Language Play, Language Learning

Oxford Applied Linguistics

by Guy Cook

This book demonstrates the extent and importance of language play in human life and draws out the implications for applied linguistics and language teaching. It stresses how language play is central to human thought and culture, learning, creativity, and intellectual development.

Genres: Linguistics

235 pages, Paperback

First published February 21, 2000

About the author

Guy Cook is Professor of Language and Education at the Open University, UK. He was formerly Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Reading (1998-2004) and head of TESOL at the London University Institute of Education (1991-1998). He was co-editor of the journal Applied Linguistics 2004-2009. He is current Chair of the British Association for Applied Linguistics, and an academician of the UK Academy of the Social Sciences. He has published extensively on applied linguistics, discourse analysis, English language teaching, literary stylistics, advertising, and the language of environmental debate. He has been an invited speaker in over 30 countries.

Reviews

[Diz · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is more about language play than language learning. In fact, there are long sections of this book that are just about play without reference to language. When it does focus on language play, there is an emphasis on playful language (nursery rhymes, playground chants, and so on) rather than on using a language to play, so be aware of that if you are looking for the latter. Perhaps the most useful section of this book for me was a criticism on the focus on practical tasks in language education to the exclusion of anything deemed not practical. The author argues that endless language activities of giving directions to the post office, filling out business forms, and participating in stale lifeless polite small talk drain the enthusiasm that students have for studying language.

One point to note is that this book was published in 2000, so all of the citations are from the 90s and earlier, with the majority of citations coming from the 80s and 70s. If you're doing research on play and language teaching, it might be better to find more up-to-date sources as the field of language teaching is in a different place than it was in 2000.

[Brooke · Rating 2 out of 5]

1.5 rounded up, only because I forced myself to finish it. If you are a language educator looking for some research applicable to your classroom, this is NOT the book for you. I'm sure I got some good tidbits, but essentially I 'learned' that language play exists everywhere, and language classrooms shouldn't worry too much stock in any one strategy or methodology cuz everything is real and useful and it's not a big deal if something isn't authentic because what is authentic, anyway. This was so incredibly slow and has almost no application to actual language learning. What little there was came in the last quarter of the work. I put a lot of time for almost no pay off. -sigh-

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent argument for including ludic activities in the language classroom.