This volume critically reviews the most prominent issues in language teaching today and relates them to general perspectives on the nature of language and of language teaching and learning.

This book is based on a series of lectures, which begin with a look at the history of the language that we use in order to encode our knowledge, particularly our scientific knowledge, i.e., the history of scientific English. Prof. M.A.K. Halliday poses the question of how a growing child comes to master this kind of language and put it to his or her own use as a means of learning. In subsequent chapters, Halliday explores the relationship between language, education and culture, again taking the language of science as the focal point for the discussion; and finally he draws these various themes together to construct a linguistic interpretation of how we learn and how we learn how to learn.

While there is much in the literature on ESL development, this book is the first of its kind to track the development of specific language abilities in an Intensive English Program (IEP) longitudinally and highlights the implications of this particular study’s findings for future IEP implementation and practice and ESL and SLA research. The volume draws on many years’ worth of data from learners at an IEP at the University of Pittsburgh to explore selected aspects of language development, including lexical, grammatical, speaking, and writing abilities, in addition to placement assessment practices and student learning outcomes. A concluding chapter points to the ways in which these findings can be applied to decision making around IEP curriculum development and the future role of IEPs in higher education more broadly. With its focus on students in IEP settings and the concentration on data from students evaluated over multiple semesters, this volume offers a unique opportunity in which to examine longitudinal developmental patterns of different L1 groups on a variety of measures from the same learners and will be key reading for students and researchers in second language acquisition, English for Academic Purposes, language education, and applied linguistics.

It involves theories from various fields and imbibes the findings in them as from the field of psychology, philosophy of language, technology, sociology, and so on. With such an inter-disciplinary orientation, language teaching consists of first language learning theories, second language learning theories, language teaching methods-a sub-part of which is language planning and teaching tasks, language testing and variables in language learning. This entails looking up different books on the various subjects which is not an easy proposition. This book presents the topic comprehensively in one place, saving in terms of time and effort, which can be put to more constructive use. Discuss the various aspects of language teaching and the theories, examples and illustrations, and how their applied form influences the theory. The chapters are classified as : language learning theories, language teaching methods, language planning and materials production, language teaching tasks, testing, programmed instruction and CA, EA, and variables in language learning.