Politics can be a very important influence on educational developments and their deployment. However, this volume is different from other volumes since it looks, not at the macropolitics and the ideological agendas of nations and multinational or global organisations, but rather focuses on micropolitics, the agendas and motivations of individuals within organisations, and on their actions. Micropolitics can be seen as ways of manoeuvring within institutions which are themselves not political, but commercial, financial and educational. Indeed, politics with a small p includes not only institutional politics, but also personal politics, which can influence language education both in daily matters, and in projects for innovation and change. The aim of this edited book is to begin a debate about the nature and role of micropolitics, to contribute to a better understanding of language education, change and resistance to change, and the processes of language education.

The case studies in this book are based on transcripts of classroom interaction in nine different countries. In each chapter, the first author explains the specific context and through a theoretical and/or experiential perspective interprets the transcript data. The data are then re-interpreted by other authors in the book, illustrating the complexity and richness of interpretation and creating a dialogue among the book's contributors. At the end of each chapter, readers are then invited with assistance to join in the conversation by providing their own interpretations of other transcript data from the same context. The book will be useful for student teachers or practicing professionals, as well as all educators interested in exploratory classroom research.

Corpora are well-established as a resource for language research; they are now also increasingly being used for teaching purposes. This book is the first of its kind to deal explicitly and in a wide-ranging way with the use of corpora in teaching. It contains an extensive collection of articles by corpus linguists and practising teachers, covering not only the use of data to inform and create teaching materials but also the direct exploitation of corpora by students, both in the study of linguistics in general and in the acquisition of proficiency in individual languages, including English, Welsh, German, French and Italian. In addition, the book offers practical information on the sources of corpora and concordances, including those suitable for work on non-roman scripts such as Greek and Cyrillic.

For over 25 years, the journal Writing on the Edge has published interviews with influential writers, teachers, and scholars. Now, Teachers on the Edge: The WOE Interviews, 1989-2017 collects the voices of 39 significant figures in writing studies, forming an accessible survey of the modern history of rhetoric and composition. In a conversational style, Teachers on the Edge encourages a remarkable group of teachers and scholars to tell the stories of their influences and interests, tracing the progress of their contributions. This engaging volume is invaluable to graduate students, writing teachers, and scholars of writing studies.

For over 25 years, the journal Writing on the Edge has published interviews with influential writers, teachers, and scholars. Now, Teachers on the Edge: The WOE Interviews, 1989-2017 collects the voices of 39 significant figures in writing studies, forming an accessible survey of the modern history of rhetoric and composition. In a conversational style, Teachers on the Edge encourages a remarkable group of teachers and scholars to tell the stories of their influences and interests, tracing the progress of their contributions. This engaging volume is invaluable to graduate students, writing teachers, and scholars of writing studies.

This carefully balanced set of studies and practitioner research projects carried out in various learning contexts around the world highlights cutting-edge research in the use of digital learning technologies in language classrooms and in online learning. Providing an overview of recent developments in the application of educational technology to language learning and teaching, it looks at the experience of researchers and practitioners in both formal and informal (self-study) learning contexts, bringing readers up to date with this rapidly changing field and the latest developments in research, theory, and practice at both classroom and education system levels.

This carefully balanced set of studies and practitioner research projects carried out in various learning contexts around the world highlights cutting-edge research in the use of digital learning technologies in language classrooms and in online learning. Providing an overview of recent developments in the application of educational technology to language learning and teaching, it looks at the experience of researchers and practitioners in both formal and informal (self-study) learning contexts, bringing readers up to date with this rapidly changing field and the latest developments in research, theory, and practice at both classroom and education system levels.

This book explores ways to prepare teachers to teach English as an International Language (EIL) and provides theoretically-grounded models for EIL-informed teacher education. The volume includes two chapters that present a theoretical approach and principles in EIL teacher education, followed by a collection of descriptions of field-tested teacher education programs, courses, units in a course, and activities from diverse geographical and institutional contexts, which together demonstrate a variety of possible approaches to preparing teachers to teach EIL. The book helps create a space for the exploration of EIL teacher education that cuts across English as a Lingua Franca, World Englishes and other relevant scholarly communities.

Routledge Language Workbooks are practical introductions to specific areas of language for absolute beginners. They provide comprehensive coverage of the area as well as a basis for further study. Language Workbooks can be used for independent study or as part of a taught class. Vocabulary: * covers issues such as the power of words to influence our perceptions * looks at the origins of words from English and other languages * explores the relationships between the meanings and shapes of words * examines the correlation of different kinds of words with different style levels * uses striking and entertaining examples to make fundamental points about the words we use * lays the groundwork for further study in morphology, lexical semantics, historical linguistics and lexicography.

