Our second contributor in this series is Tyson Seburn. Tyson is an academic co-ordinator at the University of Toronto, where he specialises in English for Academic Purposes (EAP). Tyson is passionate about professional development for teachers, founded #EAPChat and #tleap and organised TOSCON 13 and 14. You can read more about Tyson here. We’re so excited to share this post with you.
Quite a number of list chain posts circulate among friends on Facebook. You are tagged by one of your friends after they have shared their list of 10 favourite movies, 10 foods that changed their lives, 10 books. I have taken part in a number of them, sometimes even without waiting for that desired tag—the approval to participate. I admit it. There’s something enjoyable about the simplicity of lists—those low stakes slices of who you are—that encourages discussion (and maybe debate!) where otherwise you might not bother commenting. When Divya asked me to make a list for the TDSIG website, naturally I jumped at the suggestion. Although most of my development now comes through articles and blogs, below is my list of 10 books that have shaped my teacher training through a mixture of thought-provoking research and classroom activities.
- EAP Essentials, Alexander, Argent & Spencer (Garnet)
- The Anti-Grammar Grammar Book, Hall & Shepheard (ELB)
- Teaching and Researching Reading, Grabe & Stoller (Pearson)
- Dealing with Difficulties, Prodromou & Clandfield (Delta)
- Teaching Unplugged, Meddings & Thornbury (Delta)
- Reflective Language Teaching: From Research to Practice, Farrell (Bloomsbury)
- Knowing Me Knowing You, Wingate (Delta)
- Big Questions in ELT, Thornbury (the round)
- Teaching and Learning in the Language Classroom, Hedge (OUP)
- Extensive Reading in the Second Language Classroom, Day & Bamford (Cambridge)
What are yours?
Thanks for this list Tyson. I did a book review this year for MEXTESOL Journal on Big Questions in ELT, and found the process with which Thornbury wrote it quite interesting – taking posts and repurposing both posts and replies made by readers of his blog. You won’t find a lot of answers in this book but you will find tons of very good questions which is oftentimes half the battle. We should all ask more questions…
You’re right, Benjamin. One reason I loved this title is that I fell in love with his blog from which this content was adapted first. If many of our blogs became books, I know many of them would then appear on this list.