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"Managing Evaluation and Innovation in Language Teaching" focuses
on the connections to be made between evaluation and change in
language education with a specific focus on English Language
Teaching. The book demonstrates the central importance of
evaluation in relation to language projects and programmes, the
management of change and innovation, and in improving language
teacher development.
The introductory chapter provides an overview of the present trends
in evaluation as well as offering examples of recent evaluation
projects. Subsequent chapters identify contemporary issues in
evaluation and their relevance to language teaching, covering a
number of cultural and ethnographic studies in evaluation
management in different world-wide contexts, as well as drawing
insights from other related disciplines. The editors seek to draw
attention to the possibilities of inter-disciplinary exchange to
inform the reader of current practice, and highlight emerging
issues in the expanding field of evaluation in language teaching,
especially in ELT.
The contemporary nature of the studies presented here will be
relevant to both post graduate students following language
education programmes as well as to professionals involved in
language teaching. It will be of particular interest to those
involved in the management of innovation and the evaluation of
projects and programmes, such as curriculum developers, Director of
Studies, and professionals with a special responsibility for
bringing about change in language teaching contexts.
Increased emphasis in many school systems on formal testing to mark
student achievement and hold teachers accountable has begun to
heighten concern among many educational policy makers, assessment
specialists, and classroom teachers over questions of access and
fairness, particularly for learners from culturally different
backgrounds and those with a history of academic struggles. This
situation echoes that faced by the Russian psychologist L. S.
Vygotsky nearly ninety years ago in his efforts to understand
processes of development and meet the needs of all learners. His
famous proposal of the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) holds
that assessments must take account not only of abilities that have
fully formed but also those that are still emerging. The diagnostic
value of the ZPD lies in identifying the underlying source of
learner difficulties as well as their future potential. Since
Vygotsky's time, psychologists and educators have devised a range
of practices for engaging with learners in ZPD activity that have
come to be known as Dynamic Assessment (DA). In DA, assessors go
beyond observations of independent performance and engage
cooperatively with learners to both understand and support their
development. This process is in full evidence in the papers in this
collection, which offers a cross section of applications of DA with
diverse populations, including special needs learners, immigrant
and minority students, and second language learners. While these
papers may be read as cutting-edge academic research, they also
represent a commitment to going beyond manifest difficulties and
failures to help individuals construct a more positive future. This
book was originally published as a special issue of Assessment in
Education: Principles, Policy & Practice.
"Language, Culture and Identity in Applied Linguistics" is a
collection of papers from the BAAL Annual Conference at the
University of Bristol 2005. The thirteen papers, by researchers
from Britain and across Europe, represent a range of research
orientations within Applied Linguistics which connect in different
ways with issues in culture and identity. Two plenary addresses
from the conference, by Roz Ivanie and Srikant Sarangi, explore the
themes of identity and culture in contexts of learning and of work.
Papers addressing language planning and policy issues present
recent analyses of francophone identity in Canada and Sami identity
in Finland. The issues of culture and identity in writing are
explored in different papers from the perspective of identity
construction in academic writing, discipline cultures in higher
education contexts, the consequences of these for interdisciplinary
writers, and how writers construct audience identity though the
linguistic choices they make. Empirical studies of language
learning and teaching are also represented, with papers on
Processing Instruction and Intercultural Pragmatics. The themes of
identity and culture in these papers connect a range of
sub-disciplines within Applied Linguistics, and also connect
knowledge building in Applied Linguistics with pervasive themes in
research across the social sciences, into the ways people as
individuals and in communities understand, shape and represent
their experiences of learning and work.
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