REVIEWS

TESOL Quarterly welcomes evaluative reviews of publications relevant to TESOL

professionals.

Edited by ROBERTA J. VANN

Iowa State University

The Practice of English Language Teaching (3rd ed.).

Jeremy Harmer. Essex, England: Longman, 2001. Pp. xii + 370.

■ Harmer’s third edition of The Practice of English Language Teaching

(PELT) is a guide to the teaching of World English for the 21st century. It
presents a comprehensive view of English language teaching theories
and practices that is both carefully researched and imbued with uncom-
mon sense. As such, it represents a refreshing alternative to ESOL
methods textbooks that limit their focus to a single privileged (and
predictable) methodological approach or a narrow set of national
language concerns. At the same time, its comprehensiveness underlines
the problem of trying to fit a bit of everything related to “the science and
art of teaching English” (p. x) as an additional language between the
covers of one general methods text.
PELT runs the gamut of issues related to teaching ESOL, from the
current role of English in world affairs to the classroom behavior
problems of unmotivated learners. As such, it leads something of a
double life; while it advertises itself as a teacher’s guide to be used for in-
service training programs and postgraduate courses, its encyclopedic
coverage results in a somewhat awkward compromise between a refer-
ence work and a course textbook. Indeed, given its nine major sections
and 24 chapters, it is difficult to imagine the traditional semester-length
college course that could do justice to the entire book.
PELT is intended for an audience with some previous EFL classroom
experience or training, but even though it is most definitely not an entry-
level text, it is written in a clean, easygoing style, fully accessible and
relatively free of jargon. Harmer has a light touch that dispels the notion
that professional writing must be dry and humorless (his section on
behaviorist theory is titled “Pulling Habits out of Rats”). Like the writing
style, the layout is clean and attractive, with numerous graphs, tables, and

TESOL QUARTERLY Vol. 37, No. 1, Spring 2003 179

illustrations. In addition to chapter references, there are a five-page,
double-column bibliography, separate subject and author indexes, and
follow-up activities for each chapter.
PELT offers a range of topics not often covered in ESOL methods
texts: handling classroom discipline problems, preparing students to be
autonomous learners after the language course is over, avoiding simplis-
tic praise-or-correct feedback routines, grouping students, being sensi-
tive to cultural influences on students’ learning styles, and staying
current professionally, to name but a few. There is even advice on what
beverages to avoid during class breaks. In the new edition Harmer has
added material on World English, corpus linguistics, and computer
technology for the language classroom.
The book strikes a balance between theory and practice, generally in
favor of the latter. The chapter on second language acquisition theory is
quite short, and the extensive technical chapters are crammed with
activities for receptive and productive skill classes. There is a special
chapter devoted to using and making classroom videos. Perhaps PELT’s
greatest strength is the knowing insight it displays into the psychologies
of learners and teachers. Harmer is particularly sensitive to the concerns
of nonnative-speaking teachers of English and warns repeatedly against
buying uncritically into culturally biased, Western notions of learning
styles and pedagogical approaches.
The book has a few obvious problems. There is no section on teaching
grammar, nor is there any discussion of prescriptivist notions of correct-
ness, one of the most contentious topics in teachers’ lounges around the
world. The English linguistics chapters (general overviews of pronuncia-
tion, grammar, vocabulary, pragmatics, and discourse) are thin, and one
wonders if they belong in a methods book at all. (This is a problem that
Brown’s Teaching by Principles: An Interactive Approach to Language Pedagogy,
2001, avoids by eliminating such content altogether.) Two chapters,
“Studying Language” and “Learner Autonomy and Teacher Develop-
ment,” seem to be somewhat random collections of interesting pedagogi-
cal ideas in search of a central focus. The references are generally biased
in favor of authors and publishers in the United Kingdom (e.g., there is
no mention of TESOL Quarterly or TESOL Journal in the chapter devoted
to professional literature), though this bias is probably no worse than the
opposite one found in U.S. textbooks.
On balance, The Practice of English Language Teaching is a thoughtful
and readable alternative to many less internationally minded ESOL
methods books. If one were to have but one general guide to the
teaching of EFL, one could do far worse than Harmer’s.

180 TESOL QUARTERLY

REFERENCE
Brown, H. D. (2001). Teaching by principles: An interactive approach to language (2nd
ed.). Essex, England: Longman.

ROBERT WEISSBERG
New Mexico State University
Las Cruces, New Mexico, United States

Teachers’ Narrative Inquiry as Professional Development.

Karen E. Johnson and Paula R. Golombek (Eds.). Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xii + 212.

■ Johnson and Golombek’s recent edited volume, Teachers’ Narrative

Inquiry as Professional Development, is a collection of 13 highly contextualized
narratives that reveal how L2 teachers, by (re)storying their realities,
dilemmas, and epiphanies, navigate their complex professional knowl-
edge landscapes (Clandinin & Connelly, 1995).
The book’s introduction describes the philosophy, procedures, and
potentials of the use of teachers’ narratives as a way of knowing by
teachers and as a tool for their professional development. Johnson and
Golombek organize the 13 stories in the book into four parts: inquiry
into instructional practices, inquiry into language learners, inquiry into
language teachers, and inquiry through professional collaboration.
Although each of the 13 stories successfully foregrounds one of these
four aspects of L2 teachers’ professional development, they can also be
read as nuanced, multifaceted accounts in their own right. Indeed, all
the stories are thick, varied accounts of teachers who (re)story their past
and imagine their future while living the exigencies of a present that is
mediated by their ever-evolving (re)conceptualization of curriculums,
students, teachers, professional knowledge, and institutional constraints—
from the story of integrating a literature-based curriculum in a secondary
school in the Canadian Northwest, to the story that gives voice to the
hidden ESL community of international spouses in the United States, to
the story of a Japanese teacher of English whose desire for satisfaction
has driven his growth as a teacher, to that of an English teacher in Spain
who comes to grips with the quiet students in his class through dialogues
with colleagues outside his institution.
Reading through the book, one notices that the editors are vigilant to
the possibilities of these stories being misread as other people’s stories
that are not necessarily relevant to the readers or as other people’s best
practices that should be emulated. Instead, the editors want the stories to

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