This book delineates a range of linguistic features that characterise the reading texts used at the B2 (Independent User) and C1 (Proficient User) levels of the Greek State Certificate of English Language Proficiency exams in order to help define text difficulty per level of competence. In addition, it examines whether specific reader variables influence test takers' perceptions of reading comprehension difficulty. The end product is a Text Classification Profile per level of competence and a formula for automatically estimating text difficulty and assigning levels to texts consistently and reliably in accordance with the purposes of the exam and its candidature-specific characteristics.

The author addresses key questions of foreign language teaching: How does foreign language learning take place? What is the mechanism of foreign language use and learning? What are the sources of our understanding of these processes? What significance does our understanding have for foreign language teaching? The main argument is that, in order to deal with the complexity of language learning and meet the current demands for foreign language competency, we must employ the framework of an empirical, relatively autonomous discipline of Foreign Language Didactics, constituted as a "normal" science which strives to understand foreign language learning as its subject-matter. This constructivist psycholinguistic conception targets language learning processes in the real world, i.e. as language use in the context of verbal communication, i.e. comprehension and production in speech and writing. The processes are represented as taking place in the learner's cognitive system for information processing in communicative interaction, a universal human phenomenon. This perspective leads to systematic options and strategies for the practical teaching of foreign languages with focus on English as a world language.

Leading teacher of Arabic, Munther Younes, explores the realities of teaching Arabic as a foreign language (AFL) and outlines his groundbreaking approach to instruction, tried and tested over many years at Cornell University.

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The Integrated Approach to Arabic Instruction "introduces teachers to the features of an integrated Arabic program one that simultaneously teaches the two varieties of the language, Modern Standard Written Arabic, "fu "and the dialect, " mmiyya "in a way that reflects the authentic practice of native Arabic speakers. This pedagogy, Younes argues, is the most logical, effective and economical method of instruction as it prepares students fully for the realities of the Arabic diglossic situation.

Younes takes teachers through the following ground:

• Consideration of the current Arabic sociolinguistic situation and key debates in the field
• Outline of changing student goals and the needs of the modern AFL learner
• Overview of the Integrated Approach covering its rationale, features, implementation methods and usage of instructional materials in the classroom
• Response to objections to the Integrated Approach, outlining its advantages over alternative practices and clarifying crucial issues in practice

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The Integrated Approach to Arabic Instruction "addresses a pressing issue deeply relevant to the world of Arabic Language Instruction, placed in the practical context of shifting attitudes among students and educators. It will be an essential resource for all teachers of Arabic as a Foreign Language. "

This book showcases how language learner agency can be understood and researched from varying perspectives by providing, for the first time, a collection of diverse approaches in one volume. The volume is organised into three main sections:the first sections offers an introduction to varying theoretical approaches to agency; the second section presents analyses of agency in a variety of empirical studies; and the third section focuses on the pedagogical implications of data-based studies of agency. The volume includes the work of researchers working in languages including English (ESL and EFL), Greek, Spanish, Swedish, Italian, Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati and Truku (an indigenous language in Taiwan) and with both child and adult language learners. This collection will serve as a key reference for researchers of language learning and teaching, sociolinguistics and language and identity.

Winner of the AAAL First Book Award 2017! This book outlines a framework for teaching second language pragmatics grounded in Vygotskian sociocultural psychology. The framework focuses on the appropriation of sociopragmatic concepts as psychological tools that mediate pragmalinguistic choices. Using multiple sources of metalinguistic and performance data collected during a six-week pedagogical enrichment program involving one-on-one tutoring sessions, the volume explores both theoretical and practical issues relevant to teaching second language pragmatics from a Vygotskian perspective. The book represents an important contribution to second language instructional pragmatics research as well as to second language sociocultural psychology scholarship. It will be of interest to all those researching in this field and to language teachers who will find the pedagogical recommendations useful.

Talking About Language Assessment is the first book to take an interview-based approach to the history of language assessment. This collection consists of interviews originally featured in Language Assessment Quarterly with renowned language assessment experts. Contextualized with commentary by the editor, the articles in this text cover many of the essential areas of language testing and assessment including assessment design, validation argument, epistemological issues in research, and language assessment policy. This text is a valuable compilation on the history of language assessment, and an ideal resource for researchers and students in the field of language testing and assessment.

