miércoles, 24 de abril de 2013

The practice of English Language Teaching

Not a simple word about story-telling!
I bought this book with great expectations because I'm very interested in the subject of ELT (English Language Teaching) but my dissapointment was huge! I found it so superficial... Harmer has created an extensive book based on his fame and reputation but nothing else. Surely he must know a lot, but he's missed the point as a writer. The book is extremely tedious and dull, there's no spark, no vision, no motivation, it could be said that the author just hates to teach, because it's so difficult to find any passion in those gullible and twisted obscure lines. At least, if it could have been a smart and profound theoretical book with a deep academic background, it would've been worth, but it fails on that too. Most of the explanations are so obvious and simple that they're not worth your time and believe me, he takes a huge amount of words to explain the simplest idea wasting your time again.

How can a book that talks about English teaching not say anything about literature?, story-telling? or the use of games in the classroom as fundamental resources to use nor to say the use of drama or acting? Nothing, it doesn't say a simple word about it!!! And the book has 488 damn pages and is very expensive to put it worse. In an attempt to provide some feedback to the author I posted a polite comment on his blog... but... he didn't seem to like that someone could disagree with his celestial point of view about language teaching and his answer was far-far away from what you should expect from a teacher of his level. To put it simple: He attacked my "English", even though I'm not a native speaker!! Incredible! So humble!

Normally, I'm not so negative about a book, but this one I just hate it!

2 comentarios:

  1. Could you suggest me a good English Language Teaching. Thanks

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    1. Yes, a practical one is Brewster, Ellis and Girard, called the primary English teacher's guide from Pinguin Editions 2010. A more theoretical one, but serious and with a lot of perspective and ideas is approaches and methods in language teaching, from Richards and Rodgers. Also, David Nunan designing tasks for the communicative classroom. Thanks for the visit.

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