The Experience of Language Teaching

Rose(mary) Senior, MA 1964

This Cambridge University Press publication, based on classroom observation and extensive interviews with more than a hundred native-speaking English language teachers, provides an in-depth picture of teaching and learning English in communicative classrooms at the start of the new millennium. It covers a range of aspects of classroom life: how teachers create environments suitable for language practice, the steps they take to get students ‘on-side’, how they cope (both successfully and unsuccessfully) with tricky behaviour and other everyday problems, how they vitalise the learning experience, how they develop a sense of community within their classes and so on.

Having drawn attention to the fact that effective teachers constantly balance both the learning and the social needs of their class groups, the author presents a framework for understanding the complex, interrelated nature of teacher and student classroom behaviour. This book contains a wealth of observations made by language teachers as they talk openly and honestly about their thoughts, feelings, motivations and everyday classroom decisions. In the words of one reviewer, ‘In this highly readable volume . . .

Senior gives voice to the many aspects of everyday teaching that are familiar to language teachers but seldom described, offering refreshing insights into how experienced language teachers think and act’. The Experience of Language Teaching won the Ben Warren International House Price in 2006 for the most significant book of the year in the field of language teacher education.

ISBN: 978-0-521-61231-9