Current, comprehensive, and authoritative, this text gives language teachers and researchers, both a set of conceptual tools with which to think and talk about creativity in language teaching and a wealth of practical advice about principles and practices that can be applied to making their lessons more creative. Providing an overview of the nature of creativity and its role in second language education, it brings together twenty prominent language teachers and researchers with expertise in different aspects of creativity and teaching contexts to present a range of theories on both creative processes and how these processes lead to creative practices in language teaching. Unique in the field, the book takes a broader and more critical look at the notion of creativity in language learning, exploring its linguistic, cognitive, sociocultural and pedagogic dimensions. Structured in four sections- theoretical perspectives, creativity in the classroom, creativity in the curriculum, and creativity in teacher development-each chapter is supplemented by Questions for Discussion and Suggestions for Further Research. Its accessible style makes the book relevant as both a course text and a resource for practicing teachers.

In 1998 and 1999, three of the largest providers of educational tests introduced computer-based versions of proficiency tests for English as a foreign language. Around the same time, many institutions began to offer Web-based tests for particular language courses and classes. These two phenomena have greatly added to the momentum of work in computer-assisted testing and mean that assessment through computer technology is becoming a fact for language learners in educational settings and therefore for teachers and researchers. This book is the first to consider the theoretical, methodological and practical issues and their implications for language-teaching professionals wishing to engage with computer-assisted assessment. It overviews the work in the field, evaluates examples of assessment though computer technology, and provides language teachers and researchers with practical guidelines for implementation.

New languages are constantly emerging, as existing languages diverge into different forms. To explain this fascinating process, we need to understand how languages change and how they emerge in children. In this pioneering study, David Lightfoot explains how languages come into being, arguing that children are the driving force. He explores how new systems arise, how they are acquired by children, and how adults and children play different, complementary roles in language change. Lightfoot makes an important distinction between 'external language' (language as it exists in the world), and 'internal language' (language as represented in an individual's brain). By examining the interplay between the two, he shows how children are 'cue-based' learners, who scan their external linguistic environment for new structures, making sense of the world outside in order to build their internal language. Engaging and original, this book offers an interesting account of language acquisition, variation and change.

This book demonstrates how resources taken from positive psychology can benefit both teachers and learners. Positive psychology is the empirical study of how people thrive and flourish. This book explores a range of topics, such as affectivity and positive emotions, engagement, enjoyment, empathy, positive institutions, a positive L2 self-system, as well as newly added Positive Language Education. Some papers in this collection introduce new topics such as the role of positive psychology in international higher education, a framework for understanding language teacher well-being from an ecological perspective, or positive institutional policies in language education contexts.

This book reports on and analyses the Integrated Language Learning & Social Awareness Project, a unique project in the field of Foreign Language Learning and Telecollaboration till now in the world. It takes the existing research on telecollaborative learning, content and language integrated learning and e-learning and combines them into one coherent concept in which language acquisition and enhancement takes place through task-led research on the specific issue of "Healthy Cities" by targeting language learners from around the world. The book delivers insights into the planning and the development of the project including collaborative task design and its underlying theoretical and research frameworks. It then goes on to reflect on how these underlying frameworks are developed further to broaden the existing paradigms of research in the field of telecollaborative language learning.

In a time when the increasing cultural diversity and population mobility of the continent calls for good communication skills, this fascinating book features a wealth of data and critical opinion on the topic of mother tongue education.In the first part of the book, the two editors address central cultural, political and educational concerns relating to the mother tongue, using some of the findings of their European Commission funded research on the changing European classroom. The second part presents case study articles by practitioners from nine countries which have significant regional or immigrant mother tongue populations. These include Welsh in Wales, Catalan and Galician in Spain, Turkish and Greek in Germany, Arabic and Corsican in France, and Belorussian in Poland, as well as critical accounts of the main first language situation in England, Denmark, France, Germany, Poland, post-Soviet Russia, and Spain. The concluding part of the book looks at language awareness as a possible approach to linguistic diversity. It examines the preparation of teachers at all levels, as experinced by the editors through their involvement in an in international language study group based in Calgary, Cambridge, Mainz and Bialystock.Teaching the Mother Tongue in a Multilingual Europe is packed with original information which will be of use to all teachers and educationalists concerned with language.

