I first became aware of the unique collaboration between Marion Williams, an applied linguist, and Robert L. Burden, an educational psychologist, when I attended their presentation on motivation in language learning at the 12th World Congress of Applied Linguistics in Tokyo last summer (Williams & Burden, 1999). That experience led me to buy a copy of their book, Psychology for Language Teachers, which I found useful not just for its insightful chapter on motivation, but also because it is a thorough, but very accessible overview of important issues and developments in the field of educational psychology of particular relevance to language teachers.
        In his keynote address at the same conference, Michael Long (Long, 1999) pointed out that "all theories are at some level interim understandings of what theorists ultimately seek to explain" but stressed the importance of theories of second language acquisition (SLA) being judged on the basis of their relevance for language teaching. Williams and Burden would seem to agree when they argue that "there has never been a time when language teaching and learning was more in need of a systematic educational underpinning to its activities" (p. 44). They state that the main purpose of their book is to provide that type of underpinning.
        The model they choose to provide the framework is that of a social constructivist approach, which they describe as a perspective in which "learners make their own sense of their world, but they do so within a social context, and through social interaction" (p. 28, italics in original). In that sense, learners may learn in very different ways, even when provided with very similar learning experiences, because each individual constructs his or her own reality.
        The book contains ten chapters. The first two chapters provide an introduction to theories and developments in the field of educational psychology that have influenced language teaching and present the basic concepts of the authors’ social constructivist approach. Four key factors are identified which interact to influence the learning process. These include teachers, learners, tasks, and contexts. As might be expected, the rest of the book elaborates on these factors.
        Two chapters focus on the role of teachers in the language learning process and what they can do to promote learning. Three chapters discuss, within the framework of the authors' social constructivist model, different aspects of what learners bring to the language learning situation--how individual learners "make sense" (p. 88) of their own learning situations, the "multifaceted nature" (p. 111) of motivation in language learning, and how it is that learners actually go about learning something. The last of these considers the skills and strategies learners make use of as well as the processes they go through to, again, "make sense" (p. 143) of their learning. One chapter each is then devoted to the remaining key factors in the model, that is, the place of tasks in the language classroom and the ways in which the learning context, or more realistically, the "variety of often overlapping contexts" (p. 188), affect language learning.
        The final chapter provides a succinct summary of main ideas discussed throughout the book. This summary takes the form of a list of ten propositions that the authors consider "crucial for language teachers" (p. 204), each of which is followed by a very short and easily understandable explanation of the authors’ views about that particular issue. In fact, this short chapter would be worth reading in its own right, even without the rest of the book. It would make excellent material, for example, for a discussion of teachers' practices and beliefs in a workshop setting or a graduate class in SLA or language teaching methodology.
        In Psychology for Language Teachers, Williams and Burden summarize a vast amount of relevant research related to language learning and teaching, but make it accessible to the average language teacher. For readers with teaching experience but little or no background in SLA theory and the psychology of language learning, this is an excellent introduction that should be both understandable and useful. For readers with more extensive knowledge of SLA theory, the review of the psychology research fills in some of the background information about how and why the theories developed, which is (perhaps understandably) usually left out of other popular books written by and for language teachers or applied linguists (e.g., Brown, 1994; Lightbown & Spada, 1999). In that sense, it provides some reassurance to teachers by showing that the prominent theories of SLA and methods of language teaching did not just develop in a vacuum, but that there really is some solid psychological research backing them up.
        Most importantly, this book really is written for language teachers, although it can be read at two different levels. For those interested in psychological theory, there is a thorough overview of the important research and developments in the field related to language teaching, which can be appreciated regardless of one's particular theoretical views. For those who are simply interested in developing their teaching ability, on the other hand, there is a wealth of theoretically-grounded, but straight-forward advice for language teachers. This book, then, should be useful for virtually all practicing language teachers as well as graduate students in fields related to language teaching.
 

The Reviewer:

Rodney E. Tyson (Ph.D., University of Arizona) is an associate professor at Daejin University in Korea, where he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in English and English Education and coordinates the General English Program.
 

References

Brown, H. D. (1994). Principles of language learning and teaching. (3rd ed.). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Lightbown, P., & Spada, N. (1999). How languages are learned. (2nd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Long, M. (1999). Theories and theory change in SLA. Keynote address at the 12th World Congress of Applied Linguistics, Tokyo.

Williams, M., & Burden, R. L. (1999). Motivation in foreign language learning: A social constructivist perspective. Paper presented at the 12th World Congress of Applied Linguistics, Tokyo.