Publisher's Synopsis
Encyclopaedia of Curriculum Development in Language Teaching: A Critical Analysis envisages light on the cur¬rent trends in language teaching methods. There are still many controversies about their usefulness and appropriateness. This book tries to analyze their effectiveness and weakness of several most influential teaching approaches and methods. Most recently, there has been also a significant shift toward greater attention to reading and writing as a complement of listening and speaking, based on a new awareness of significant differences between spoken and written languages, and on the notion that dealing with language involves an interaction between the text on the one hand, and the culturally-based world knowl¬edge and experientially-based learning of the receiver on the other. There have been developments such as a great emphasis on individualized instruction, more humanistic approaches to language learning, a greater focus on the learner, and greater emphasis on development of communicative, as opposed to merely linguistic, competence.
