Martin Rybika

Critical Analysis
Jeremy Harmer - The Practice of English Language Teaching (chapter: The Changing World of English, p.13)

The book contains a fair collection of overall and specific knowledge, let it be on teaching English, or about the language itself and various techniques how to deal with it. Also there are many useful advices concerning concrete facts and situations which can occur in classroom. The structurization of the text is lucid and well-arranged and may succeed in helping the teacher to improve his or hers style of teaching, however, also there are several things which are not in my opinion as they could be. From my point of view, some parts of the book could contain lesser amount of information or be more straightforward. In the chapter "The Changing World of English", there is a good deal of unnecessary advice, which regard as not being of the main concern of the book as it is not related to the teaching. The problem of the information overload is present in this chapter in particular. This can be demonstrated quite easily on the structure of sub chapters, which contain two or more paragraphs concerning the set of grammatical rules already known to teacher and just one paragraph or no paragraph emphasizing the relation of the content to English teaching. Also the ever-present information overload throughout the book is probably the biggest disadvantage, as I often found myself mesmerized and not remembering anything from the previous chapters when starting to read the next one. Eventually, in conclusion the book is a good source of advice and presents the reader with the new content in a way that can actually be used. But the sometimes excessive amount of information presented to the reader would suffice for two books. This fact gives the readers the obligation of making various notes, which may restrain the reader from dovetailing all the useful information provided.