This second edition is an extensive revision of this successful text. Like the first edition, it surveys the major approaches and methods in language teaching, such as grammar translation, audiolingualism, communicative language teaching, and the natural approach. The text examines each approach and method in terms of its theory of language and language learning, goals, syllabus, teaching activities, teacher and learner roles, materials, and classroom techniques. The second edition includes new chapters on topics such as whole language, multiple intelligences, neurolinguistic programming, competency-based language teaching, cooperative language learning, content-based instruction, task-based language teaching, and the Post-Methods Era. Teachers and teachers-in-training will enjoy reading this comprehensive survey and analysis of the major and minor teaching methods used around the world. The book seeks not only to clarify the assumptions behind these methods and their similarities and differences, but also to help teachers explore their own beliefs and practices in language teaching.
Educated at Caius College, Cambridge, where he was elected to a Fellowship upon obtaining a double-starred first in History, Quentin Skinner accepted, however, a teaching Fellowship at Christ's College, Cambridge, where he taught until 2008, except for four years in the 1970s spent at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. In 1978 he was appointed to the chair of Political Science at Cambridge University, and subsequently regarded as one of the two principal members (along with J.G.A. Pocock) of the influential 'Cambridge School' of the history of political thought, best known for its attention to the 'languages' of political thought.
Skinner's primary interest in the 1970s and 1980s was the modern idea of the state, which resulted in two of his most highly regarded works, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought: Volume I: The Renaissance and The Foundations of Modern Political Thought: Volume II: The Age of Reformation.