Designing Language Teaching Tasks provides a research-based account of how experienced teachers and task designers prepare activities for use in the language classroom. It gives detailed information on the procedures which a group of expert materials designers follow, and compares those procedures with ones used by a second, less experienced group. The book discusses issues of research methodology in a way which will be of interest to all students of applied linguistics. It is written in a clear and comprehensible style, and provides practical guidance on how to go about designing language teaching activities. As such it will be relevant to practising teachers and other professionals who need to write their own teaching tasks, or even modify already-exisiting tasks for their students. Though the examples in the book deal with English as a foreign language, what it discusses will be of interest to teachers of any foreign language.CONTENTS:Acknowledgements - Why Study Task Design - Some Studies in Expertise -Studying Task Designers at Work - A Look at Two Designers - DesigningLanguage Teaching Tasks: Beginnings - Designing Language Teaching Tasks:Middles and Ends - The Good Task Designer: Some Hypotheses - Evaluating andTeaching Task Design - Appendices - References - IndexABOUT THE AUTHORKeith Johnson is Professor of Linguistics and Language Education atLancaster University. His recent publications include An Introduction toForeign Language Learning and Teaching (2001), Encyclopaedic Dictionary ofApplied Linguistics (1998), and Language Teaching and Skill Learning (1996).He is the founding editor of the journal Language Teaching Research.To order this book or to browse our fully searchable on-line catalogue, please visit our website at http://www.palgrave.com