La palabra y el mundo: entrevista con B. Kumaravadivelu = The Word and the World: Interview with B. Kumaravadivelu

B. KUMARAVADIVELU es catedrático en el Departamento de Lingüística y de Desarrollo del Lenguaje de la San José State University, en California, Estados Unidos. Es autor de numerosos artículos y de algunas obras significativas en el campo de la metodología de lenguas: Beyond Methods: Macrostrategies for Language Teaching (2003), Understanding Language Teaching: From Method to Postmethod (2006), Cultural Globalization and Language Education (2008) y la más reciente Language Teacher Education for a Global Society (2012). El cuestionario que conforma esta entrevista ha sido elaborado por José Manuel Foncubierta y ha contado con la participación y/o asesoramiento de Ernesto Martín Peris, Elena Landone y Agustín Yagüe. marcoELE quiere agradecer al profesor Kumaravadivelu su amabilidad por contestar a todas las preguntas formuladas

Language Teaching in India: Issues and Innovations

This collected volume on English language teaching (ELT) in India contains 22 articles written by Indian teachers and researchers. The book has been divided into six sections. The first section—“Problematizing ELT in India”—offers a critical, historical perspective along with innovative ideas for making English language learning and teaching meaningful and purposive in modern India. The second section—“Nature of ELT Materials”—demonstrates how the ELT materials used in Indian classrooms are not embedded in local needs and indigenous contexts. The section emphasizes the importance of developing instructional materials that not only make use of the rich linguistic and cultural resources available in India but also promote effective communication skills among the learners. The third section—“Learner Profiles”—provides interesting insights into the needs, wants, and lacks of Indian learners of English. This section shows how the instruments of needs analysis developed in monocultural and monolingual settings are inadequate for assessing the needs and wants of learners in multilingual and multicultural India. The fourth section—“Classroom Issues”—focuses on certain central issues affecting teaching and learning in the classroom context, particularly the role of native language knowledge and skills that Indian learners bring with them. The fifth section—“Course Evaluation and Teacher Development”—suggests ideas for making teacher education responsive to the changing roles and responsibilities of language teachers. The sixth and final section—“Curriculum Change”—deals with the principles and procedures for curricular changes that are in tune with the evolving knowledge about learning and teaching and the increasing desire for learner control of the process of materials development and evaluation

Communication strategies and psychological processes in interlanguage written discourse

Several papers have appeared on the strategies of communication used by L2 learners. However, very little work has been done to determine the underlying psychological processes that generate communication strategies (CS). This paper assumes that any description of CS should be based on a description of the processes governing CS. The paper attempts to correlate CS with psychological processes by analyzing interlanguage (IL) written discourse produced by advanced Tamil learners of English as a Second Language