Mindful of the fact that cultures are now more interdependent than ever, this book explores the development of critical cultural awareness through the processes of teaching and learning about foreign cultures. It draws upon theoretical foundations relating to inter- and intra-cultural communication from contemporary philosophical movements, namely Critical Theory and Postmodernism. The study adopts Critical Pedagogy, as it is described by Freire, Giroux and others, as the educational framework providing guidelines for taking a critical perspective towards both native and foreign cultures. It examines the critical dimension of some selected documents and models used worldwide for teaching/learning culture within foreign language classes. It includes a research project carried out among secondary school teachers of EFL in Portugal whose national syllabus suggests a critical approach to English-speaking cultures. This project aimed to illustrate how practising teachers approach foreign cultures critically, to provide some grounded theory for a definition of critical cultural awareness within foreign language/culture education, and to inspire a proposal for teacher education and development. Finally, this book submits a general proposal for the development of critical cultural awareness and intercultural communication competence among prospective and practising teachers of foreign languages/cultures.

This book provides the reader with a basis upon which to develop teaching and learning methodologies for the multicultural classroom. It is a valuable tool for language teachers who want to implement educational practices that best serve the needs of learners eager to acquire proficiency in languages of wider communication such as English. Focusing on cross-cultural communicative competency, and with chapters on the historical spread of English, the pros and cons of utilizing American and British norms, and new alternative methods and practices, this book provides English instructors with the foundation they will need to meet the challenges of teaching a lingua franca in the age of globalization. Novel conceptualizations of language are presented which bring pluralism and multiculturalism center stage. The volume serves to show how teachers and teacher trainees can best assist learners in their pursuit of oral communication skills in the world's most utilitarian language.

Identity and Language Learning draws on a longitudinal case study of immigrant women in Canada to develop new ideas about identity, investment, and imagined communities in the field of language learning and teaching. Bonny Norton demonstrates that a poststructuralist conception of identity as multiple, a site of struggle, and subject to change across time and place is highly productive for understanding language learning. Her sociological construct of investment is an important complement to psychological theories of motivation. The implications for language teaching and teacher education are profound. Now including a new, comprehensive Introduction as well as an Afterword by Claire Kramsch, this second edition addresses the following central questions: - Under what conditions do language learners speak, listen, read and write? - How are relations of power implicated in the negotiation of identity? - How can teachers address the investments and imagined identities of learners? The book integrates research, theory, and classroom practice, and is essential reading for students, teachers and researchers in the fields of language learning and teaching, TESOL, applied linguistics and literacy.

The contributors to this volume have collaborated to present their work on introducing competences in intercultural communication and citizenship into foreign language education. The book examines how learners and teachers think about citizenship and interculturality, and shows how teachers and researchers from primary to university education can work together across continents to develop new curricula and pedagogy. This involves the creation of a new theory of intercultural citizenship and a procedure for implementation. The book is written by teacher researchers who aim to help other teachers, and concludes with reflections on the lessons they have learnt which will help others to implement these ideas in their own practice. The book is essential reading for foreign language educators and researchers, students in pre-service teacher training and teachers in in-service training.

Family Language Learning is a practical guide designed to support, advise and encourage any parents who are hoping to raise their children bilingually. It is unique in that it focuses on parents who are not native speakers of a foreign language. It gives parents the tools they need to cultivate and nurture their own language skills while giving their children an opportunity to learn another language. The book combines cutting-edge research on language exposure with honest and often humorous stories from personal interviews with families speaking a foreign language at home. By dispelling long-held myths about how language is learned, it provides hope to parents who want to give their children bilingual childhoods, but feel they don't know where to start with learning a foreign language.

While much research has been done on experiential learning opportunities in study abroad settings, there are fewer publications devoted to experiential learning in the domestic context. This volume aims to fill that gap by providing a collection of chapters highlighting research-based innovations in experiential learning in domestic settings. The book focuses on three experiential learning contexts: community engagement experiences, professional engagement experiences and other unique experiential contexts such as language camps and houses. The collection focuses on the US context but the research projects and curricular innovations described here can serve as models for educators working in other local contexts and will encourage interested practitioners to explore experiential learning opportunities in their local areas. It will also provide the reader with a better understanding of this growing field of inquiry and should appeal to graduate students and researchers who are interested in experiential language learning.

The exponential growth in the amount and complexity of information transmitted and shared on the Internet and the capabilities afforded by new information technologies result in the continuous emergence of new genres and new literacy practices that call for new models of genre analysis and new approaches to teaching literacy and language, where language learning autonomy has to take centre stage. Any pedagogical approach which seeks to develop autonomy in online language learning should also be concerned with the development of new literacies, with raising an awareness of digital texts and with the cognitive processes learners engage in when constructing meaning in hypertext. The purpose of this volume is to lay the foundations for an approach to online language learning which draws on the analysis of digital texts and of the practices and strategies involved in using such texts. With this aim in mind, this book incorporates and draws relations between research on digital genres, autonomy, electronic literacies and language learning tasks, combining theoretical reflections with pedagogical research. The chapters in this volume, written by researchers from different academic traditions, report research concerning digital genres, new literacy skills and the design of webtasks for effective language learning. These chapters will be useful resources for researchers and doctoral students interested in the development of autonomous language learning in digital environments.

