English Experienced; Teaching Foreign Students by Staging Communication, - Hardcover

The teaching of English to foreign students has presented many challenges to those in the teaching field. English Experienced offers an exciting change from the often dreary run of language-exercise texts with their pattern practice drills and dialog exchanges. Here is a genuinely new approach to teaching English to nonnative English speakers built on a fresh redefinition of language. This innovative work unchains the student from his desk and involves him in communication situations demanding an integration of behavior patterns appropriate to the given situation. The training of the disembodied voice is abandoned in favor of a concept of total role playing as learning process.

With this approach the student is immersed in a role requiring he learn to integrate communication patterns of which the oral is but one element. By total mimicry and in performance he learns the integration of movement and sound, of facies and postures which convey meaning. Retention is augmented by the mutual reinforcement of integrated patterns.

English Experienced provides ten nondramatic, nontheatrical stagings based on daily life situations to be used as learning process. Extensive notes on underlying situational values and attitudes, as well as on phonological and syntactical structures peculiar to nonwritten English are furnished for each setting.

Teachers of English as a second language both in the United States and abroad will be anxious to see and try out Mr. Bedford's approach to learning the English language.