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The Story behind the Book: Communicative Focus (Shekhtman & Kupchanka)

 


Communicative Focus was written through collaboration of Boris Shekhtman, who had left the Foreign Service Institute to open his own highly successful private school, using language teaching techniques that were quite unique but extremely effective, and Dina Kupchanka, a young teacher who taught for him. 

The realization of the principles introduced in Communicative Focus had appeared earlier as actual classroom exercises in several publications, a book published by Cambridge University Press (Developing Professional-Level Foreign Language Proficiency), How to Improve Your Foreign Language Immediately (an immensely popular book published by MSI Press), and articles in the Journal for Distinguished Language Studies. The theory behind these activities had never been spelled quite so explicitly before (lack of room in the previous publications to include theory). Further, it took some time before the profession was ready to move on from teaching language as linguistics and teaching it or communication from the point of message to teaching language as communication from the point of view (and use) of the native speaker (as opposed to the teacher or the language learner or a corpus). Even now, many language teachers and programs are not ready for these ideas -- but students are.

Communicative Focus is currently on special sale at the MSI Press webstore -- lowest price anywhere at the moment.

For other book back stories, click HERE.


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