This volume will appeal to anyone interested in knowing more about the fundamental building blocks of language: words. It brings together the fields of linguistics, neuroscience, psycholinguistics, speech-language pathology, and language education to present multifaceted perspectives on the topic of vocabulary. The theoretical and empirical contributions included consider some of the key questions facing the field, such as What is the mental lexicon?; What constitutes a word?; What are new and novel approaches to measuring and researching vocabulary?; and, What is the best way to teach vocabulary? This book will be useful to graduate students and scholars in the fields of theoretical linguistics, psycholinguistics, applied linguistics, adult and child language acquisition, and modern languages. In addition, it will appeal to language educators at various institutions, immigrant service specialists, school board officials, and study abroad consultants.

As people move into the new era of the twenty-first century, they will have more and more opportunities to communicate and interact with others using foreign languages. While this will naturally generate wide-ranging intercultural experience, people may not be alert to it in everyday life, and teachers may not know how to address the issues that arise. This book starts by exploring what it means to be intercultural from different theoretical standpoints, before contrasting ways in which people do (or do not) become intercultural in both tutored and untutored ways, inside and outside the classroom. The main purpose of this book is to introduce the concept of interculturality, to examine how it can emerge in an unplanned way and to consider ways in which it can be more systematically addressed through education, particularly through foreign language education.

Dramatic Interactions is a collection of essays on the flourishing and interdisciplinary subject of teaching foreign languages, literatures, and cultures through theater. With rich examples from a variety of commonly and less commonly taught languages, this book affirms both the relevance and effectiveness of using theater for foreign language learning in the most comprehensive sense of the term. It includes innovative approaches to specific theatrical texts and addresses numerous aspects of foreign language learning such as oral proficiency and communication, intercultural competence, the role of affect and motivation in foreign language study, multiple literacies, regional variations and dialect, literary analysis and adaptation, and the overall liberating effects of verbal and non-verbal self-expression in the foreign language. Dramatic Interactions renders accessible, efficacious, and enjoyable the study of languages, literatures, and cultures through theater with the hope of inspiring and facilitating the greater incorporation of theatrical texts and techniques in foreign language courses at every level.

The study reported in this volume is based on three decades of research on the SLA of Mandarin tone. It investigates whether differences in learners' tone perception and production are related to differences in the effects of certain linguistic, task and learner factors. The learners focused on are English-speaking students of Mandarin in Beijing, China. Their performances on two perception and three production tasks are analyzed through a host of variables and methods of quanitification.

Pedagogical Reflections on Learning Languages in Instructed Settings is intended to provide the latest pedagogical reflections that derive from research in a variety of key areas within the discipline of language learning. Thus, this volume aims at helping practising language teachers to update their teaching methodology. The book has fifteen chapters that are grouped around five sections. The first section of the book includes three chapters, which outline past approaches to language learning and highlight advances in our understanding of how languages are likely to be learned and taught. These three chapters provide the theoretical grounding for the rest of the volume by discussing outstanding concepts in the language learning field, namely: those of eclecticism (Chapter 1), communication (Chapter 2), and learner autonomy (Chapter 3). The second section of the book contains three chapters, which explore new directions in the field that have recently caught the attention of language researchers and practitioners, namely: the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in language learning (Chapter 4) the use of language corpora (Chapter 5) and finally, the use of the portfolio as a new assessment tool responding to new pedagogical demands (Chapter 6). The third section of the book consists of three chapters, which discuss the role of learners' individual variables such as affect (Chapter 7), learning styles (Chapter 8), and learning strategies (Chapter 9), crucial for understanding the nature of language learning. The fourth section of the book has five chapters and provides insights into understanding the nature of the four language skills, that is to say, listening (Chapter 10), speaking (Chapter 11), reading (Chapter 12) and writing (Chapter 13). This section also addresses the issue of assessment with the aim of increasing awareness on the duality teaching/assessing and its pedagogical dimension (Chapter 14). The book concludes with the fifth section, which includes a single chapter, that pulls all aforementioned topics together and highlights connections to a student-centred approach, which involves a reformulation of language teachers' teaching practices (Chapter 15).

First Language Lessons for the Well-Trained Mind uses picture study and other classical techniques to develop the child's language study in those first two all-important years of school. Each lesson leads the parent, step-by-step, through the simple oral and written projects that build reading, writing, spelling, storytelling, and comprehension skills. Use this book to supplement school learning, or as the center of a home-school language arts course.

Traditionally, teachers of majority languages receive less training to teach a language as a second language or to develop the plurilingual repertoire of their learners than, for example, foreign language teachers. Yet, in today's societies, learners bring many different languages to school. This means that the teaching of the majority language has to extend beyond teaching it as a first language and adopt elements of second language teaching. This publication aims to encourage teachers to become agents of reform for the promotion of plurilingualism in majority language teaching. The range of proposed actions includes small-scale activities, such as planning a lesson relating to a specific aspect of grammar which incorporates all languages spoken in the classroom. More comprehensive strategic approaches proposed in the materials involve head teachers or parents.