This book explores the benefits of teaching reflection upon one's own culture to develop intercultural competence and looks into the relationship between the proficiency level of the second language and the target culture. It introduces new debates on the concept of 'critical cultural awareness' in intercultural learning and teaching, for example the indiscriminate use of terminologies related to the idea of 'intercultural encounters'. Also, it provides insight into the relationship between language and culture using a new tool such as the Autobiography of Intercultural Encounters through Visual Media. The presentation of different approaches, tools, barriers, educational and cultural realities, online intercultural exchange projects and concepts such as motivation, attitudes, stereotyping, otherization, and critical cultural awareness makes this book an excellent instrument not only for teachers but also for researchers, policy-makers and private and public institutions that want to explore culture and interculturality and to promote an intercultural competence and global citizenship among its learners / users / clients and / or an interculturally-oriented language education.

This text focuses on the motivational regulation in English language learning of Chinese college students. Considering the importance and necessity of motivational regulation study in foreign language learning, it systematically explores strategies used by Chinese college students to regulate motivation, taking into account student gender, specialty and English proficiency. The book considers self-regulated language learning, pointing out the impact that motivation, language learning strategies, and motivational regulation have on academic learning and achievement. Based on surveys of motivational regulation strategies used by Chinese college students as well as the differences in using motivational regulation strategies between high and low English achievers, the volume introduces models of self-regulated learning and provides a theoretical foundation for the study of motivational regulation.

This volume provides conceptual syntheses of diverging multilingual contexts, research findings, and practical applications of integrating content and language (ICL) in higher education in order to generate a new understanding of the cross-contextual variation. With contributions from leading authors based in Asia, the Middle East, and Europe, the volume offers comparison of contextualized overviews of the status of ICL across the geographic areas and allows us to identify patterns and advance the scholarship in the field. ICL in teaching and learning has become an important consideration in the endeavors to address linguistic diversity at universities, which has resulted from the growing teacher and student mobility around the world.

This book adopts a multi-method and multi-phase approach to investigate the washback effects of Test for English Majors (TEM) on program administrators, teachers and students, shedding new light on TEM reform and the reform of English teaching and learning in China. TEM, a nationwide test used to measure the language proficiency of undergraduate English majors in China, is a major standardized test taken by nearly 400,000 students every year. The book's key features include: an in-depth discussion of the nature of washback and a framework for investigating it; a multi-method and multi-phase approach, employing both the quantitative method of questionnaire surveys and the qualitative methods of interviews and classroom observations; large-scale questionnaire surveys conducted among experts, program administrators, teachers and students, and involving over 30,000 participants; detailed assessments of TEM's washback effects on stakeholders' perceptions, classroom teaching practice, students learning activities, etc.; and essential insights into testing and teaching reforms.

This book explores the application of an innovative assessment approach known as Dynamic Assessment (DA) to academic writing assessment, as developed within the Vygotskian sociocultural theory of learning. DA blends instruction with assessment by targeting and further developing students' Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD). The book presents the application of DA to assessing academic writing by developing a set of DA procedures for academic writing teachers. It further demonstrates the application of Hallidayan Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), combined with DA, to track undergraduate business management students' academic writing and conceptual development in distance education. This work extends previous DA studies in three key ways: i) it explicitly focuses on the construction of a macrogenre (whole text) as opposed to investigations of decontextualized language fragments, ii) it offers the first in-depth application of the powerful SFL tool to analyse students' academic writing to track their academic writing trajectory in DA research, and iii) it identifies a range of mediational strategies and consequently expands Poehner's (2005) framework of mediation typologies. Dynamic Assessment of Students' Academic Writing will be of great value to academic writing researchers and teachers, language assessment researchers and postgraduate students interested in academic writing, alternative assessment and formative feedback in higher education.

This study provides a systematic overview of articles and article systems in the world's languages using a sample of 104 languages. Articles can be classified into 10 types according to their referential functions: definite, anaphoric, weak definite, recognitional, indefinite, presentational, exclusive-specific, nonspecific, inclusive-specific, and referential articles. All 10 types are described in detail with examples from various languages of the world. The book also addresses crosslinguistic trends concerning the distribution and the development of different article types, and it proposes a typology of article systems. The aim of this study is to provide a general crosslinguistic overview concerning the attested properties and distributions of articles. It is geared towards readers with interests in language typology and the nominal domain, and it can serve as a point of reference for language-specific studies of articles or determiners.

