Developing Expertise through Experience

Abstract

Are there any similar lines of thought about language learning and teaching among ELT professionals coming from India, Canada, Argentina, Singapore and South Africa? Can English teachers with several decades of experience from Vietnam, Hungary, Greece and Brazil agree on what some of the crucial elements of successful language acquisition might be?

The editor, Alan Maley, decided that these questions are worth exploring despite the vast geographic distances and the widely different contexts in which the contributors to the volume have gained their expertise in the course of their life-long development as teachers, teacher trainers, authors and policy makers. Maley invited 20 ELT practitioners to describe their personal stories and the journey they took to arrive at the values and beliefs that lie at the heart of how they perceive language learning and teaching. He asked the contributors to weave together “the five strands of places, personalities, ideas, publications and critical moments” (p. 8) and align them with Prabhu’s (1987) concept of ‘the teacher’s sense of plausibility’. The result is a rich tapestry of experiences that are often rooted in early childhood and describe the learning of additional languages as a source of immense joy and, on occasion, a fair amount of frustration.