This volume offers a collection of essays addressing contemporary issues in foreign and second language education. In particular, it addresses language learner autonomy, both as a theoretical construct and in relation to areas of application such as the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR), the European Language Portfolio (ELP), teacher training, Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL), and minority language provision. The contributors - well-known researchers, policy makers, teachers and teacher trainers - provide a multi-faceted insight into an innovative and influential approach to language education. David Little, to whom the volume is dedicated, was Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics and Head of the School of Linguistic, Speech and Communication Sciences at Trinity College Dublin. He is recognised worldwide as a leading proponent of the theory of language learner autonomy, and has been a driving force behind many influential language education initiatives internationally.

This volume documents a sixteen-year longitudinal study of two elementary schools in which Spanish and Japanese foreign language programs were implemented and evaluated. Evaluation of the programs involved documenting children's language development, assessing the attitudes of various constituents, and examining critical issues related to the introduction and successful operation of a well articulated sequential foreign language program in schools. The volume concludes with a discussion of possible reasons why over time certain sequential foreign language programs flourish and grow while other programs are reduced or eliminated from the school's curriculum. Parallels with the theory and practice of environmental sustainable development are used as a framework for this analysis.

Assessment is omnipresent and multifaceted in contemporary institutions of higher education. This collection provides a sound and revealing overview of language and (inter-)cultural assessment practices in European higher education and beyond (Australia, China and Japan). It addresses mainly the following questions: What sort of assessment is taking place? What purposes does it serve? What representations do teaching staff and learners have of assessing language and (inter-)cultural competences in higher education? The chapters were first presented at the bilingual conference (English and French) Assessing language and (inter-)cultural competences in Higher Education at Turku University (Finland) in 2007. L'evaluation est un phenomene multiforme et omnipresent dans l'enseignement superieur. Ce volume collectif propose un large eventail d'articles, qui passent en revue les pratiques d'evaluation en didactique des langues dans les systemes educatifs europeens mais aussi en Australie, en Chine et au Japon. Les auteurs s'interrogent sur les questions suivantes : quels types d'evaluation sont mis en oeuvre dans le superieur ? Dans quels buts ? Quelles representations les enseignants et les apprenants ont-ils de l'evaluation des competences langagieres et interculturelles ? Les textes qui constituent l'ouvrage ont ete presentes au colloque intitule Evaluation des competences langagieres et (inter-)culturelles dans l'enseignement superieur, organise par l'Universite de Turku (Finlande) en 2007.

Graduate and professional TESOL students will welcome this research methods textbook for undertaking qualitative, naturalistic and action research projects. Uniquely, the book offers a three-level structured progression, suited both to novice and intermediate students with a focus on development as classroom teachers of English, and to advanced students engaged in academic research work in applied linguistics. Every chapter is structured to develop the important skills for undertaking QI in a rigorous and serious way, at whatever level is appropriate for the reader's purpose. The book is both scholarly in approach and written in an engagingly direct and clear style.

The adoption of Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) in Higher Education teaching has been widespread. This learning strategy has developed the need to learn foreign languages and to communicate with people with different cultural backgrounds. Culture learning should be part of language and content teaching as Higher Education involves language skills, topic comprehension and sociological capabilities. Teachers explore new teaching strategies which imply diverse goals and focus on different cultural backgrounds. The contributions of this book comment the multicultural awareness of the students involved in learning another language and the facts implied in teaching in a multicultural environment.

It has long been noted that high-stakes language exams exert a powerful influence on teaching and learning, a phenomenon known as the washback effect (Alderson and Wall, 1993). However, due to the complex nature of the phenomenon, little research has been conducted in the field so far. This book, which is based on empirical research into the washback effect of First Certificate in English (FCE, Cambridge ESOL), discusses and elaborates on the complexity of the phenomenon and accounts for the intervening factors that mediate the process of test washback. The book concludes with the presentation of a model that demonstrates how the mechanism of washback operates and with recommendations to a variety of stakeholders for achieving beneficial washback.