First published in 1967, this book was based on new descriptions of English emerging from recent research. It provides an introduction to the study of the English language for the first-year university student. It will also be invaluable to all those concerned with the teaching and learning of English as a foreign or second language, particularly the teacher in training and the university student.

"Starting English Teaching" is aimed at new teachers and at teachers new to the teaching of English. Its main focus is the secondary classroom, but primary teachers too will find here much to interest them. Taking the National Curriculum in English as a starting point, but not necessarily the last word on the subject, Robert Jeffcoate looks at the theoretical issues involved in thinking about what English means, defining goals and planning the curriculum. He shows the how to go about developing a repertoire of skills in the different curriculum areas from drama teaching to teaching about the language. His suggestions are illustrated with detailed examples of classroom practice and with many quotations from pupils' own work.

Language learning strategies have been a topic of research for roughly three decades. Broadly speaking, that research has focused on classroom tuition, predominantly at secondary level. Increasingly, however, language learning occurs in independent settings, whether at distance, on Institution-Wide Language Programmes (IWLPs), or in virtual environments. Success in independent language learning is achieved by autonomous individuals with a capacity for self-regulation. Yet we still know relatively little about the specific means they use to learn effectively, whether in terms of the affective strategies they employ to sustain motivation, the metacognitive strategies required for planning, monitoring and evaluating their learning, or the specific cognitive strategies applied to difficult learning tasks. These are all discussed and evaluated in Language Learning Strategies in Independent Settings.

Teaching and Researching Speaking provides an overview of the main approaches to researching spoken language and their practical application to teaching, classroom materials, and assessment. The history and current practices of teaching and researching speaking are presented through the lens of bigger theoretical issues about the object of study in linguistics, social attitudes to the spoken form, and the relationships between spoken and written language. A unique feature of the book is the way it clearly explains the nature of speaking and how it is researched and puts it into the context of a readable and holistic overview of language theory. This new edition is fully updated and revised to reflect the latest developments on classroom materials and oral assessment, as well as innovations in conversation analysis. The resources section is brought up-to-date with new media and currently available networks, online corpora, and mobile applications. This is a key resource for applied linguistics students, English language teachers, teacher trainers, and novice researchers.

The book focuses on investigating pragmatic learning, teaching and testing in foreign language contexts. The volume brings together research that investigates these three areas in different formal language learning settings. The number and variety of languages involved both as the first language (e.g. English, Finnish, Iranian, Spanish, Japanese) as well as the target foreign language (e.g. English, French, German, Indonesian, Korean, Spanish) makes the volume specially attractive for language educators in different sociocultural foreign language contexts. Additionally, the different approaches adopted by the researchers participating in this volume, such as information processing, sociocultural, language socialization, computer-mediated or conversation analysis should be of interest to graduate students and researchers working in the area of second language acquisition.

In this age of globalisation, people who do not speak a foreign language are at a serious disadvantage in the job market. It is therefore of great relevance that learners with learning disabilities are also provided with equal and appropriate opportunities to acquire a second or foreign language. The aim of the book is to give readers an insight into the language learning process of learners with disabilities. The articles discuss the learning process and the teaching of dyslexic as well as hearing impaired learners in various parts of the world, from the USA and Canada to England, Norway, Poland and Hungary. The intended audience of the book is language teachers, MA and MEd students, and researchers in the field of SLA, applied linguistics, or special education.

Writing centers in universities and colleges aim to help student writers develop practices that will make them better writers in the long term and that will improve their draft papers in the short term. The tutors who work in writing centers accomplish such goals through one-to-one talk about writing. This book analyzes the aboutness of writing center talk-what tutors and student writers talk about when they come together to talk about writing. By combining corpus-driven analysis to provide a quantitative, microlevel view of the subject matter and sociocultural discourse analysis to provide a qualitative macrolevel view of tutor-student writer interactions, it further establishes how these two research methods operate together to produce a robust and rigorous analysis of spoken discourse.

A number of reports in the US have highlighted the country's need for improved second language skills for both national security and economic competitiveness. The Language Flagship program, launched in 2002, aims to raise expectations regarding language proficiency levels at the post-secondary level and to address structural gaps in the curricula of many L2 programs. This federally funded program provides opportunities for US undergraduate students in any specialization to reach a professional level of competence in a targeted second language by graduation. This volume highlights innovative practices that enable students to achieve this goal - even those with no exposure to the second language prior to university. This book explores the rationale and history of the federal program and showcases models and strategies of existing Flagship programs.

