Monday, July 12, 2010

More books I want

Some WL-specific books this time.

Blaz, D. (2001).  Collections of performance tasks & rubrics: Foreign languages.  Larchmont, NY: 2001.

The value of this book in a collection should be self-evident--the more examples of performance assessments that one has to hand, the more effectively one can design them.  Besides, I'm finding it tough to know if my performance assessments are really actual assessments, or not.  But what I'm really dying to see is the examples of rubrics that they give.

Shrum, J. L., & Glisan, E. W. (2009).  The teacher's handbook: Contextualized language instruction [4th ed.]  Thompson and Heinle.

(Bibliographical note:  I don't have the book in front of me, and I'm having a devil of a time figuring out where Heinle is based.  As an international textbook company and a subdivision of Thompson, I'm guessing their main offices are in New York with branches in London, Berlin, Sydney, possibly Beijing, and several other major cities around the world.)

On the ACTFL Language Educator listserv, Randy B. recommended this as a college-level WL textbook, saying that his/her students found it to be relevant to their lives.  Catherine J. B. and Jessi Y. concur.  Eileen Glisan chimes in to say "Thanks for recommending our book!"  It seems like this book would be similar to Curtain's Langauges and Children: Making the match, but on the listserv, everyone who's read it recommends it highly.  My biggest question is: Contextualized language instruction?  How else would you do it?

There are seven or eight other methodology textbooks I'd like to look at: Omaggio's Teaching language in context, Brown's Teaching by Principles, etc.  But the two above are at the front of the list.

Update, 10 minutes later:  This is the textbook's companion website.   I haven't looked through it yet--it's very possible that the website is useless without the textbook.  Probably not, though.

2 comments:

Steve Ackley said...

Teacher's Handbook AND Languages and Children are both readily available in the bookstore at www.actfl.org. Also check out The Keys to the Classroom, a great book for new teachers.

JohnCosby said...

I'm glad to know that those are all available from an organization I have belonged to, and will belong to again. I think I've mentioned "Keys to the Classroom" here before. It's definitely one I want to read.