Retrospective accounts of materials development in the applied linguistics literature speak to the relationship between creativity and textbook writing, but this study forges another path by examining how an expert ELT (English language teaching) textbook writer deploys creativity during ongoing coursebook production. Qualitative content analysis…

The need for collaboration between researchers and practitioners to address the research-practice gap is a long-debated topic in applied linguistics. Little is known, however, about how researchers and practitioners can collaboratively develop teaching materials, as a potential venue to narrow the gap. This study explored how two groups of…

Despite coverage of materials development principles in the applied linguistics literature, principled production of open textbooks has not received attention. To address this gap and demonstrate the interdisciplinary potential of materials development research, the authors drew upon concurrent verbalization and interview data they collected while…

Different theoretical and empirical taxonomies of reading and listening comprehension (RC, LC) are available in the literature. Most of language tests and tasks in English as foreign or second language (EFL/ESL) coursebooks are based on the classifications of reading and listening subskills (micro-skills) offered in theory. However, these…

This paper investigates semantic categories of reporting verbs across four disciplines: Accounting, Applied Linguistics, Engineering and Medicine in research article genre. A general corpus of one million words and sub-corpus (for each discipline) were compiled from a total of 120 articles representing 30 articles from each discipline. In this…

The author of the "Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language" responds to two areas of criticism of the textbook: its size and its intended audience. These aspects and the general construction of the book are discussed in relation to the information needs of the foreign language learner and in comparison with the information…

GENERATIVE THEORY NOW DOMINATES MACHINE TRANSLATION AND HAS BEGUN TO TAKE OVER THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH GRAMMAR IN THE SCHOOLS, AS ONE PUBLISHER AFTER ANOTHER COMES OUT WITH A TRANSFORMATIONALLY-ORIENTED SERIES OF TEXTBOOK FOR HIGH SCHOOL ENGLISH. THE AUTHOR FEELS, HOWEVER, THAT THE EFFECTS OF THIS THEORY ON LANGUAGE TEACHING HAVE BEEN NEGLIGIBLE…

Italian pedagogical texts in general hold the position that the partitive is not obligatory as it is in French. However, some of these texts devote a great deal of time to repetition and transformation drills while others never mention the construction at all until the chapters on the pronoun replacement of accusative complements. Italian phrase…

Discusses the problem of finding appropriate communication and grammar texts for English-as-a-second-language (ESL) business students. Notes that texts do exist; however, more needs to be done before English characteristics of business can be adequately presented to ESL students. Provides lists of available texts. (PD)

Analysis of beginning second language textbooks for German, Swedish, English, and Finnish looked at the readability of the contents. Finnish and English texts are examined more closely here as illustrations of the problems found in all four languages. Specific passages are cited and discussed; two are appended. A general framework of text…