The advocacy of task-based language teaching (TBLT) has met with resistance. The critiques of TBLT and the misconceptions that underlie them have already been addressed in Ellis (2009) and Long (2016). The purpose of this article is to move forward by examining a number of real problems that TBLT faces--such as how a "task" should be…

This article responds to recent critiques of the usefulness of research findings to teaching, and the call for teachers to rely on their experiences and intuition. I discuss the fallibility of intuition and then examine the nature of research and of critical thinking and their importance for teachers and teacher education. I provide evidence of…

In the literature dealing with L2 teacher training and education numerous references are made to the concept of reflective teaching and teachers and teacher educators are encouraged to engage in reflective practices. The present paper, however, argues that in our attempt to empower teachers to become more efficient practitioners, we have lost…

In this article, the author provides a brief response to Claire Kramsch's paper. While the author agrees in many ways with her arguments, he also wants to point to a potential contradiction between two positions: On the one hand, Kramsch suggests that in promoting foreign language learning language educators run the danger of essentialising the…

This response article addresses two issues raised by the publication of Basturkmen et al. (2004). The most important one concerns the nature of the research itself, whilst the other relates to the relevance of the purpose of the research to the aims of the involvement of applied linguistics in second and foreign language teaching. As to the first,…

Factors that influence teachers' general avoidance of incorporating literary studies in second language instruction include fundamental misconceptions about what constitutes literature; teachers' own lack of reading; over-reliance on a "materials" approach to language teaching; demanding aspects of teaching about literature; and lack of teacher…

The extensive literature, situated mainly in "first world" contexts, on design and evaluation of distance learning materials, emphasises the importance of student feedback. This paper begins with an account of how two groups of students responded to questions on a text they had used in an inservice professional development programme for teachers…

Argues that resisting reading, a kind of reading learned from recent feminist literary criticism, is a way of ensuring that learning about a foreign culture does not lead to the destruction of one's own identity. Students can read texts they are not sympathetic with because understanding does not mean accepting. (Author/VWL)