Where to buy these classic teaching books?

Work Teaching English in Taiwan
1

I really want to buy Stephen Krashen’s “The Natural Approach: Language Acquisition in the Classroom” and James Asher’s “Learning Another Language Through Actions”.

Has anyone seen books such as these, new or secondhand, on sale in Taiwan, or should I order them from abroad?

Thanks for any tips.

2

I could have sworn I’ve seen Krashen’s book in Caves bookstore, but don’t hold me to it. I do know that I saw one of the textbooks I studied from while I working on my BA in linguistics.

3

Cranes, Lucky and Bookman carry teachers resources.

Krashen is an idjit anyway… :wink:

4

Cranes carries some Krashen books. I believe you can also search their online catalog in Chinese.

5

some of Krashen’s books are online at http://www.sdkrashen.com. If you want to order books from TPR-world the shipping will probably be about $25 US, and the books will take about 3 weeks to arrive.

6

You can definitely get them here, no problems.

Kenneth

7

What other books would you add to your ‘classic’ list of books?

Kenneth

8

I’ve seen the Krashen book at Eslite, and the other one (maybe) at Bookman’s.

9

Thanks everybody. My colleague helped me search on the Caves and Cranes websites. Basically nothing except for one little Krashen book at Cranes I think.

I’ve read everything on the Krashen website. I want to read more about the classroom applications of his theories, and I believe ‘The Natural Approach’ is the seminal book.

I think I’ll probably just order these two books from Amazon. If I subsequently want more books on TPR I might try TPR World, though, as they have all the latest editions and stuff that might not be available elsewhere.

[Edit: Thanks Bababa: a search of Eslite has turned up “The Natural Approach” so I’ll get it from there]

10

Good question. Actually I don’t have much of an idea of the ‘canon’ of FL teaching books but I’m sure that you and other posters could come up with some good and useful suggestions, and if you do I’ll amend the title of the thread accordingly, or maybe a moderator could split it off.

The thing that gripped me about Krashen was how his theories described and explained so well what was going on in my classroom. The learning/acquisition distinction explained how students could reproduce language perfectly under controlled practice conditions, but would seem to have lost all the learned language by the next class. It explained the seeming limitations of error correction. It explained how some students who seemed inept at formal language learning would nevertheless aquire some language and attain some communicative ability, especially if I worked with their intuitive and creative senses.

I’m still in an internal debate with Krashen. While much of his theory is compelling and persuasive, I have yet to come to a firm conclusion, and there are some areas which it does not seem to cover adequately. It certainly merits serious thought, which is what I’m trying to give it.