Explicating clearly and concisely the full implication of a praxis-oriented language pedagogy, this book argues for an approach to language teaching grounded in a significant scientific theory of human learning-a stance that rejects the consumer approach to theory and the dichotomy between theory and practice that dominates SLA and language teaching. This approach is based on Vygotsky's sociocultural theory, according to which the two activities are inherently connected so that each is necessarily rooted in the other; practice is the research laboratory where the theory is tested. From the perspective of language education, this is what is meant by the 'pedagogical imperative.' Sociocultural Theory and the Pedagogical Imperative in L2 Education* Elaborates a new approach to dealing with the relationship between theory and practice-an approach grounded in praxis-the dialectical unity of theory and practice * Presents an analysis of empirical research illustrating praxis-based principles in real language classrooms * Brings together cognitive linguistics and sociocultural theory the former provides the theoretical knowledge of language required of praxis and the latter furnishes the theoretical principles of learning and development also called for in a praxis approach * Offers recommendations for redesigning teacher education programs Its timely focus on the theory-practice gap in language education and its original approach to bridging it put this book at the cutting edge of thinking about Vygotskian sociocultural theory in applied linguistics and SLA.

The Diagnosis of Reading in a Second or Foreign Language explores the notion of diagnostic testing and establishes a framework for its practical applications in understanding second and foreign language reading. The book uses case studies from a wide variety of subject areas to contextualize a theory of diagnosis and to show how second and foreign language reading has been assessed in the past, culminating in a discussion of how diagnosis might be used to better understand and assess second and foreign language reading abilities. This is the only book to provide a detailed look into the little-examined field of diagnostic language testing, ideal for students, researchers, and professionals in applied linguistics, second language acquisition, and language testing and education.

About the NPLA Series:

Headed by two of its leading scholars, the series captures the burgeoning field of language assessment by offering comprehensive and state-of-the-art coverage of its contemporary questions, pressing issues, and technical advances. It is the only active series of its kind on the market, and will include volumes on basic and advanced topics in language assessment, public policy and language assessment, and the interfaces of language assessment with other disciplines in applied linguistics. Each text presents key theoretical approaches and research findings, along with concrete practical implications and suggestions for readers conducting their own research or developmental studies.

The 21st-century global linguistic landscape has seen many changes for language learners. New assessments have been made in a host of areas, especially regarding learners' needs, motives, the target of instruction, and methodologies. The new realities, locales and purposes of communication all necessitate a shift in attitude and a new set of competencies is required of the teacher. This volume comprises a multi-faceted and thoughtful response to these changes in both modern reality and teaching philosophy. It is a study of a few of the other ways to tackle situations outside of norms and routines. The authors of this volume possess many years of teaching experience, and have stepped off the roads most travelled to explore new avenues and find novel solutions in foreign language teaching. This volume familiarises readers with contemporary theoretical debate and new research, and demonstrates how to easily translate these into practical, everyday classroom applications.

For many decades, English language educators across the world have been locked in a paradigm of ESL/EFL/ESD methods that have circumvented the growth of any pedagogical will for Immersion in English (IE) or the Sustained Use of English (SUE) in speech environments where other languages challenge English-in-use and the preparation of teachers of English to facilitate IE or SUE in classroom praxis. There is an opportunity to advance this scholarship from an international perspective to build a distinct post-method pedagogy for English language teaching in the Caribbean and other global teaching-learning contexts. English Language Teaching in a Post-Method Paradigm is a critical scholarly publication that provides relevant teacher initiated theoretical frameworks and the latest empirical research findings in English language teaching that promote English as the tool for global integration and communication. Highlighting topics such as curriculum, pedagogy, and teacher education, this book is ideal for professionals, researchers, policymakers, academicians, and educators.

Leading teacher of Arabic, Munther Younes, explores the realities of teaching Arabic as a foreign language (AFL) and outlines his groundbreaking approach to instruction, tried and tested over many years at Cornell University.

"

The Integrated Approach to Arabic Instruction "introduces teachers to the features of an integrated Arabic program one that simultaneously teaches the two varieties of the language, Modern Standard Written Arabic, "fu "and the dialect, " mmiyya "in a way that reflects the authentic practice of native Arabic speakers. This pedagogy, Younes argues, is the most logical, effective and economical method of instruction as it prepares students fully for the realities of the Arabic diglossic situation.