Critical pedagogies are instructional approaches and materials that are aimed at transforming existing social relations in the interest of greater equity in schools and communities. Interest in this area is rapidly gaining momentum. This important new volume applies the critical pedagogical approach to the area of language learning, and in so doing, it addresses such topics as critical multiculturalism, gender and language learning, and popular culture. Committed to language education that contributes to social justice - and the political, economic, and sociocultural changes such justice requires - the contributors explore the meaning of creating equitable and critical instructional practices, exploring diverse representations of knowledge; they also make recommendations for further research in this area, and for critical testing practices and teacher education. Graduate students and researchers in TESOL, applied linguistics, and education will find this volume a thought-provoking and comprehensive presentation of theory and practice in this important new area of scholarship.

As opportunities for distance language learning expand language teachers and learners are presented with a new set of issues, challenges and practical realities. By taking a learner-centred approach to issues and developments within the field this book provides an overview of distance language learning and explores the ways in which all participants are adapting their practices in response to the new learning environments. Important themes include the initial experience of distance language learning and the need to develop a practical knowledge of distance learners, as well as learner support, learner autonomy, innovation and the emergence of new constraints associated with distance learning environments.

Shortlisted for the 2020 BAAL Book Prize This book brings together empirical studies from around the world to help readers gain a better understanding of multilinguals, ranging from small children to elderly people, and their lives. The chapters focus on the multilingual subjects' identities and the ways in which they are discursively and/or visually constructed, and are split into sections looking specifically at the multilingual self, the multilingual learner and multilingual teacher education. The studies draw on rich visual data, which is analysed for content and/or form and often complemented with other types of data, to investigate how multilinguals make sense of their use and knowledge of more than one language in their specific context. The topic of multilingualism is addressed as subjectively experienced and the book unites the current multilingual, narrative and visual turns in Applied Language Studies. It will be of interest to students and researchers working in the areas of language learning and teaching, teacher education and bi/multilingualism, as well as to those interested in using visual methods and narratives as a means of academic research.

This book explores the usage patterns of a group of adversative and concessive conjunctions in English texts written by Chinese EFL learners and their native speaker counterparts. Focusing on probability profiles and systemic potentials, the study encompasses three stages and combines the strengths of two research methods - the corpus-based approach and text-based analysis - to examine the conjunctions under the theoretical framework of systemic functional linguistics and rhetorical structure theory. Starting with an overview of seventeen conjunctions across two corpora in terms of overall frequency, positional distribution and distribution of semantic categories, the book then offers a more detailed discussion of three individual conjunctions, highlighting the interconnections between 1) syntactic positions and co-occurrence patterns and 2) semantic relations encoded by these conjunctions. Lastly, it presents a case study of one full-length text taken from the learner corpus, applying rhetorical structure theory to provide new insights into the relevance of adversative and concessive relations to text structure. This comprehensive, in-depth analysis is both diagnostic and pedagogically informative.

This edited collection explores the use of Exploratory Practice (EP) by language teachers in classrooms. Written by practitioners, the chapters showcase unique examples of each principle of EP, with topics ranging from mentoring practitioner researchers, to teaching and learning in EAP, and investigating curriculum development in language teaching programs. The book provides example EP studies and gives voice to practitioners' experiences of the challenges they experienced as well as the benefits. Examples include tackling intercultural communication in linguistically and culturally diverse classrooms; pedagogy and curriculum design in language teaching; explorations of continuing professional development in language education. In doing so, it offers tools that can be transferred to other classroom contexts and used to aid teacher development. The concluding chapter highlights critical aspects of Exploratory Practice which emerge in the studies and examines how practitioners advanced their understandings. This book will appeal to those working in Applied Linguistics, TESOL research, as well as language teachers and teacher educators.

