"Buenos dias", "buenas noches" -- this was the first words in a foreign language I heard in my life, as a three-year old boy growing up in developing post-war Western Germany, where the first gastarbeiters had arrived from Spain. Fascinated by the strange sounds, I tried to get to know some more languages, the only opportunity being TV courses of English and French -- there was no foreign language education for pre-teen school children in Germany yet in those days. Read more
To find some answers Tim Machan explores the language's present and past, and looks ahead to its futures among the one and a half billion people who speak it. His search is fascinating and important, for definitions of English have influenced education and law in many countries and helped shape the identities of those who live in them.
This volume provides a new perspective on the evolution of the special language of medicine, based on the electronic corpus of Early Modern English Medical Texts, containing over two million words of medical writing from 1500 to 1700.
EDITORS: Van Deusen-Scholl, Nelleke and Hornberger, Nancy H. TITLE: Second and Foreign Language Education SERIES TITLE: Encyclopedia of Language and Education, Volume 4 PUBLISHER: Springer YEAR: 2010
Dr. Melodie Lorie Cook, University of Niigata Prefecture, Japan
SUMMARY
This volume is part of a 10-part encyclopedia series focusing on issues in language education, which, as a whole, is intended as a reference for ''every university and college library in the world that serves a faculty or school of education'' (general editor's introduction, p. xi). According to the editors, what makes this volume significant is the inclusion of ''foreign language'' in addition to second language education, in response to the increasing global significance of foreign language education.
Volume 4 contains articles on theoretical and practical approaches to second and foreign language education under the themes ''Theoretical underpinnings'', ''Current approaches'', ''International perspectives'', ''Teacher preparation and professional development'', and ''The role of technology.'' Common themes which emerge from the work as a whole include problems with the wholesale application of communicative language teaching, challenges for educational policies with regards to minority or heritage languages, and the transformation of language educational through technology.
Each chapter in each section contains definitions of key terms, a history of, current trends in, evaluation of the contributions to and drawbacks of, and future directions of the theories, methods, or policies presented. Chapters are written by many leading experts in the field of second and foreign language education whose names will be familiar to students of second/foreign language education.
Section 1: Theoretical underpinnings
This section consists of four chapters focusing on applied linguistic theory and second/foreign language education, sociolinguistics and second language education, individual differences in second and foreign language learning and conditions for second language (L2) learning written by Claire Kramsch, Sandra Lee McKay, Robert C. Gardner, and Rebecca Oxford.
Section 2: Current approaches to second and foreign language learning
This section is comprised of five chapters focusing on content-based instruction, task-based instruction, professional communication, content and language integrated learning (CLIL) and second language learning in a study abroad context. Contributors include Fredricka L. Stoller, Teresa Pica, Britt-Louise Gunnarsson, Do Coyle, and Barbara Freed.
Section 3: International perspectives on second and foreign language learning
This is the largest section, containing 10 chapters on foreign language learning in K-12 classrooms in the United States, issues in heritage language learning in the United States, learning and teaching endangered indigenous languages, community language learning in Australia, second and foreign language learning in South Africa, second and foreign language education in Canada, language education in Europe, innovative second and foreign language education in the Middle East and North Africa, and innovative second and foreign language education in the South Pacific. Authors include Myriam Met, Olga Kagan and Kathleen Dillon, Leanne Hinton, Michael George Clyne and Sue Fernandez, Nkonko M. Kamwangamalu, Margaret Early, Peter Broeder and Waldemar Martyniuk, Mahmoud A. Al-Khatib, Anne Pakir, and Noel Watts.
Section 4: Teacher preparation and professional development
This section presents four chapters focusing on the professional development of foreign language instructors in postsecondary education, network-based language teaching, teacher training in bilingual education in Peru, and nonnative speaking teachers of English as a foreign language. The first chapter highlights the professional development of foreign language teachers in American postsecondary institutions; the second, research findings on computers connected to local or global networks; the third, teacher training in bilingual education in Peru, and the fourth nonnative speaking teachers of English as a foreign language. Authors include Linda van Hoene, Richard Kern, Paige Ware and Mark Warschauer, Virginia Zavala, and Oleg Tarnopolsky.
