers about actual teaching situations. This volume provides current and prospective ESL teachers with the opportunity to examine experienced teachers' ways of addressing locally situated issues of teaching and learning within ESL and EFL classrooms. By focusing on individual teachers' discussions of instructional plans, decisions, and experiences in specific courses, this collection complements other training and development resources, such as methods-course textbooks.
Individual chapters are rich in descriptive details and resonate with the contributor-teachers' personal investment in teaching. John Murphy and Patricia Byrd have arranged these chapters in four thematic clusters, the first dealing with general purposes instruction, including workplace literacy, community-based ESL, and courses designed for rich recent immigrants; the second with the teaching of English as a foreign language; the third with university credit-bearing courses focused on the teaching of English for academic purposes; and the fourth with noncredit university-affiliated courses offered through intensive English programs.
The contributors represent a variety of educational settings and many different countries and include many of the most well-known researchers in the field.
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