Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language, Third Edition

This is a collection of articles from a variety of sources, aimed at graduate students in Education. The writing is uniformly poor, as these scholars indulge themselves in pompous, pretentious obfuscation that is fearsomely difficult to read. If you're in the profession and are interested in pedagogical theory, this book may be useful to you, but if you're just preparing for a career as an ESL teacher, this is pretty close to worthless.

If theory is what you're after, and you want to acquire a large vocabulary of academic terminology, you'll find plenty of that here. If you're looking for readability, clarity, good writing, practical information of immediate use, lesson plans, suggestions for classroom activities, or anything relating to "hands-on" training, you should look elsewhere.

This is an extremely poor choice for teacher training, bristling with examples of how to write unclear, boring, pedantic English.

This is easily the most tedious and worthless textbook I have ever been forced to endure, going back to first grade.

After working for more than 20 years as a speech and language pathologist I have opted for a career change and have oriented myself towards the ESL-EFL sector. This book is very comprehensive and covers a multitude of aspects of teaching. It is a must for anyone beginning in this field as well as for those with more experience who would appreciate a refresher as well as keeping up-to-date with the latest tendencies and debates.

it is a must-have book for those working in the field of language. Well informed and well edited.

I am disappointed with lack of current ESL/EFL research that is cited in this text. It appears that the contributors simply resubmitted their original material without significant change. This is unacceptable. A simple web search on the contributers reveals far more current work than contained in this text. This is taking into consideration that this edition was published in 2001.

After teaching English abroad for two years, I came back to the States to do my MA TESOL. We used this book for an introductory class on teaching ESL/EFL. I must say that if you have teaching experience, you will get more out of the book. Those without experience may find the book difficult to interpret, because there is a lot of background information on different teaching methods, as well as some history of language teaching.

That being said, I highly recommend this book to ALL who are serious about teaching English as a second or foreign language. True, there are no lessons made out for you, but the insight you gain by reading this book is invaluable. After all, why have a book of lesson plans when you can learn how to plan lessons yourself? Teach a man to fish...

If you are currently teaching, you'll be able to put some of the material into practice right away, to see how it works in your classroom.

If you want to keep up-to-speed and in-the-know in the field of language teaching, purchase this book. It may change your professional outlook as it has changed mine.