Section 5: The role of technology in second and foreign language education
This last section comprises four chapters focusing on computer-mediated communication, learner corpora in foreign language education, computer-assisted language assessment, and distance learning for second and foreign language teaching. Authors of this section include Steven L. Thorne, Sylviane Granger, Paula Winke and Fei Fei, and Robert Blake.
Other
The main text is followed by a subject index, a name index, and a table of contents for each of the other nine volumes in the series.
EVALUATION
True to the aims of any encyclopedia, the articles are clearly structured, easy to understand, contain current information, and offer an extensive list of citations for further reference. All chapters follow a standard structure, enabling readers to find information in any chapter with ease.
Volume 4 is useful for beginning students learning second and foreign language education concepts, new or seasoned teachers looking to update or refresh their knowledge, teacher educators, and graduate students or researchers looking for a handy source of information and ideas for future research. While reading through the book, I found myself becoming excited about the possibility of taking on some of the research projects recommended by the authors.
However, as someone who works in Japan, I was more than a little disappointed to find little or no reference to the teaching of foreign languages (English primarily) in Japan or in other Asian countries, such as Korea, which have similar language policies, pedagogies, and assessment practices (a quick perusal of the list of topics provided in the other volumes comprising this series indicates that chapters focusing on Japan appear in only 3 of the 10 volumes).
I chose to review this particular work not only to determine its usefulness for a future teacher education course at my institution, but also in the hopes of deepening and broadening my understanding of my local situation. In many chapters, the authors speak of globalization and highlight many of the issues Japan faces, for example, those related to learner identity, evaluation of outcomes of foreign language study, the status of content-area knowledge versus teaching skill, and even similar to problems to those faced by teachers in Europe with a CLIL (content and language integrated learning) mandate, to name a few. However, there is no mention of Japan in Section 3, ''International perspectives on second and foreign language learning.'' In fact, six of the 10 chapters focus on issues relevant to the United States (3 chapters), Canada, (1 chapter), Australia (1 chapter), and Europe (1 chapter). The remaining four cover issues in the Middle East, North and South Africa, the South Pacific, and Southeast Asia. Expecting to see more ''international perspectives'' I was surprised at an imbalance in favour of Western countries.
This volume thus seems to be intended primarily for the bookshelves of academic institutions in BANA (British, Australasian, and North American) (Holliday, 1994) countries. More focus on TESEP (state education at tertiary, secondary and primary) (ibid.) contexts of which Japan is a member, would be helpful to those teaching pedagogy to language educators around the world.
Since many students of second/foreign language education intend to teach outside of their home countries, it would be doing them a service to include more information about foreign language learning around the world in books such as this. In addition, some focus on TESEP countries may also ensure inclusion of this series on the library shelves of their universities which have faculties of education. If scholars from TESEP education are represented in ''international'' volumes, they may, in turn be more likely to accept the views of scholars beyond their own borders.
REFERENCES
Holliday, A. (1994b). The house of TESEP and the communicative approach: The special needs of state English language education. ELT Journal, 48(1), 3-11.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
ABOUT THE REVIEWER:
Dr. Cook has been teaching English as a Foreign Language at the university
level in both Japan and Canada since 1993. Her primary research interest is
in foreign language teacher education in Japan, its current state, and how
it can be enhanced to better serve the needs of Japanese teachers of
English in modern-day Japan. Interest in this topic came out of her
research on the outcomes of an overseas program of language and pedagogical
study for Japanese teachers of English where she learned that many
teacher-accreditation-granting institutions in Japan do not require
prospective teachers to take courses related to pedagogy or second language
acquisition.
