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Issue 21 Number
1, September 2011
In this edition, Ling and Kettle
investigate the teaching of listening, arguing for the importance
of teaching strategies which enable and extend comprehension.
Through a synthesis of current research, the authors develop
guidelines to help teachers better equip students to understand and
respond to 'real world' oral texts.
In their contribution, Nicholas,
Starks and MacDonald reflect on a day-long workshop for in-service
ESL teachers, which in turn had a focus on participant reflection
and self-positioning in relation to various forms of knowledge and
practice. They show how the workshop developed a greater
appreciation for, amongst other things, the place of student
identity as a part of learning, and the value of mistakes. Their
piece resonates with others in this edition in emphasising the
importance of maximising opportunities for knowing one’s students
as the starting point for practice, and for reflection.
Williams and Setijadi-Dunn draw
on the accounts of adult migrants returning to visit homes overseas
to provide an analysis of bilingual identity formation. The return
to a homeland and to family makes the students in this study
rethink how their lives and outlooks are changing, an experience
that teachers can draw upon and use to prompt further
reflection.
In the final paper in this
edition, Wette investigates the role of commercially-produced
materials in instruction, and takes up the question of how teachers
select and make use of such materials. Surprisingly, instructional
materials have received little recent attention relative to other
aspects of ESL teaching. Wette examines the ways in which materials
are integrated into overall teaching practice, highlighting the
importance of time, resources and independence for teachers to
develop their own materials appropriate to the students they face
in their classrooms.
Pedagogies of
Connection
Special Edition S2.
Edited by Kate Cadman, Jenny
Barnett & Cally Guerin (2009).
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