Pictures in Action [antikvár]

Preface Within the Language Teaching Methodology Series we have created a special set of books with the In Action title. These books are designed to offer teachers material that can be directly used in class. They are resources for action, hence the title. They offer language teachers material which can be adapted with various inputs for their own classroom work. The activities are presented in an accessible and teacher-friendly way, with a clear identification of teacher and learner roles and above all, they consist of tried and tested tasks. The authors of the books in the In Action collection all have considerable practical experience of teaching and of classroom research. It is this combination of principle and practice available in an easily accessible form for the teacher which characterises the design of the books. We hope that they will not only help teachers to plan and carry out exciting lessons but also to develop themselves as reflective teachers by suggesting action research that can be done with their own learners. In many ways, language learning is a process of understanding metaphors, looking at the way other worlds and other systems go about the familiar process of communicating ideas, values, opinions, preferences and beliefs. Language teaching, in turn, acts to provide keys to the unlocking of these complex metaphors, suggesting clues and ways of proceeding towards greater understanding. Such detective work has, of course, primarily to rest on our understanding of the verbal code, the words and structures which encode and realise the meanings that communication makes. None of us, however, relies on the form of words alone, whether oral or written. We draw upon all our iconic competence to picture the available and possible meanings of what people say and write. We make use of our visual sense to colour in the context against which words derive a part of their value. Pictures, then, are crucial to understanding, whether they are actual representations or images in the mind. Even Comenius knew that a very long time ago, when he wrote his Pictures of the World. In this new book In the In Action collection, Pictures in Action, Günter Gerngross and Herbert Puchta draw on their immense practical classroom experience to offer readers a window into this world of images in language learning. Like other books in the collection, readers are provided with an easily accessible and catalogued set of practical classroom tasks, identified in relation to type of classroom activity, language-learning purpose and skill as well as level and competence of the learning group. It will be as easy to make use of individual activities as it will to chain them into a more extended curriculum. Moreover, the pictures themselves are equally varied: photographs, drawings, cartoons, classroom visual aids and commercial artwork are