The field of second/foreign language teacher education is calling out for a coherent and comprehensive framework for teacher preparation in these times of accelerating economic, cultural, and educational globalization. Responding to this call, this book introduces a state-of-the-art model for developing prospective and practicing teachers into strategic thinkers, exploratory researchers, and transformative teachers. The model includes five modules: Knowing, Analyzing, Recognizing, Doing, and Seeing (KARDS). Its goal is to help teachers understand

• how to build a viable professional, personal and procedural knowledge-base,
• how to analyze learner needs, motivation and autonomy,
• how to recognize their own identities, beliefs and values,
• how to do teaching, theorizing and dialogizing, and
• how to see their own teaching acts from learner, teacher, and observer perspectives.

Providing a scaffold for building a holistic understanding of what happens in the language classroom, this model eventually enables teachers to theorize what they practice and practice what they theorize. With its strong scholarly foundation and its supporting reflective tasks and exploratory projects, this book is immensely useful for students, practicing teachers, teacher educators, and educational researchers who are interested in exploring the complexity of language teacher education.

This book traces the historical development of major language teaching methods in terms of theoretical principles and classroom procedures, and provides a critical evaluation of each. Drawing from seminal, foundational texts and from critical commentaries made by various scholars, Kumaravadivelu examines the profession's current transition from method to postmethod and, in the process, elucidates the relationship between theory, research, and practice. The chief objective is to help readers see the pattern that connects language, learning, teaching methods, and postmethod perspectives.
In this book, Kumaravadivelu:
*brings together a critical vision of L2 learning and teaching--a vision founded at once on historical development and contemporary thought;
*connects findings of up-to-date research in L2 learning with issues in L2 teaching thus making the reader aware of the relationship between theory, research and practice;
*presents language teaching methods within a coherent framework of language-, learner-, and learning-centered pedagogies, thus helping the reader to see how they are related to each other;
*shows how the three categories of methods evolved historically leading ultimately (and inevitably) to the emergence of a postmethod condition; and
*provides the reader with a solid background in several interconnected areas of L2 pedagogy, such as concepts of competence, input factors, intake processes, interactional modifications, and instructional design.
"Understanding Language Teaching: From Method to Postmethod" is intended for an international audience of teacher educators, practicing teachers and graduate students, researchers, curriculumplanners, and materials designers in the field of second and foreign language teaching.

This book traces the historical development of major language teaching methods in terms of theoretical principles and classroom procedures, and provides a critical evaluation of each. Drawing from seminal, foundational texts and from critical commentaries made by various scholars, Kumaravadivelu examines the profession's current transition from method to postmethod and, in the process, elucidates the relationship between theory, research, and practice. The chief objective is to help readers see the pattern that connects language, learning, teaching methods, and postmethod perspectives. In this book, Kumaravadivelu: *brings together a critical vision of L2 learning and teaching--a vision founded at once on historical development and contemporary thought; *connects findings of up-to-date research in L2 learning with issues in L2 teaching thus making the reader aware of the relationship between theory, research and practice; *presents language teaching methods within a coherent framework of language-, learner-, and learning-centered pedagogies, thus helping the reader to see how they are related to each other; *shows how the three categories of methods evolved historically leading ultimately (and inevitably) to the emergence of a postmethod condition; and *provides the reader with a solid background in several interconnected areas of L2 pedagogy, such as concepts of competence, input factors, intake processes, interactional modifications, and instructional design. Understanding Language Teaching: From Method to Postmethod is intended for an international audience of teacher educators, practicing teachers and graduate students, researchers, curriculum planners, and materials designers in the field of second and foreign language teaching.

The field of second/foreign language teacher education is calling out for a coherent and comprehensive framework for teacher preparation in these times of accelerating economic, cultural, and educational globalization. Responding to this call, this book introduces a state-of-the-art model for developing prospective and practicing teachers into strategic thinkers, exploratory researchers, and transformative teachers. The model includes five modules: Knowing, Analyzing, Recognizing, Doing, and Seeing (KARDS). Its goal is to help teachers understand:

• how to build a viable professional, personal and procedural knowledge-base,
• how to analyze learner needs, motivation and autonomy,
• how to recognize their own identities, beliefs and values,
• how to do teaching, theorizing and dialogizing, and
• how to see their own teaching acts from learner, teacher, and observer perspectives.

Providing a scaffold for building a holistic understanding of what happens in the language classroom, this model eventually enables teachers to theorize what they practice and practice what they theorize. With its strong scholarly foundation and its supporting reflective tasks and exploratory projects, this book is immensely useful for students, practicing teachers, teacher educators, and educational researchers who are interested in exploring the complexity of language teacher education.

We live in a globalized and globalizing world that is marked by the twin processes of economic globalization and cultural globalization. In this thought-provoking book, Kumaravadivelu explores the impact of cultural globalization on second- and foreign-language education. Kumaravadivelu examines in detail how the cultural component of second- and foreign-language education has been informed by the Western notions of cultural assimilation, cultural pluralism, and cultural hybridity. Drawing insights from international and interdisciplinary sources, he argues that they have only a limited and limiting relevance to language education in the era of cultural globalization. Grounded in Western as well as non-Western perspectives, and written in an easily accessible style that combines personal narrative and academic genre, this book is indispensable for graduate students, practicing teachers, teacher educators, researchers, and others who are interested in exploring the complexity of cultural globalization and language education.