Someone somewhere, in my grad school era, opined that the most important part of any research book is the bibliography, and if one was short for time, that should come first.

Situating any book in the field is vital to a researcher. A kind of due diligence and critical look at the contents.

Getting the bibliography for this book into a text-readable form took days. Kindle reader (and the publisher) would only let me download a bit at a time. I have used up most of my 10% limit to get the 41 pages of references. I can continue to highlight, the subject of the next post.

Copy and pasting meant the line feeds were not included, meaning huge blocks of text. I spent many a meeting mindlessly finding author names, and adding two line feeds (return key) to format everything (as I listened, of course).

Once in digital forms, we can look at it through a word-cloud, above, which is pretty useless. Below is a list of names and publishers; Ellis, Skehan, Robinson. Swain was surprising, such a strong showing. Dornyei missed a few because of his umlaut. Long established researchers had the advantage here.

The Concepts list is not surprising, except perhaps the low ranking of the word Motivation. You’d think that would be mentioned more often as it is central to language learning. More to explore.

These will help me continue to puzzle out which 2-3 articles to read for each chapter as I progress a second time through the book.

Authors/Publishers

71 oxford
70 cambridge
61 ellis
59 benjamins
46 skehan
29 robinson
22 tblt
22 swain
20 ma
20 lantolf
18 routledge
18 li
18 gass
17 mackey
16 lambert
15 ortega
14 macmillan
14 kim
13 williams
13 palgrave
12 longman
11 norris
11 lyster
11 erlbaum
11 basingstoke
10 sheen
10 loewen
10 clevedon
9 willis
9 shintani
9 mahwah
9 gilabert
8 vygotsky
8 schmidt
8 rowley
8 newbury
8 nassaji
8 lloret
8 lawrence
8 gonz
8 doughty
8 branden
7 zhang
7 harlow
7 gruyter
7 erlam
7 blackwell
7 ahmadian
6 vanpatten
6 sato
6 Dornyei
6 philp
6 pergamon
6 mouton
6 horwitz
6 edwards
6 beretta
6 baralt
5 wigglesworth
5 wang
5 tavakoli
5 storch
5 springer
5 shehadeh
5 reinders
5 poehner
5 lapkin
5 krashen
5 housen
5 crookes
5 bloomsbury
5 alderson

CONCEPTS

617 language
265 task
233 second
179 learning
156 teaching
130 acquisition
100 university
99 research
69 tasks
56 linguistics
52 interaction
46 feedback
46 classroom
43 development
37 planning
37 learners
36 instruction
33 assessment
31 learner
30 memory
29 working
29 oral
28 cognitive
27 education
26 tesol
26 corrective
23 technology
23 anxiety
22 tblt
22 system
15 motivation
15 international

Today Reading (1:12 Ch. 10) and Blogging (0:42)

Previously: Announcement. Book. Selection. 3Readings. FirstRead. BloodBrainBarrier. Serendipity. SecondRead. Bibliography

Background: I’m preparing an 8-week course about TBLT for iTDi as part of their Great Minds series (not mine, the ones in the book). I am blogging about the process of preparation mostly for the fun of it. I was inspired by Cory Doctorow, an SF writer that does this with all his books. But it also helps me focus. This is even more exciting than teaching a grad school course. I’m looking forward to it and hope this might spark an interest.