An entertaining collection of strange, delightful and unexpectedly apt words from the origins of English, which illuminates the lives, beliefs and habits of our linguistic ancestors. 'A marvelous book' Neil Gaiman 'Wonderful' - Tom Holland 'A lovely, lovely read' - Lucy Mangan 'Splendid' - David Crystal 'Thorough, entertaining, and absolutely fascinating.' Paul Anthony Jones, Haggard Hawks In this beautiful little book, Hana Videen has gathered gems of words together to create a glorious trove and illuminate the lives, beliefs and habits of our linguistic ancestors. We discover a world where choking on a bit of bread might prove your guilt, where fiend-ship was as likely as friend-ship, and you might grow up to be a laughter-smith. These are the magical roots of our own language: you'll never see English in the same way again.

The structure and content of a contemporary second language textbook are intended to encourage the initiative learner activity and create proper conditions for its manifestation in the curriculum. This premise unreservedly accepted by the teaching community proposes a flexible approach to second language acquisition encouraging individual self-learning experience. Textbook Theory and Invariant Approaches to Language Learning: Emerging Research and Opportunities is a critical scholarly publication that examines the structure and function of current second language learning curricula and classrooms. The book pursues three main objectives, which include (1) reconstruction of the general conceptual framework of textbook theory; (2) systematization of the invariant approach applications; and (3) production of a set of concepts, principles, rules, and regularities underlying the invariant-based text development. Featuring a wide range of topics such as learning patterns, proficiency, and communication, this book is ideal for education professionals, academicians, professionals, researchers, curriculum designers, and students.

During the last four decades, a corpus-based approach to language teaching has become very significant. Direct use of corpora in language pedagogy is limited by certain factors: time, the lecturer's knowledge and skills needed to analyze the corpus, access to sources such as computers and appropriate computer tools, or a combination of these factors. The key to a successful corpus-based approach is in the appropriate level of the lecturer's guidance or pedagogical mediation, which depends on student age, experience, and prior knowledge. It is therefore very important that lecturers be equipped with the necessary knowledge and education for using and analyzing corpora on a daily basis. Computer Corpora and Open Source Software for Language Learning: Emerging Research and Opportunities is a cutting-edge research publication that analyzes teacher experiences in implementing computer corpora into their language learning classrooms in order to formulate additional insights as to best strategies for integrating such tools that maximizes language learning efficiency in primary and secondary education. Highlighting topics such as ICT tools, language education, and linguistics, this book is ideal for academicians, educators, computer science teachers, IT professionals, researchers, and students.