Defining Issues in English Language Teaching

Recent developments in linguistic description and applied linguistics have significant implications for the way English is to be conceived as a subject for teaching. This book presents a critical exploration of these implications, and how they lead to a reconsideration of common assumptions about communicative language teaching. Among the issues that are examined itself effects decisions about the goals that learners should be required to achieve, what relevance corpus descriptions of English have for the specification of course content and the design of classroom activities, and the role of the learner’s mother tongue. The nature and functions of the discipline of applied linguistics are set out with precision and transparency