Interesting, topical and up-to-date, Close-Up is a four-level B1 / C1 course which makes English come alive through spectacular National Geographic photography and facts carefully selected to appeal to the inquisitive minds of young teenagers. Thematically-based, Close-Up provides a plethora of interesting and diverse reading texts guaranteed to appeal to this age-group, while providing a springboard for the development of language skills required to communicate effectively about the world around us.

Writing Centers have traditionally been viewed as marginalized facilities within their institutions. At the same time, faculty in all disciplines have come to stress the importance of good writing, and institutions have created Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) Programs to address this concern. Often, the interests of Writing Centers conflict with those of WAC programs, and the theoretical foundations of the two may not necessarily be the same. Nonetheless, Writing Centers--whether voluntarily or involuntarily--have become more involved with efforts to promote Writing Across the Curriculum and have formed fruitful partnerships with WAC Programs. While journal articles have begun to discuss these partnerships, this book offers an extended treatment of the topic. By examining the relationships between Writing Centers and WAC programs, this volume challenges the view that Writing Centers are marginalized and demonstrates how they are aggressively moving toward the curricular center of education.

Each chapter examines the evolving theoretical, practical, and institutional relationships between Writing Centers and Writing Across the Curriculum programs. By drawing from institutionally specific experiences, expert contributors present a variety of approaches for establishing and developing effective Writing Center/WAC partnerships. Included are perspectives from established and emerging theorists from all levels, including high schools, community colleges, small four-year colleges and universities, and major research institutions. The contributors accurately portray the true diversity of Writing Center/WAC partnerships and assess the compatibility of these partnerships with larger institutional missions. The volume touches on such topics as the use of computers in writing instruction, the use of student writing tutors, and the problems inherent in discipline-specific language. By deepening our knowledge of the merging of Writing Centers and WAC Programs, this book sets the foundation for more advanced future research.

This book presents the first comprehensive reference on noun declensions in Modern Irish. Whereas traditional descriptions of noun inflection are notoriously complex and filled with exceptions and irregularities, this reference guide provides a systematic and straightforward characterization of nominal paradigms, which also captures important generalizations about the inflection of nouns. Andrew Carnie proposes ten declension classes instead of the traditional five and separates off seven major types of plural formation. He provides fully inflected paradigms for 1200 nouns, and a reference list of 10,000 Irish nouns annotated with their new declension class, their plural type and the form of the genitive singular and common case (nominative) plural. The book also includes parallel information on the inflection of adjectives and prepositions.
This unique reference tool will be invaluable not only to language researchers and authors, but to teachers and students of the language, whether they are native speakers or beginners.

Using a corpus of data drawn from naturally-occurring second language conversations, this book explores the role of idiomaticity in English as a native language, and its comparative role in English as a lingua franca. Through examining how idiomaticity enables first language learners to achieve a greater degree of fluency, the book explores why idiomatic language poses such a challenge for users of English as a lingua franca. The book puts forward a new definition of competence and fluency within the context of English as a lingua franca, concluding with an analysis of practical implications for the lingua franca classroom.
This in-depth study of English language learning using corpus data will be of interest to researchers in applied linguistics and corpus linguistics and to teachers of English as an international lingua franca.