This volume presents the results of two tasks examining the acquisition of plosive voicing contrasts in L2 English by college students with Cypriot Greek (CG) backgrounds. The tasks focus on the different factors affecting plosive identification and the types of errors involving plosives. With respect to the first issue, the phonetic perception of plosives turns out to be better in voiceless consonants compared to their voiced counterparts, thus providing evidence for the importance of the voicing contrast factor. With respect to the second issue, the results point to the same direction since it appears that L2 users performed significantly better in voiceless plosives. It is also indicated that they were able to perceive voiced plosives but they treated such instances as a /nasal+voiced plosive/sequence (prenasalised plosives). Therefore, the overall results seem to agree mostly with the speech perception approach suggesting that voiced plosives are realised differently in CG while the difficulties of the L2 CG users with plosives seem to be attributed to VOT differences between the L1 and the L2.

Loin d'etre une utopie, le plurilinguisme en entreprise est une realite complexe, qui fournit des ressources mesurables. Les etudes reunies dans ce volume montrent que les locuteurs cherchent spontanement plusieurs solutions, differentes du tout anglais, afin de communiquer de maniere efficace. Comme les besoins linguistiques changent selon la typologie de l'entreprise, les auteurs proposent diverses solutions pour mieux investir dans les langues. Un dernier volet presente des temoignages d'entreprises ayant mise sur le plurilinguisme comme ressource strategique. Far from being a utopia, plurilingualism in business companies is a complex reality and provides measurable resources. The contributions in this volume show that language users spontaneously look for solutions other than English only to communicate effectively in the workplace. Since different types of company have different language needs, the authors suggest diverse language strategies and implementations. One section is devoted to best practices: companies present their experience in addressing language issues in the workplace.

Drawing on recent socio-cultural approaches to research on language learning and an extensive corpus of classroom video recording made over four years, the book documents language learning as an epiphenomenon of peer face-to-face interaction. Advanced technology for recording classroom interaction (6 cameras per classroom) allows the research to move the focus for analysis off the teacher and onto learners as they engage in dyadic interaction. The research uses methods from conversation analysis with longitudinal data to document practices for interaction between learners and how those practices change over time. Language learning is seen in learners' change in participation in their in social actions that occur around and within teacher-assigned language learning tasks (starting the task, non-elicited story tellings within tasks, and ending tasks). Web links are provided so the reader can see the data from the classroom that is the subject of the analyses.

The proliferation of language awareness has now led to a need for a reassessment of the nature and functions of language awareness. This accessible collection of essays addresses that need in developing a more rigorous and critical theoretical underpinning for what language awareness is and should do. In particular, it argues that there needs to be a greater awareness of the social and political issues, and the context within which language awareness work is set.

Showcasing a new methodology in language learning and identity research, this carefully conceptualized, innovative book explicates the use of autoethnography as a way of re-imagining one's sense of linguistic and cultural identity. A key work for researchers and students in Applied Linguistics and Language Education, it addresses fundamental aspects of research methodology and explores substantive issues relating to individual dimensions of multilingualism. Choi shows convincingly how the learning of a language is inseparable from one's constant searching for a voice, a place, and a self in this world, demonstrating the importance of interrogating what lies behind everyday life events and interactions-the political and ethical implications of the utterances, thoughts, actions, and stories of the self and others. Themes of authenticity, illegitimacy, power relations, perceptions of self/other, cultural discourses and practices, and related issues in multilingual identity development surface in the multi-modal narratives. Chapters on methodology, woven through the book, focus on the process of knowledge production, approaches to writing narratives, the messiness of research writing practices, and the inseparability of writing and research.

This volume provides foreign language educators and classroom researchers with an introduction to online intercultural exchange, the activity of engaging foreign language learners in collaborative project work with partners from other cultures through the use of online communication tools such as email, discussion boards and videoconferencing. The authors use their extensive experience in both the practice and research of online exchange to present a clear overview of the pedagogical theory behind online exchange and its contribution to different aspects of foreign language learning, including communicative competence, intercultural awareness and learner autonomy. The chapters look at different ways of organising such projects, such as the Tandem and Cultura models, and also provide clear discussions on practical aspects of the area including task design, the choice of communication tools and the role of the teacher.

This book offers a lively introduction to the research methods and techniques available to English language teachers who wish to investigate aspects of their own practice. It covers qualitative and quantitative methodology and includes sections on observation, introspection, diary studies, experiments, interviews, questionnaires, numerical techniques and case study research. Each method is illustrated with examples in language teaching contexts, and techniques of data collection and analysis are introduced. The authors focus particularly on research in the classroom, on tests, materials, the effects of innovations, and they discuss methods appropriate to research in various collaborative modes as well as by individuals. A key feature of the book is an introduction to the debate surrounding different approaches to research, with an evaluation of traditional research in relation to the paradigms associated with reflective practice and action research. The book is ideal for teachers on initial training and post-experience courses, students on degree programmes in applied linguistics and TEFL and, of course, practising teachers with an interest in research methods in language teaching.