Exploring Learner Language
by Elaine Tarone & Bonnie Swierzbin
Elaine Tarone and Bonnie Swierzbin’s new book and DVD, Exploring
Learner Language, is coming out this month from Oxford University
Press! Their book is a direct response to a call from CARLA’s Language
Teacher Education conferences for a more hands-on approach to second
language acquisition coursework for language teachers, and builds on
the authors’ experience teaching in CARLA’s summer institute program.
By means of exercises and transcripts linked to videos of English
language learners doing individual and pairwork language tasks,
language teachers are guided in doing their own analyses of learner
language, and reflecting on the implications of their findings for
pedagogy. Through doing learner language analysis at this descriptive
case-study level, language teachers can develop skills for exploratory
practice (Allwright & Hanks 2009) that will help them to address their
own questions about learner language in their own classrooms, with a
resulting improvement in the quality of classroom life and learning.
The authors presented a workshop on the book on May 16 at the spring
meeting of the Teacher Educator Interest Section of MinneTESOL at
Hamline University in St. Paul, and will offer a 3-hour workshop
demonstrating the approach at the Language Teacher Education
Conference at George Washington University on May 28.
The book is published by Oxford University Press (ISBN 978-0-19-442291-8) and will soon be available to order through OUP USA: http://www.oup.com/us/