The diagnostic assessment of writing is an important aspect of language testing which has often been neclected in the literature. However, it is an area which poses special challenges to practioners both in the classroom and in large-scale testing situations. This book presents a study which set out to develop and validate a rating scale specifically designed for the diagnostic assessment of writing in an academic English setting. The scale was developed by analysing a large number of writing performances produced by both native speakers of English and learners of English as an additional language. The rating scale was then validated using both quantitative and qualitative methods. The study showed that a detailed data-based rating scale is more valid and more useful for diagnostic purposes than the more commonly used impressionistic rating scale.

What does learning a language involve? Obviously, a rapid and definitive answer cannot be provided for this question since the aspects and situations affecting language learning are many and varied. From the role of culture to the use of new technologies in foreign language learning, this work aims to offer its readers some of the current research being carried out in different areas relevant to the topic. A long developing project has become reality thanks to the work of several researchers who are also experienced teaching professionals. In this sense, it is worth mentioning that most chapters of the book relate to different aspects of language learning within the classroom context which has resulted in realistic approaches to foreign language learning that can be of great help to those involved and/or interested in this field. Moreover, the clear division into sections allows readers to make their choice on how to proceed with the reading of the book depending on their thematic interests. Five sections make up this practical work: culture and language learning, human resources in language learning, language learning strategies, language learning software and language learning web resources.

This volume examines the various linguistic and cultural problems which point towards the practical impossibility of conveying in one language exactly what was originally said in another. The author provides an exhaustive discussion of Spanish translations from English texts, including non-standard registers. Equivalence across languages, that most elusive of terms in the whole theory of translation, is discussed in terms of linguistic equivalence, textual equivalence, cultural equivalence and pragmatic equivalence. Other aspects studied include how translation has been perceived over the centuries, the differences and the similarities between a writer and a translator, plus a detailed examination of translation as process, all of which bring the problems of literary translation into perspective.

This book examines how Japanese learners of English learned about managing politeness while they were studying at language schools in New Zealand. Specifically, it investigates how they learned to produce and interpret a range of disagreement strategies during oppositional talk with native speakers of English. Employing a combined qualitative and quantitative approach to data analysis, the book discusses the initial pragmatic competence of the learners, and describes how their competence developed over a ten-week period. The book outlines some points of cultural divergence which may have influenced the direction and the extent of the learners' pragmatic development. It also sheds light on the language-acquisition strategies utilised by the learners during their tenure in the host culture. Most crucially, the book illuminates patterns of directness and indirectness in the learners' selected disagreement strategies. These patterns challenge the generally accepted theory that politeness always increases with social distance.

Language Teaching demonstrates the relevance of an integrational linguistic perspective to a practical, real-world need, namely the learning of languages. Integrational linguistics' shunning of both realist and structuralist theories of language, its commitment to an unwavering attention to the perspective of the language user, and its adherence to a semiology in which signs are the situated products of interactants interpretive behaviour, mean that it radically reconceptualizes language learning and language teaching. Detractors have implied that IL is so 'philosophical' or 'theoretical' an exercise that it has no useful bearing on the practical problems of language learning. These papers refute that misconception. They do so by demonstrating how an IL stance can help disentangle the conflicting considerations and contradictory assumptions that arise in a host of language teaching situations: first, second- and foreign-language classrooms in a diversity of settings (including India, Australia, the United States, and Hong Kong), with different age-groups of students, whether the focus is on speech or writing, and in more informal settings also.

Arguably the whole point of education is to effect change in what people know and are able to do. Globalization has contributed to a common perception worldwide of the need to introduce changes to the teaching and learning of languages. The success of many attempts to do so has been limited by insufficient consideration of implementation contexts. Understanding Language Classroom Contexts explores and illustrates how what happens in any (language) classroom is influenced by (and can be an influence on) the contexts in which it is situated. A clear understanding of these influences is thus the starting point for planning effective change. The book considers many visible and invisible features of the multiple layers of any context, and provides a framework for understanding the types of factors that may influence whether changes (planned by a teacher or externally initiated) are likely to be successful. The book will help teachers (and educational managers or change planners outside the classroom) to understand why their classrooms are as they are and so to make informed decisions about what can or cannot (or not easily) be changed, and suggests how any changes might be appropriately managed.

