About the Series Editor

Dr. Michael Rost has been active in the areas of language teaching, language acquisition, and language policy for over 20 years. With his internationally acclaimed work as a researcher, a teacher trainer, and a materials designer, Mike brings a unique blend of abilities and interests to the WorldView series.

Mike’s teaching career has taken him to many parts of the world and has informed his current vision of global language teaching. His first teaching job in the Peace Corps in West Africa taught him the value of facing challenging situations — such as open-air classes of 100 students — with humor and creativity. His most recent teaching position at the University of California, Berkeley, where he worked with students of diverse backgrounds, renewed his focus on student motivation and learner-led instruction. Between these two career experiences, Mike worked as a curriculum coordinator of a large ESL program (Arizona State University), directed a highly successful English Language Program (Temple University, Japan), and taught applied linguistics and teaching methodology classes in M.A. and Ph.D. programs (Temple University).

In addition to his teaching positions, Mike has traveled widely as a lecturer and a consultant, conducting seminars at language centers, universities, and professional conferences around the world for such varied groups as the Save the Children Foundation, Bell Laboratories, the National Foreign Language Center, and the Annenberg Organization. In his seminars, Mike has helped teachers to understand theories of instructional design, to value the principles of communicative language learning, to make creative use of multimedia, and to awaken a sense of vitality and optimism in their own teaching.

Mike is also known worldwide for his language learning materials. He is author or co-author of several influential works, including the groundbreaking multimedia course Longman English Interactive (Longman, 2004), and he is instructional designer and series editor of several successful young adult and adult series, including English Firsthand (Longman, 2004) and the standard-setting academic training series, Contemporary Topics (Longman, 2003).

Mike holds an M.A. in TESOL from Arizona State University and a Ph.D. in Linguistics from University of Lancaster (UK), where he completed his influential doctoral dissertation on second language listening. He has written numerous academic articles and books dealing with listening and oral language development. His recent published works include “Second language processes and development” in the distinguished Handbook of Research in Second Language Teaching and Learning (Erlbaum, 2005) and Teaching and Researching Listening, in Longman’s experimental Applied Linguistics in Action series (Longman, 2002).

In the WorldView project, Mike has collaborated with the WorldView editorial team at Pearson Longman to create a dynamic series that reflects the principles of positive multiculturalism and successful learning that he has experienced firsthand during his career. Mike believes that WorldView has a perfect blend of features that appeal to today’s students: a compelling topic selection, active student-led tasks, and a careful incorporation of different media and resources. He feels that the WorldView approach, with its flexibility of instructional options and clarity of tasks and assessment procedures, will just as importantly allow teachers to be more confident, more creative, and more effective.