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This post will be about books that I am reading lately as well as books that my students are reading. First I’ve been reading a lot of books lately. A few books that I have borrowed and enjoyed include:

The Omnivores Dilemma is a book that will forever change the way you look at food. I don’t mean that it will make you a vegetarian, because that didn’t happen to me - I just had some bacon for breakfast and have steaks queued up for dinner. However, you will learn how much of what you eat is made from corn. This book is a fascinating read - I highly recommend it.

DNA: The Secret of Life is written by James D. Watson, winner of the Nobel prize and the discoverer of DNA. It’s written for the layman and talks about the history of DNA up to the present and what this means for the future of mankind. Another absolutely fascinating book on science.

Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking is about how the unconscious mind can make the best decisions immediately upon sizing up a situation and why getting too much information can often derail that same decision. It’s all about thin slicing. A must read and one that I will buy in order to read again in the future. I’ve also purchased The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by the same author and this book is queued up.

The list of books is going to be quite long so this will be continued in the extended entry.

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Gord has posted a review of Education Fever: Society, Politics, and The Pursuit of Schooling in South Korea by Michael J. Seth. The title alone makes me want to read it, but after reading Gord’s review this book is now on my must read list.

Gord’s review is well written as one would expect from the quality of his past writings. Read the excerpt below or go read the whole thing, it really is compelling.

This book should, in my opinion, be required reading for anyone who’s coming to work as a teacher of any kind in Korea. Why? I believe this for a number of reasons…

...As an individual teacher, the themes of the book were quite familiar to me, for I have faced all of them in my own classroom at one time or another: class size issues, the fast-and-loose approach to standards of admission and academic advancement that results in the graduation of effective incompetents, the (to a Westerner) rather extreme zeal with which Koreans regard education, the universally-agreed-upon insanity of the University Entrance Exam and its paradoxical continuation into the present day, the stunning impotence and occasional outright ineptitude of the Ministry of Education, and the puzzling insistence that university studies (and especially English-language studies) are the hope of the nation. All of these are things I have bumped into myself time and time again.

What the book does is snap these issues into perspective, showing how and why they got the way they did, as well as establishing that, no, you — the white foreign teacher who is encountering these things for the first time ever — are not the only person who perceives there is a problem, and that your simple solution probably would work, in Canada, but for some reason — cultural, societal, linguistic, pedagogical, or logistical — is seen by Koreans as inapplicable. Reading this book, you don’t just realize what the wisest of us have intuited or picked up in conversations — that Koreans see many of these problems too — but you also see that you’re far from the first Westerner to suggest the very same solution to these problems. Most of them walked away in frustration, muttering darkly, and though their predictions about Korea’s economic future turned out to be flat-out-wrong (they thought the society would be stuck in poverty forever) many would agree that socially and developmentally, Korea’s developing much more slowly than it could be, and the bottom line is its educational system.

Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Wednesday Mar 12, 2008 at 07:49 PM
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It’s been over two years since I graduated from my M.A. program and I’ve done very little reading other than blogs. I’ve picked up a number of books over that time fully intending to read them but never got around to it. That has all changed recently as I finished The Vocabulary of World English (this entry) and Autonomy in Language Learning which I had bought and read sections of for my M.A. but have now finally read the whole thing strait throught (this entry). Tonite I will be starting English Language Learning and Technology by Carol A. Chapelle.

The book by Chapelle is for background research on an action research project that I will be doing in conjunction with a colleague and friend. This colleague specializes in research and is published in several academic journals. He is going to help me with research design and understanding how to analyze the data. That being my weak area and one of the most difficult things I did not learn while doing my M.A. We’ve been meeting over the past few weeks discussing the study design and will be preparing the materials and background research over the winter vacation and then conduct the research in spring semester.

It feels good to be learning again and getting something productive done. I’m also looking forward to getting published assuming the research and article writing go as planned.

Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Saturday Nov 24, 2007 at 04:03 PM
general_linguistic_study | Research_Methods | Teaching | Book_Gigilo | Permalink |

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Today is a holiday and I went downtown to do some shopping for my wifes birthday. Because I am a book gigolo, I stopped in at all three of the major book retailers. Doing this is usually does major damage to my credit card but not today. At Kyobo bookstore (광화문점) There is a good selection of linguistics and teaching oriented material on sale for 3,000 to 5,000 won each. There were a couple of books that I already own and paid 30,000+ won for. Needless to say I picked up 5 books for me and one for a friend whom I called to inform about the sale.

• Sound Patterns of Spoken English - (amazon)
• The Vocabulary of World English - (amazon)
• A History of the English Language - (amazon)
• Knowledge and Learning in Natural Language - (amazon)
• The Pronunciation of English - (amazon)
• Essential Introductory Linguistics (for my friend) - (amazon)

On a related note Alex Case is looking for reviewers for teaching materials and linguistics books. I already submitted myself to review materials and have recieved a response back. It looks like I’ll be reviewing a photocopiable resource book for advanced learners. If you are interested in reviewing material why not contact Alex?

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Readers may recall that a few months ago I wrote a review of a book I recieved as a door prize: Listening. In that review I said that I would be picking up other books in the series. Well I finally got around to picking up one. Today I purchased Grammar (really expensive online - I did not pay nearly that much) written by David Nunan. I also picked up a thicker heavier and no doubt more intellectually challenging book by David Crystal, English as a Global Language.

Book reviews forthcoming when I have time.

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As I have previously mentioned I signed up the The Library Thing a while back and have been recording my books, which a random 100 can be viewed on my library page.

Today’s Language Log post brings to my attention that it is possible to create and join groups within library thing. I have joined the group I survived the great vowel shift as linked by Arnold Zwicky. I’m not exactly sure what benefits a group have but I created another group, ELT Instructors.

If you are an ELT instructor and have books why not join library thing and then join this group. I think it would be a good way to discover books that may be useful to you that you have not yet discovered. Additionally it would be a great way to centralize book reviews of teaching materials and professional development resources. If you join, please leave a comment here or in the forum associated with the group.

Now listening to The Eels

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I was browsing Gord Sellar’s site the other day, when I noticed he had this block of book covers on his side bar. Intrigued I clicked through and found Library Thing. Library Thing allows you to catalogue every book you own or have read. You can then display them on your blog or export the data to excel or csv files.

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Practical English Language Teaching: Listening by Marc Helgesen and Steven Brown (ISBN-13: 978-0-07-111842-2) is a book that I recieved as a door prize at a CALLSig event. As I’ve mentioned before I’ve been intending to writing a review of this book for some time.

I found this book to be very engaging and easy to read. It is clearly written for the average teacher and not academics in an ivory tower. Reading the book I can hear Helgesen speaking as I’ve seen him present twice and the book reminds me of his entertaining, engaging, and informative style. I haven’t seen nor read anything by Brown before but in my opinion he gets points for being associated with Helgesen.