The Story behind the Book: Task-Based Instruction by Leaver and Willis (an affiliated book)
This Sunday, we begin a new Sunday feature: the story behind our books. We will take these one at a time, on Sundays. So, if you like knowing the unknown and little known, come on by on Sundays.
This Sunday the book chosen to kick off our series is Task-Based Instruction by Leaver and Willis. This book was published by Georgetown University Press and appears among the affiliated books of MSI Press by virtue of having been co-authored by an MSI Press author (me - Leaver).
At the time of the writing of this book, much was available about task-based instruction (TBI) in the English as a Second Language (ESL) field, of which the greatest amount appeared to have been written by Jane Willis of the UK, often together with her husband. For Foreign Language Education/Second Language Acquisition (L2), however, only a small generically oriented spiral-bound sample of essentially one task was available, written by Michael Long, then at the University of Hawaii.
In consulting and in administering programs, I felt myself in need of a comprehensive book with applied theory and pragmatic models from time to time, and I knewIn that others working in my capacities also needed such a book. I was also pretty sure that Georgetown University Press would be interested in publishing it, since GUP had published an earlier co-authored book of mine, Content-Based Instruction, written with my colleague and friend, Steve Stryker.
So, I began to gather together examples of successful task-based programs within the US government, universities, and foreign institutions. As a result of consulting in more than two dozen countries, I had become aware of a wide range of emulatable programs. Collecting them was not difficult, but the hard work of organizing them and creating a thread among them, as well as presenting the current state of theory in TBI such that it created a cohesive umbrella over the book, was requiring more time than I had available, especially since several of the chapters were written by first-time authors (editing needed) or non-native speakers of English (pre-copyediting needed). So, I looked for a co-editor.
From 1998-2003, I spent a lot of time in various cities of Brazil. A proportion of that time was working with English language faculty on task-based approaches to language learning. Very frequently, I found that I was either preceding or following Jane Willis, so I contacted her, asking her if she would be able to take on the co-editor role. Delightfully, she answered yes. Although I did not know her personally at the time, she turned out to be a great colleague -- very knowledgeable, intuitive, hard-woring, very likable, very kind -- and, very helpfully, similar to me in outlook on L2. She additionally took on the difficult task of writing the introductory chapter, the one the presented the philosophical umbrella that the book needed. That chapter has been praised by reviewers.
Once Jane had agreed to help, we sent the book proposal to GUP where it was unusually quickly approved. After that, we finished the book surprisingly quickly, given the large number of chapter contributors, in less than a year.
All was going so well! Then, I got a copy of the contract. The requirement was to have both co-editors' original signatures on the same piece of paper. Huh? She lived in England; I lived in California. Even though we had completed a book together, we had never met. How on earth were we supposed to get both our signatures on the same sheet of paper?
I thought of the possibility of using DHL to sign, then send to Jane, then have her DHL it to GUP. She had a better idea.
It turns out that she would be visiting friends in western New Hampshire. I grew up in southern Maine and eastern New Hampshire so could visit home whenever time allowed (although I rarely made that trip except for special occasions). Well, this was indeed a special occasion. So, we made plans to meet in NH.
Derry, NH, the home to some of my relatives (my dad grew up in Londonderry), was also home to Robert Frost's Farm, located a long walk of a couple miles from my uncle's house. Since Jane incorporated Frost's work into some of her work but had never been to his home, it seemed the ideal place to meet, especially since there were tours, exhibits, and lectures there.
On a remarkable day in the spring, we met at the farm, listened to a lecture, and walked the property where we saw the stone wall that prompted the poem about mending fences, the birches reflected in the poem about bending birches, and the west-running brook Frost pointed out as different from most New England brooks, which run east to the ocean. There, on the hood of the car that Dave and Jane had rented, we signed the contract. Two wet signatures. Two original signatures. Just what the publisher had ordered. I have never had so much enjoyment signing a contract before or since!
I mailed the contract from Maine, where I was staying with my brother. Definitely a short postal trip to Washington, DC than from California.
Then, I returned to California. The book came out the next year. It got some pretty good reviews and some devoted fans. Most university libraries have copies, and the book is a staple of some faculty development programs.
About 10 years ago, which was 10 years after the book was published, Jane and I got to meet again. She and her husband, Dave (now deceased, may he rest in peace) were conducting some faculty development in San Jose. My husband, Carl (now deceased, may he rest in peace) traveled the 45 minutes north to meet with Jane and Dave and their friends, where we had a delightful time. It seemed like no time had passed since the first meeting.
We stay in touch, somewhat irregularly, but our paths do not cross. Maybe they will; perhaps we will both meander back to New Hampshire where, as the song says, "the fragrant breezes blow" and "the purple lilacs grow," and gain some more inspiration from Robert Frost. Were we to be able to go back in time to before the Old Man in the Mountains fell, we could have met there and gotten a different kind of inspiration from Noah Webster, who wrote my very favorite short story, "The Great Stone Face."
And that is how two people, who did not know each other (except by reputation), from two continents published a book together and created their own story line.
Every book has a back story. Watch this blog on Sundays for other back stories.
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