Book Review

Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) presents teaching techniques and procedures along with the underlying theory and principles and is comprehensible to readers who are new to the field of English Language Teaching (ELT). David Nunan (2015) proposes rich illustrations of theoretical constructs through providing practical examples of how to develop teaching materials and tasks from sound principles; he also presents content through various textual types including classroom vignettes which show language teaching in action, question and answer sessions. The book consists of twelve concise chapters: Language Teaching Methodology, Learner-Centered Language Teaching, Listening, Speaking, Reading, Writing, Pronunciation, Vocabulary, Grammar, Discourse, Learning Styles and Strategies, and Assessment.

Writing a book review is an instance of evaluative academic writing where the writer is involved in an interaction with the author and the reader, evaluates the viewpoints stated in the book and voices his own position and stance in a dialogue with the reader. Working within the framework of Martin and White’s (2005) Appraisal Theory as an effective tool for studying the essential resources employed in this interaction and evaluation, the present study examined 60 book reviews from the Humanities academic journals written by native male and female writers, and tried to investigate the type and frequency of the three Appraisal categories (Attitude, Engagement, Graduation). The findings indicate that both writer groups made extensive use of these resources in their writings. However, the male book review writers exceeded the female writers in all the three categories. In addition, the Attitude resources were used the most and The Engagement resources were the least employed resources. The implications of the study for teaching writing skills and developing materials and tasks for writing courses at academic levels are mentioned in detail

Objective: The purpose of this study was analytical review of the book Designing the Digital Library, written by Mehdi Alipoor-Hafezi and published by SAMT in 2019 based on the criteria and standards of the university textbooks. The type of research was applied in terms of  purpose. As regarded method, it was a mixed-method approach. The analysis, review  and extraction of required data have been simultaneous. The checklist was used for assessing formal writing structure and content features on a Likert-type 5-pointed scale. Author's expertise in the field can be mentioned as the main advantage of the book. The textbook is the only work in Persian in the field of designing digital libraries. A separate chapter on legal  issues in digital libraries can also be considered as another positive point of this work. At the same time, this work has also notable points for improvement, the most important of which are   writing points. In general, the work in hand in terms of evaluation of formal writing structure and content criteria received scores of 46, 46, 63 and 63, respectively and achieved at least 70 percentage points, passing as a  book appealing to its audience. In spite of some defects and weaknesses, the studied textbook is one of few books on designing digital libraries and suitable for students and audience.