About Language: Tasks for Teachers of English

Front Cover
Cambridge University Press, Mar 13, 1997 - Foreign Language Study - 269 pages
Teachers of English need not only to have a good productive command of the language; they also need to know a good deal about the way the language works. This book asks: 'What is it that a teacher needs to know about English in order to teach it effectively?' It leads teachers to awareness of the language through a wide range of tasks which involve them in analysing English to discover its underlying system. The book consists of 28 units, each containing around ten tasks, plus a diagnostic introductory unit. Units start at phoneme level and progress through words, phrases and sentences on to complete texts. Task-types include recognition, categorisation, matching, explanation, and application tasks. Throughout the book, the language is illustrated wherever possible from authentic sources, so that the teacher can be sure that the English being studied represents current usage.

About the author (1997)

Scott Thornbury is Associate Professor on the MA TESOL program at the New School in New York, and has an MA (TEFL) from the University of Reading. His previous experience includes teaching and training in Egypt, UK, Spain, and in his native New Zealand. He has written extensively on areas of language and methodology, his most recent books being Beyond the Sentence: An Introduction to Discourse Analysis and An A-Z of ELT, Natural Grammar, which won a British Council ELT Innovations Award in 2004, and Grammar, which earned a special mention in the English Speaking Union awards for 2006; Conversation: From Description to Pedagogy (with Diana Slade, Cambridge University Press) and The CELTA Course (with Peter Watkins, Cambridge University Press). He is currently the series editor of the Cambridge Handbooks for Language Teachers (CUP). He divides his time between New York and Barcelona.

Bibliographic information