Younes takes teachers through the following ground:

• Consideration of the current Arabic sociolinguistic situation and key debates in the field
• Outline of changing student goals and the needs of the modern AFL learner
• Overview of the Integrated Approach covering its rationale, features, implementation methods and usage of instructional materials in the classroom
• Response to objections to the Integrated Approach, outlining its advantages over alternative practices and clarifying crucial issues in practice

"

The Integrated Approach to Arabic Instruction "addresses a pressing issue deeply relevant to the world of Arabic Language Instruction, placed in the practical context of shifting attitudes among students and educators. It will be an essential resource for all teachers of Arabic as a Foreign Language. "

The Diagnosis of Reading in a Second or Foreign Language explores the notion of diagnostic testing and establishes a framework for its practical applications in understanding second and foreign language reading. The book uses case studies from a wide variety of subject areas to contextualize a theory of diagnosis and to show how second and foreign language reading has been assessed in the past, culminating in a discussion of how diagnosis might be used to better understand and assess second and foreign language reading abilities. This is the only book to provide a detailed look into the little-examined field of diagnostic language testing, ideal for students, researchers, and professionals in applied linguistics, second language acquisition, and language testing and education.

About the NPLA Series:

Headed by two of its leading scholars, the series captures the burgeoning field of language assessment by offering comprehensive and state-of-the-art coverage of its contemporary questions, pressing issues, and technical advances. It is the only active series of its kind on the market, and will include volumes on basic and advanced topics in language assessment, public policy and language assessment, and the interfaces of language assessment with other disciplines in applied linguistics. Each text presents key theoretical approaches and research findings, along with concrete practical implications and suggestions for readers conducting their own research or developmental studies.

Testing of second language pragmatics has grown as a research area but still suffers from a tension between construct coverage and practicality. In this book, the authors describe the development and validation of a web-based test of second language pragmatics for learners of English. The test has a sociopragmatic orientation and strives for a broad coverage of the construct by assessing learners' metapragmatic judgments as well as their ability to co-construct discourse. To ensure practicality, the test is delivered online and is scored partially automatically and partially by human raters. We used the argument-based approach to validation, which showed that the test can support low-stakes decisions about learners' knowledge of sociopragmatics in English.

This book aims to aid English teachers at the junior and senior secondary school levels in teaching pronunciation within a regular EFL syllabus. It presents such a way of incorporating the phonetic and lexical components so as to facilitate students' acquisition of a standard phonetic system and to prevent them from forming habitual mistakes in individual words. It highlights key areas of the English phonetic system and provides examples of strategies how to use a course-book for the sake of teaching pronunciation. The discussion of teaching the phonetic system relies on the comparison between its conscious and unconscious acquisition. Teaching individual vocabulary items (especially reversing habitual mispronunciations) is analysed through contrasting mental and behavioural learning.

The revival of translation as a means of learning and teaching a foreign language and as a skill in its own right is occurring at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels in universities.

In this book, Sara Laviosa proposes a translation-based pedagogy that is grounded in theory and has been applied in real educational contexts. Drawing on the convergence between the view of language and translation embraced by ecologically-oriented educationalists and the theoretical underpinnings of the holistic approach to translating culture, this volume puts forward a holistic pedagogy that harmonizes the teaching of language and translation in the same learning environment.

The author examines the changing nature of the role of pedagogic translation starting with the Grammar Translation Method and concluding with the more recent ecological approaches to Foreign Language Education.

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Translation and Language Education" analyses current research into the revival of translation in language teaching and is vital reading for translators, language teachers and postgraduate students working in the areas of Translation Studies and Applied Linguistics.

This volume aims to represent the breadth and depth of current linguistic research of predominantly young linguists and thus to produce a snapshot of topical linguistic issues and trends. Therefore, it presents papers from systemic linguistics next to ones on text linguistics, sociolinguistics and the didactics of language. The volume is based on talks given at the 14th Norddeutsches Linguistisches Kolloquium 2013 in Halle an der Saale. The book contains 14 contributions in English, and three in German.

As technological innovation continues to affect language pedagogy, there is an increasing demand for information, exemplars, analysis and guidance. This edited volume focuses on international perspectives in Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) in all of its forms, including Technology Enhanced Language Learning, Network-Based Language Learning, Information and Communication Technologies for Language Learning.

