The starting point for this collection is a chapter by Dick Allwright on the language learning and teaching classroom experience entitled Six Promising Directions in Applied Linguistics. The other distinguished contributors respond to this discussion with their own interpretations and from their own experience. The collection problematizes prescription, efficiency, and technical solutions as orientations to classroom language learning. Complexity and idiosyncrasy, on the other hand, are recognized as central concepts in a move towards centralizing teachers' and learners' own understanding of 'classroom life', in the contexts of language learning, adult literacy education and language teacher education.

This book for TESOL researchers, professional and student teachers of English and other languages, highlights complexity and idiosyncrasy as key concepts for understanding language classroom life

List of Figures Foreword; K.M.Bailey Acknowledgements Notes on the Contributors Introduction Six Promising Directions in Applied Linguistics; D.Allwright What Do We Mean By 'Quality of Classroom Life'?; S.N.Gieve & I.K. Miller What Happens Between People: Who We Are and What We Do; A.Holliday Managing Classroom Life; T.Wright Who Does What In The 'Management of Language Learning'? Planning and the Social Construction of the 'Motivation to Notice'; D.Woods Darwin and the Large Class; H.Coleman Recognizing Complexity in Adult Literacy Research and Practice; M.L.Tseng & R.Ivanic Language Lessons: A Complex, Local Co-Production of all Participants; E.E.Tarone Take 1, Take 2, Take 3: A Suggested Three-Stage Approach to Exploratory Practice; J.F.Fanselow & R.Barnard Collegial Development in ELT: The Interface Between Global Processes and Local Understandings; M.P.Breen Language Teacher Educators in Search of 'Locally Helpful Understandings'; M.A.A.Celani Teaching and Learning in the Age of 'Reform': The Problem of the Verb; D.Freeman Index