Teacher Training

Learning Teaching

The title of this book is encouraging because it suggests that you can learn how to teach. It also suggests that it is an ongoing process. Jim Scrivener is a very reassuring writer, and an experienced teacher, with many excellent ideas about teaching and his style is very readable and unthreatening for the novice or student teacher. The bonus with the third edition is a DVD showing many of the techniques and strategies described in the book. The drawback of the DVD is that all the classes are filmed at a private language school in Cambridge, with very small groups. It would have been far better (but undoubtedly much more complicated and expensive) to have filmed many different classroom types, varying the level, age, size, sector, etc. However, even though all the classes are on the same model, it is still very useful to see exactly how certain strategies can be used in the classroom.
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Tips for Teaching Culture

Texts on culture and intercultural communication topics tend to divide into too theoretical and research oriented or too superficial, treating culture as “food, flags and fun.” Tips for Teaching Culture by Wintergerst and McVeigh is one of the rare college textbooks that has been able to successfully bridge the theory, research and practice divide by integrating important concepts and research into chapters that offer teachers of adults and young adults activities to investigate cultural concepts and understandings in their English as a Second Language (ESL) classes. The authors’ goal is to build the intercultural understanding of teachers while providing ways to raise English language learners’ (ELLs) intercultural understanding and awareness of cultural dynamics.

In eight chapters on the intersection of culture with language, non-verbal communication, identity, cross-cultural adjustment, education, sensitive issues, and social responsibility, Tips for Teaching Culture provides the basics of understanding ways to describe, view, compare and interrelate various cultural paradigms and the interactions of cultural participants. Including traditional perspectives and concepts of teaching culture (e.g. culture shock) and spanning into more contemporary approaches (e.g. identity and social responsibility), the text provides new insights for even the seasoned professional. I was happy to learn more than just the tired and stereotypical comparisons of “shy Japanese students” to “raucous American children”.
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