This book examines approaches to teaching students who aim to make the leap from "advanced" or "superior" proficiency in a foreign language to "near-native" ability. While there are an abundance of publications on classroom techniques and methods for lower levels of instruction, almost nothing exists about the transition, which is vital for those who intend to use foreign languages in high-level arenas. Compiled by leading practitioners in this area of foreign language teaching, the book fills the gap for those developing programs at the "advanced to distinguished" level.

Extensively revised and updated, this second edition provides, in an A-Z format, an analysis of the most important generalizations that have been made on the unidirectional change of grammatical forms and constructions. Based on the analysis of more than 1,000 languages, it reconstructs over 500 processes of grammatical change in the languages of the world, including East Asian languages such as Chinese, Korean and Japanese. Readers are provided with the tools to discover how lexical and grammatical meanings can be related to one another in a principled way, how such issues as polysemy, heterosemy, and transcategoriality are dealt with, and why certain linguistic forms have simultaneous lexical and grammatical functions. Definitions of lexical concepts are provided with examples from a broad variety of languages, and references to key relevant research literature. Linguists and other scholars will gain a better understanding of languages on a worldwide scale.

The influence of cognitive processing on second language acquisition (SLA), and on the development of second language (SL) instruction, has always been a subject of major interest to both SLA researchers and those involved in SL pedagogy. Recent theoretical research into SLA and SL pedagogy has shown renewed interest in the role of cognitive variables such as attention, short, working, and long term memory, and automaticity of language processing. This volume first examines the theoretical foundations of research into the cognitive processes underlying SLA, and then describes various implications for pedagogically oriented research and for SL classroom practice. This book's blend of research from the cognitive sciences and applied linguistics make it an excellent introduction to applied linguists and language teachers interested in the psycholinguistic processes underlying SLA.

This book addresses the acquisition of pragmatics in second and foreign language classrooms, offering two state-of-the-art survey chapters, and eleven chapters reporting the results of empirical research. All chapters have been written especially for this collection. The empirical studies cover three areas: incidental acquisition of pragmatics in instructed contexts, the effects of instruction in pragmatics, and the assessment of pragmatics ability. The studies address a number of areas in pragmatics, from speech acts and discourse markers to conversational routines and address terms, and represent a range of target languages and contexts in the US, Asia, and Europe. A wide array of research methodologies are also employed, from questionnaires to in-depth interviews and conversation analysis. The first collection of its kind, Pragmatics in Language Teaching offers a comprehensive and essential introduction to a rapidly growing area, and should be of interest to researchers and language teachers alike.

This book is about planning lessons and courses for students of English as a foreign language. It is the only book on the market totally devoted to this. It does not take the view that "planning" equals writing pages and pages of notes by an assessor or observer. Rather it takes the everyday reality of the working teacher as they design short and long instructional units. Each chapter is based on a real life question, such as: Who are the students? When is the lesson? What can go in to a lesson or course? How do people learn? How can I teach? What materials can I choose? How can I get started on planning? What are my constraints and freedoms? What activities can I use and adapt?Each chapter contains both thought provoking analysis of parts of a teacher's job and many practical principles clearly explained. The book is designed to help inexperienced teachers gather working routines and sequences of ideas and to help experienced teachers to refresh the routines they have grown used to.

This book is a guide devoted to what language teachers can do to become more aware of and explore their teaching beliefs, attitudes, and practices. It provides teachers with the kind of knowledge and guidelines that can empower them to make their own informed teaching decisions. As such, teacher educators will find this a practical book to use in training courses.

This book examines establishing, maintaining and developing self-access language learning (SALL). While much of the book presents practical ideas dealing with issues related to SALL, they are supported by references to relevant literature and research. This link between theory and practice makes the debate about SALL accessible and makes the book a useful resource for those establishing and running self-access learning facilities, from pre-service teacher trainees to experienced teachers and from managers of self-access centers to administrators.

