On Being a Language Teacher: A Personal and Practical Guide to Success

by Norma López-Burton, Denise Minor

On Being a Language Teacher provides an innovative, personal approach to second-language teaching. Through illustrative personal anecdotes, this text guides new and aspiring language teachers through key pedagogical strategies while encouraging productive reflection by classroom veterans. An ancillary website provides online videos to complement the text by showing an experienced teacher applying the book’s lessons.

In a market dominated by dense theoretical approaches to language pedagogy, this text provides an instantly accessible, practical set of teaching tools for educators at all levels. Its accessible style and affordability give it the flexibility to serve as either a primary or a supplemental text for teaching assistants, students in credential programs, or undergraduates in applied linguistics courses.

Genres: Teaching

385 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2012

Reviews

[Rebecca Sawyer · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is fine if you just need some ideas to get your feet under you, but I'd hesitate to recommend it to someone that has no pedagogical training. There is a critical perspective missing, and many things should be taken with a grain of salt. The chapter about classroom management is particularly disappointing; skip it, unless you want to ruin relationships with students. I didn't love that the authors take it for granted that grading systems and the grammatical syllabus just "are the way things are". As teachers, we can change that! If all you want is to use a textbook in a way that won't make your students hate language, this book is fine. If you want to actually engage in transformative and critical pedagogy, look elsewhere.

[Fateme Jamali · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is a collection of a teacher's solutions to problems that a teacher may encounter, it is not didactive neither the solutions are in form of the tips, but rather are in a form of diary. All the solutions are experimental and that is a bad news for those who seek for scientific tips. mu solution is that instead of reading this books and returning to it when you got the same problem, simply just google the problem and let the tree be cut for better purposes.