The Book
This volume brings together, for the first time, N. S. Prabhu’s thoughts and ideas on language pedagogy as they have evolved over the decades. It captures different stages in an intellectual journey, from making a quiet entry into the world of ELT through an article published in a daily newspaper in 1966 to becoming one of the best-known practitioners and radical thinkers in the field. Geetha Durairajan has edited this collection taking care to draw attention to those arguments which are specially relevant to the ELT debate in India.
The Author(s)
N. S. Prabhu has an MA in English Literature from the University of Madras and an MA as well as a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Reading, U.K. He taught English to undergraduate classes in colleges for about ten years, then spent twenty years working for the British Council giving advice and short courses to college lecturers on teaching English to undergraduate students, and then moved to the National University of Singapore to teach applied linguistics for ten years. He has also been visiting faculty at universities in Hong Kong, Japan and Brazil.
He is most widely known in the ELT profession for what is referred to as the Bangalore Project which was a five-year experiment in teaching English to children in mother-tongue medium schools through problem-solving (‘task-based’) activities, and is described in his book Second Language Pedagogy (1987).
Geetha Durairajan (Ed.) is Professor, School of English Language Education, English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad.
Table of Contents
Author’s Note
Editor’s Note
Publisher’s Acknowledgements
- Rational Approach to English Teaching
- The Teaching of English and Notions about Communication
- Alternative Strategies in Educational Reform: An ELT Practitioner’s Views
- Procedural Syllabuses
- Communicative Teaching: “Communicative” in What Sense?
- Coping with the Unknown in Language Pedagogy
- Language Education: Equipping or Enabling?
- A World Language in Education: Defining the Domain
- Materials as Support; Materials as Constraint
- Acquisition through Comprehension: Three Procedures
- Three Models in Second Language Pedagogy
- There is no Best Method—Why?
- The Learner’s Effort in the Language Classroom
- The Dynamics of the Language Lesson
- Descriptive and Prescriptive Approaches to the Norms of English in Singapore
- English Language as a University Discipline
- Communicative Language Teaching: Three Perceptions
- The Mathetic Function of English as a World Language
- Attempting Educational Change
- Teaching is at Most Hoping for the Best
- Should Materials be Prescribed?
- Ideation and Ideology
- The Appropriation of ELT
- Misapplied Linguistics
- Teachers’ Growth
- A Case Against Practice
- Evaluation in ELT: Six Levels
- Rethinking Language Pedagogy: An Interview
- Plausibility
Index