The Fabrication of Traditional Language Teaching

''Traditional'' language teaching has come to be equated with old, dysfunctional, outdated, or backward pedagogies. But is that really all there is to it? This book breaks through the disinterest in tradition and challenges taken-for-granted assumptions about the realm of the traditional in language education, gradually revealing that the common and dismissal of traditional language teaching is inadequate and flawed - a fabrication. To disrupt this fabrication of traditional language teaching, The Fabrication of Traditional Language Teaching argues for the reclaiming and reframing of tradition as a crucial concept in language education and scholarship. It provides an in-depth investigation of applied linguistics scholarship and the knowledge that it has produced about traditions, relates this to interdisciplinary perspectives on tradition that have been advanced in the social sciences, philosophy, education, and cultural studies. By tracing the ways in which traditional language education has been, and continues to be, fabricated, it reveals how this fabrication affects and impedes our understanding of language education and research.

List of contents

Introduction
1. Traditional language teaching in the communicative era
2. Into the 21st century: Competing narratives about communicative and traditional language teaching
3. Traditional language teaching beyond CLT
4. Tensions, frictions, fractures
5. Tossing tradition
6. Reclaiming tradition
References
Index

About the author

Barbara Schmenk is Professor of German and Applied Linguistics at the University of Waterloo, Canada

Product details

• Authors: Barbara Schmenk
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Release: 02.04.2026
• EAN: 9781350563254
• ISBN: 978-1-350-56325-4
• No. of pages: 264
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Education > School education, didactics, methodology; Education, Language acquisition, Language teaching theory & methods, Language teaching theory and methods, Language teaching and learning, Language teaching & learning (other than ELT), EDUCATION / Teaching / Methods & Strategies, EDUCATION / Teaching / Subjects / Language Arts, Education / Educational sciences / Pedagogy