Welchen Stellenwert soll und kann ein intertextuelles Netzwerk aus literarischen Texten, Filmen und Medienmaterialien im Lehren und Lernen von Fremdsprachen einnehmen? Um darauf Antworten anbieten zu koennen, konzentriert sich das Buch auf zentrale Merkmale, welche literarische und filmische Texte kennzeichnen, die in komplexen, zwischen Sprachen und Kulturen situierten Raumen entstehen und diese thematisieren. Deren Potenziale produktiv fur den Fremdsprachenunterricht zu nutzen, ist ein wesentliches Ziel dieses Bandes. Vorgeschlagen wird eine integrativ verstandene Sprach-, Literatur- und Filmdidaktik. Der Fokus liegt auf dem Italienischen und Franzoesischen als Fremdsprache, auf transkulturellen Theorien und Methoden und deren Anwendung in plurilingualen LernerInnen-Kontexten.

Inevitably, it is in the most commonly used languages that the vocabulary of language testing and assessment is most highly developed, and for which most of the literature has been produced. A multilingual glossary has a significant role to play in encouraging the development of language testing in less widely taught languages. The idea of producing a multilingual glossary of assessment and language testing terms has grown out of the needs experienced by members of the Association of Language Testers in Europe (ALTE) while engaged in work on language testing projects. It is anticipated that this glossary will be of use, not only to members of ALTE, but to many others working in the context of European languages, who are involved in language testing and assessment. The glossary contains entries in ten languages: Catalan, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Irish, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish.

A proper understanding of intelligibility is at the heart of effective pronunciation teaching, and with it, successful teaching of speaking and listening. Far from being an optional 'add-it-on-if-we-have-time' language feature, pronunciation is essential because of its tremendous impact on speech intelligibility. Pronunciation dramatically affects the ability of language learners to make themselves understood and to understand the speech of others. But not all elements of pronunciation are equally important. Some affect intelligibility a great deal, while others do not. With a strong emphasis on classroom practice and how pronunciation teaching can be more effectively approached in different teaching contexts, this book provides an important resource for pronunciation researchers, with a distinctly practical focus. It shows how intelligibility research informs pronunciation teaching within communicative classrooms, enabling language teachers to incorporate intelligibility findings into their teaching. Professionals interested in oral communication, pronunciation, and speech perception will find the book fascinating.

Die enge Verbindung zwischen Sprache und Kultur ist eine Grundidee der kulturwissenschaftlich-interkulturellen Linguistik sowie der Fremdsprachendidaktik. Ausgehend von kommunikationstheoretischen Ansatzen untersucht die Autorin, wie genau sich die Brennpunkte dieser Verflechtung ausgestalten. Darauf basierend erfasst sie systematisch die Voraussetzungen fur erfolgreiche, sozial erfolgreiche und selbstbestimmte Kommunikation - auch unter Bedingungen der Fremd- und Mehrsprachigkeit. Die entwickelte interkulturell orientierte Theorie der Kommunikation bildet schliesslich die Grundlage fur den anwendungsbezogenen Teil der Studie. Dieser zeigt klare Perspektiven fur die Sprach- und Kulturvermittlung auf.

Im Jahr 2001 erschien der Gemeinsame europaische Referenzrahmen fur Sprachen (GeR) und hat national und international eine erhebliche Wirkung fur das Lehren, Lernen und Beurteilen von Fremdsprachen entfaltet. Im Jahr 2018 (Endfassung 2020, deutsche UEbersetzung 2020) erschien der Begleitband zum GeR mit neuen Skalen und Beispieldeskriptoren, der auch eine konzeptionelle Erweiterung darstellt. Die Beitragenden des Sammelbandes diskutieren und illustrieren die zentralen Aspekte des Begleitbandes mit einem Fokus auf dem deutschen Kontext und zeigen Umsetzungsmoeglichkeiten fur den Fremdsprachenunterricht auf.

This book examines a wide range of innovations in language learning and teaching in Japan. Each of the chapters describes the impetus for a change or new development in a particular context, from early childhood to adult learning, details its implementation and provides an evaluation of its success. In doing so, they provide a comprehensive overview of best practice in innovating language education from teaching practice in formal classroom settings, to self-directed learning beyond the classroom, and offer recommendations to enhance language education in Japan and beyond. The book will be of interest to scholars of applied linguistics and language development, and in particular to those involved in managing change in language education that attempts to mediate between global trends and local needs.