This book examines the use of tasks in second language instruction in a variety of international contexts, and addresses the need for a better understanding of how tasks are used in teaching and program-level decision-making. The chapters consider the key issues, examples, benefits and challenges that teachers, program designers and researchers face in using tasks in a diverse range of contexts around the world, and aim to understand practitioners' concerns with the relationship between tasks and performance. They provide examples of how tasks are used with learners of different ages and different proficiency levels, in both face-to-face and online contexts. In documenting these uses of tasks, the authors of the various chapters illuminate cultural, educational and institutional factors that can make the effective use of tasks more or less difficult in their particular context.

This edited volume explores the educational significance of intercultural experience. It offers a broader conception of interculturality than commonly found in the area of foreign language teaching. Contributors represent a diverse range of academic and professional interests. The aim of the book is to encourage dialogue and interchange across this range, and beyond, to stimulate thinking about the educational value of intercultural experience.

Drawing on the latest developments in bilingual and multilingual research, The Multilingual Turn offers a critique of, and alternative to, still-dominant monolingual theories, pedagogies and practices in SLA, TESOL, and bilingual education. Critics of the 'monolingual bias' argue that notions such as the idealized native speaker, and related concepts of interlanguage, language competence, and fossilization, have framed these fields inextricably in relation to monolingual speaker norms. In contrast, these critics advocate an approach that emphasizes the multiple competencies of bi/multilingual learners as the basis for successful language teaching and learning. This volume takes a big step forward in re-situating the issue of multilingualism more centrally in applied linguistics and, in so doing, making more permeable its key sub-disciplinary boundaries - particularly, those between SLA, TESOL, and bilingual education. It addresses this issue head on, bringing together key international scholars in SLA, TESOL, and bilingual education to explore from cutting-edge interdisciplinary perspectives what a more critical multilingual perspective might mean for theory, pedagogy, and practice in each of these fields.

Basing his arguments on the developments in theoretical linguistics as well as his own experience in teaching and research, the author proposes a model of learning which could resolve differences which have for centuries divided thinkers in philosophy and linguistics, between extreme and modified views of the way that language and thought interact, one determining the other; and in language teaching between proponents of contending methodologies. He shows that such distinctions as those between language learners and language users, first language learners and foreign language learners are misleading.

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.

Despite widespread agreement about the need to develop interculturally competent graduates, there is a lack of agreement about how this goal may be achieved in practice. This is significant as universities around the world, particularly in English-speaking countries, have espoused an interculturally-aware vision for their future graduates and turned to language education, as an inherently intercultural activity, to expose students to a world which is linguistically and culturally different from their own. This book focuses on narrowing the gap between the often conflicting theoretical and practical imperatives faced by language teachers in an internationalised higher education context. It does so by providing comprehensive conceptual discussions of emerging critical intercultural language pedagogies as well as empirical accounts and case studies from the frontline.

This book, which is aimed at researchers in specialised varieties of English, provides an illustration of how linguists can use terms, i.e. the expression of concepts in specialised fields, as entry points to explore any specialised domain, whether academic or professional, and to get acquainted with its history, its culture, and the evolution of the ideas that have nurtured it. Choosing the field of economics as an example, the author approaches terms from a diachronic, descriptive and contextual perspective, focusing on neonyms, metaphorical, ambiguous or indeterminate terms, as well as interface terms likely to underscore the evolving character of the domain. The analysis points out the role of terms as milestones highlighting key discoveries that have shaped scientific fields; terms can also be considered as barometers of the evolution of knowledge in a specific field and of a changing social environment. Whoever thought terms were only interesting for their definitions or for translation purposes will no doubt be surprised at the insights that can be gained from considering them from a different angle and for other purposes.

The tenth EFNIL conference investigated the different ways in which people in Europe access lexical information - both in their own language and in other languages - and how governments, language institutions, publishers, and others go about the business of compiling and disseminating this lexical information. In this volume, general reflections by several experts on the history, the present state and new developments of lexicography in Europe are presented, followed by reports on special lexicographic projects in several European countries. The Budapest Resolution of EFNIL on the Lexical Challenges in Multilingual Europe offered in the official languages of most of the member states of the European Union and other European countries concludes the book.