This edited collection challenges the perceptions of disciplinary, linguistic, geographical and ideological borders that run across language education. By highlighting commonalities and tracing connections between diverse sub-fields that have traditionally been studied separately, the book shows how the perspectives of practitioners and researchers working in diverse areas of language education can mutually inform each other. It consists of three thematic parts: Part I outlines the field of language education and challenges its definition by highlighting additional theoretical constructs that have tended to be viewed as separate from language education. Part II investigates curricular boundaries, showing how the language-learning curriculum can be enriched by connections with other curricular areas. Lastly, Part III looks into the challenges and opportunities associated with language education against the backdrop of globalisation.

In the sociopolitics of language, sometimes yesterday's solution is tomorrow's problem. This volume examines the evolving nature of language acquisition planning through a collection of papers that consider how decisions about language learning and teaching are mediated by a confluence of psychological, ideological, and historical forces. The first two parts of the volume feature empirical studies of formal and informal education across the lifespan and around the globe. Case studies map the agents, resources, and attitudes needed for creating moments and spaces for language learning that may, at times, collide with wider beliefs and policies that privilege some languages over others. The third part of the volume is devoted to conceptual contributions that take up theoretical issues related to epistemological and conceptual challenges for language acquisition planning. These contributions reflect on the full spectrum of social and cognitive factors that intersect with the planning of language teaching and learning including ethnic and racial power relations, historically situated political systems, language ideologies, community language socialization, relationships among stakeholders in communities and schools, interpersonal interaction, and intrapersonal development. In all, the volume demonstrates the multifaceted and socially situated nature of language acquisition planning.

Thriving as a Graduate Writer offers a comprehensive guide to the multifaceted challenges of writing in graduate school. It shows readers how to think about academic writing, how to manage an academic text, and how to establish an effective writing practice. Graduate students from all disciplines will find concrete strategies and motivation for the enterprise of academic writing. Intended for both multilingual writers and those for whom English is a first language, Thriving as a Graduate Writer offers essential writing support in quick, easily digestible chunks. Readers of Thriving as a Graduate Writer will: - Learn how to establish an effective writing practice - Discover how to position themselves as competent and engaged writers - Learn how to structure their writing, craft effective sentences, and create movement with a text - Develop processes for draft revisions - Create individual writing strategies that will last throughout their careers

Originally published in 1874. The book also contains specimens of Gypsy poetry, and an account of certain Gypsyries and of various things relating to Gypsy life in England. Contents include: The Gypsy Language - Word Book of the Romany - Gypsy verbs - Little Sayings - The Lord's Prayer in Gypsy Dialect - Book of Wisdom of the Egyptians - Gypsy names of Countries and Towns - English Gypsy Songs - Foreign Gypsy Songs - The English Gypsies - Gypsy names - Fortune Telling - Metropolitan Gypsies - Famous Gypsies. Etc

The book contains contributions from practitioners and theoreticians who explore the pronunciation of English from various perspectives: phonetic, phonological, psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic. In accordance with the unifying theme of the volume, individual contributions investigate the characteristics of a foreign accent, its production and perception, study the development of methods and techniques in pronunciation teaching, evaluate their use in classroom materials and in the classroom itself, and investigate the conditions for second language learning and teaching from the perspective of learners and teachers. The book offers a unique combination of a scholarly research with practical applications, inspired over the years by the work of Professor Wlodzimierz Sobkowiak, who has researched pronunciation teaching and pioneered technology-oriented, corpus-based approaches to the study of English pronunciation in Poland.

This book focuses on the dynamic nature of EAP (English for academic purposes) learners' beliefs about language learning in their shift from an EFL (English as a foreign language) environment to an EMI (English as the medium of instruction) setting in mainland China. It adopts a mixed method paradigm, whose quantitative part aims to capture the general dynamic feature of the selected student population, while its qualitative part attempts to unveil the process of change in beliefs about language learning among the sample. It is hypothesized that the change in their beliefs about language learning is the result of the interplay between the learners' agency and the mediation of the contextual realities at the institutional and social levels.