Two concepts currently in vogue in language teacher education are collaboration and reflection. Both are related, although reflection is probably the superordinate concept. It is possible to be reflective without collaborating, although I would argue that collaboration can greatly increase the quality of reflection. Without reflection, collaboration is of little value. Farrell covers both concepts in his book. While the focus is on reflection, collaboration also features prominently, particularly in the chapters on teacher development groups, classroom observations, and critical friendships. I should declare my position at the outset. This is a book that I wish I had written! While it covers some of the same terrain as that traversed by a book I did co-author (Bailey et al., 2001), it does so from a different angle. Additionally, each book covers topics not covered by the other, and is therefore complementary. In fact, I used both in a professional development program that I taught not so long ago. Concepts are presented with admirable clarity, and Farrell’s voice as well as his extensive experience in language teacher education and development are evident on almost every page.

This article presents the results of an investigation into the place of English in the curriculum in several countries in the Asia-Pacific region. The study indicates that the emergence of English as a global language is having considerable impact on policies and practices in all countries surveyed. However, it also reveals significant problems, including confusion and inconsistency, at the level of policy, particularly regarding the issue of age of initial instruction, inequity regarding access to effective language instruction, inadequately trained and skilled teachers, and a disjunction between curriculum rhetoric and pedagogical reality.

TESOL Quarterly publishes brief commentaries on aspects of English language teaching. For this issue, we asked two educators to discuss the following question: What are the challenges and rewards of teaching MA-TESOL courses online?

Learning About Language Assessment: Dilemmas, Decisions, and Directions. Kathleen M. Bailey. Teaching Second-Language Writing: Interacting With Text. Cherry Campbell. Doing Teacher Research: From Inquiry to Understanding. Donald Freeman. Teaching Bilingual Children: Beliefs and Behaviors. Suzanne Irujo. Working With Teaching Methods: What's at Stake? Earl W. Stevick.

* A critical moment in the teacher-research movement came with the publication in 1975 of Stenhouse's introduction to curriculum research and development. Stenhouse argued that only when curriculum research and development belonged to teachers through a healthy teacherresearcher agenda would educational improvement emerge from it. Twenty years later, the TESOL community is beginning to respond to the call, although interest in the notion of teacher-research in TESOL has, in fact, grown substantially over the past 7 or 8 years. This growth has been marked by the publication of practical manuals (Nunan, 1989), the staging of a biennial Teachers Develop Teachers Research conference, and an increase in the number of teacher-research presentations at international conferences such as those of TESOL and the International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language. Within the TESOL organization, interest has also quickened in recent years. In 1995, an ad hoc committee of the Board of Directors was established to articulate a position on the place of research within a teachers' organization; to provide a clear, reasoned, and coherent direction for TESOL's research agenda; and to develop a set of strategies for promoting teacher-research within the TESOL community. This move was followed by a half-day symposium before the 1996 convention to take the issues further. Out of these initiatives emerged a number of practical suggestions, including the idea of establishing a distinguished teacher-researcher award.

In this paper, I explore the mismatch between the pedagogical intentions and plans of the educational institution, curriculum, teacher, and textbook, and the outcomes as realized through the Skills and knowledge that learners take away from instructional encounters. Although there will never be a one-to-one relationship between teaching and learning, there are ways in which teachers and learners and teaching and learning can be brought closer together. In this article, I look at ways of closing the gap in relation to experiential content, learning process, and language content. The theme holding these three disparate domains together is that of learner centredness, and it is this concept which I take as my point of departure.

myself to two aspects of the piece that I find personally objectionable. My first objection relates to the extremely selective data base Sheen draws on in attempting to establish his case against me. The article purports to critique my advocacy of task-based syllabuses. I have written extensively on task-based language teaching. (I shall overlook, as Sheen has done, the fact that in my 1988 book on syllabus design I question whether there is such a thing as a task-based syllabus.) My writings include a book and several articles in international journals, including the TESOL Quarterly, on the subject of task-based learning. Not one of the sources is cited, nor is there any evidence that they have even been read. The single source drawn upon for the article is a book on language-teaching methodology. Although task-based learning is dealt with in this book, it is not a central theme of the work as a whole. My second major objection is that my views are consistently misrepresented. Sheen implies that I am attempting to foist a new paradigm or fad on the field. Nothing could be further from the truth. In a great deal of my writing, including the book used exclusively by Sheen for his critique, I argue that teachers should not accept the exhortations of others but should contest them, in a critically informed way, against the realities of their own situation. Additionally, through selectively quoting from my book, I am represented as an advocate of the comprehensible input hypothesis when my very purpose in introducing the hypothesis was to critique it. I shall not lay out further examples of the scholarship evident in this paper. Nor shall I engage in an elaborate refutation of the thinking on which the piece is based. Instead I invite readers to look at my work on task-based language teaching overlooked by Sheen and make up their own minds.

Over the last 25 years the communicative task has emerged as a significant building block in the development of language curricula and also as an element for motivating process-oriented second language acquisition research. This paper reviews the influence of the communicative task on curriculum development and summarizes the research base for task-based language teaching. In the final part of the paper, an agenda for future research is set out.

Journal Article A client-centred approach to teacher development Get access David Nunan David Nunan David Nunan is Director of the National Curriculum Resource Centre for the Australian Adult Migrant Education Program. He has had extensive experience in ESL/EFL teaching and teacher training in Australia, Europe and South-East Asia. He holds a PhD in applied linguistics, and his research interests include teacher-based curriculum development and classroom-centred research. He is the author of The Learner-Centred Language Curriculum (Cambridge University Press 1988) and Syllabus Design (Oxford University Press 1988). Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar ELT Journal, Volume 43, Issue 2, April 1989, Pages 111–118, https://doi.org/10.1093/elt/43.2.111 Published: 01 April 1989 Article history Received: 01 February 1988 Published: 01 April 1989

This article presents a rationale for the development of a collaborative approach between teachers and curriculum specialists to language curriculum design. The adoption of such an approach within the Australian Adult Migrant Education Program (AMEP) is described, as is the National Curriculum Project, setup within the AMEP to realize the ideals of a collaborative approach.

Communicative language teaching: Making it work Get access David Nunan David Nunan David Nunan is Director of the National Curriculum Resource Centre for the Australian Adult Migrant Education Program. He has had extensive experience in ESL/EFL teaching and teacher training in Australia, Europe, and Southeast Asia. He holds a PhD in applied linguistics, and his research interests include teacher-based curriculum development and classroom-centred research. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar ELT Journal, Volume 41, Issue 2, April 1987, Pages 136–145, https://doi.org/10.1093/elt/41.2.136 Published: 01 April 1987 Article history Received: 01 June 1986 Published: 01 April 1987