MSI Press Blog

  This week's story-behind-the-book post provides a look behind the scenes for Teaching and Learning to Near-Native Levels of Language Proficiency . From the publisher -  Well, this is a trip down memory lane! This series of books served as the proceedings of the annual conferences of the Coalition of Distinguished Language Centers (CDLC). There are four volumes; two more were planned, but the CDLC, the organization providing the book editors and authors, closed it doors before the proceedings from the final two conferences could be processed.  CDLC was a unique organization in that it formed as an umbrella organization for support to language centers from a range of institutions, including ivies (e.g. Yale University), state universities (e.g., San Diego State University), and private schools. The reach was international, and member institutions came from the US, Jordan, Czechoslovakia, and Germany. CDLC was also unique in that it focused on the very highest levels...

  From the editor - The story behind the Journal for Distinguished Language Studies is pretty much the story behind MSI Press. When the Coalition for Distinguished Language Centers , a nonprofit organization, began holding their first conferences in 2003, they realized that they needed a publisher to handle their conference proceedings and a planned journal dedicated to helping language learners reach near-native levels of foreign language proficiency. One of the co-founders of the CDLC was the owner of a private consulting business, Mind Solutions International and offered to establish a publishing house within that business. The publishing house took on a simplified version of the name, MSI, and became MSI Press and later MSI Press LLC. (Most MSI Press authors do not know what the initials stand for since, with the closing of both CDLC and MSI in 2010, only the press remained -- and its acronymic name.) --- We have available for individual purchase each of the feature articles f...

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 administ...