Through the words of more than a hundred practicing language teachers The Experience of Language Teaching provides a detailed picture of teaching and learning in communicative classrooms, and provides a framework for understanding why experienced teachers behave in the ways that they do. It covers a range of aspects of classroom life: how teachers create environments suitable for language practice, how they get students ‘on-side’, how they manage tricky students, how they vitalise the learning experience, how they develop a spirit of community and so on. The book demonstrates how paying attention to both the learning and the social needs of their class groups enables language teachers to behave in flexible ways that promote learning. This book will be of interest to teachers, teacher educators, researchers, and to anyone interested in finding out what it is like to be a language teacher at the present time.