LATEX - The Language Teaching Expertise Research Group
What is LATEX?
The research group now known as LATEX grew out of an earlier group which concentrated its attention fully on issues of task design, and was known as the Language Teaching Design Procedures Group (LTDPG). One reason for this initial focus on task design is that from 1995 to 1998 individuals associated with the group were involved in a three-year research project, funded by the ESRC as part of their Cognitive Engineering programme. The project looked at task design in two domains, language teaching (EFL) and mathematics teaching. One main data set emerging from the project was a collection of sixteen think-aloud protocols of designers actually creating a language teaching classroom activity following a brief provided by us. Transcriptions of these protocols were coded and analysed, but at the end of the ESRC project parts of this data set remained unanalysed, and Keith Johnson was awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship to complete the analysis.
The ESRC and Leverhulme work had several outcomes. One was the book Johnson, K. 2003 Designing Language Teaching Tasks Basingstoke: Palgrave. Another was a series of two publications appearing under the title Working Papers on Task Design. The first is an attempt to provide a research-based guide for all those interested in learning how to design language learning tasks. It is entitled Designing Language Learning Tasks: A guide, Volume 1 draft, and is authored by Virginia Samuda, Keith Johnson and James Ridgway. Working Paper 2 is entitled Designing Language Teaching Tasks: the first 6.1 minutes (Keith Johnson). It describes the procedures followed by task designers in the early stages of design.
The research group's change of title from LTDPG to LATEX signals a development of its scope of interest from task design alone to wider areas of language teaching expertise. It is hoped that further working papers will be produced in the series which will henceforth be known as Working Papers in Language Teaching Expertise.
To see the specialisms of the people involved in LATEX, click here.
Current LATEX Research
Teacher Evaluation of a Textbook using Think Aloud Protocols
More information: HTML | Word Document
For information about past LATEX Research, click here
If you would like to register an interest in the work of LATEX, please contact:
Keith Johnson k.johnson@lancaster.ac.uk or by snail mail to
Department of Linguistics and English Language,
University of Lancaster,
Lancaster
LA1 4YT.