Jugendsprache ist vielstimmig und vielgestaltig und scheint durch eine nahezu unbegrenzte Heterogenitat gekennzeichnet. Der Sammelband prasentiert 19 Beitrage aus der internationalen linguistischen Jugendsprachforschung zu einzelnen Faktoren des Variationsspektrums von Jugendsprachen in verschiedenen europaischen Regionen. Artikulationsformen innerer und ausserer Mehrsprachigkeit wie Stilmischungen, Bricolagen, Varietatenwechsel, Entlehnungen und Sprachkreuzungen werden mit unterschiedlichen theoretischen und methodischen Zugangen analysiert, darunter kontrastive, textlinguistische und interaktionslinguistische Studien. Anwendungsfelder im Kontext von Medien und Unterricht werden an Beispielen von Woerterbuchern, Werbetexten, Lehrwerken, Literatur und Musik eroertert und veranschaulicht. Youth language is multifaceted and variously shaped and seems to be characterized by a nearly unlimited heterogenity. This reader presents 19 contributions on certain variants within the European countries. Expressions of intralingual and interlingual multilingualism like mixing of styles, bricolage, change of varieties, use of internationalisms, and crossing of languages are analyzed within different frames of theory and methodology, e.g. by contrastive, textlinguistic and interactional studies. Fields of application in the contexts of media and instruction like dictionaries, advertising, textbooks, literature, and music are discussed and illustrated.

This book deals with the notion of reformulation and more specifically with a group of lexico-grammatical units which help codify and signal the activity of reformulation in English. While discourse markers in English have been described in detail, the area of reformulation is a relatively unexplored area in comparison with languages such as French or Spanish. In this respect, this book has been conceived as a contribution to the field of Discourse Markers and in particular to the markers that help display the function of reformulation in English. First of all, a definition of the notion of reformulation is provided as a necessary precondition for the elaboration of a taxonomy of English reformulators. These are grouped into different classes and sub-classes on the basis of the type of reformulation effected. Thus, four main types are identified: Expansion, Modification, Reassessment and Compression. After an inductive and interpretive analysis of examples taken from the British National Corpus (BNC), the syntactic and distributional properties of these units, as well as their environments of use are described and discussed.

This empirical study examines the learning problem of the argument structure of psych predicates such as «The dog frightens John and the related V-ing adjectives such as «The dog is frightening to John. The problem is theoretically interesting because of the marked nature of the thematic role mapping of these sentences in relation to the principle of the Uniformity of Theta Assignment Hypothesis (UTAH). The problem is highly relevant to our understanding of second language acquisition, as this is known to be a prevalent difficulty among language learners. The author has framed the learning problem within a coherent parametric framework drawing on a sophisticated critical review of the syntax/semantics literature and theories of L2 development. The author has specifically developed a theory, the «Semantic Salience Hierarchy Model (SSHM), to explain the learning process. The significance of the model is not confined only to this particular study, as the issues related to the L2 acquisition of other causative verbs can also be examined within this model. The findings of this study also bear implications to TESOL.

This book systematically examines how learning to read occurs in diverse languages, and in so doing, explores how literacy is learned in a second language by learners who have achieved at least basic reading skills in their first language. As a consequence of rapid globalization, such learners are a large and growing segment of the school population worldwide, and an increasing number of schools are challenged by learners from a wide variety of languages, and with distinct prior literacy experiences. To succeed academically these learners must develop second-language literacy skills, yet little is known about the ways in which they learn to read in their first languages, and even less about how the specific nature and level of their first-language literacy affects second-language reading development.

This volume provides detailed descriptions of five typologically diverse languages and their writing systems, and offers comparisons of learning-to-read experiences in these languages. Specifically, it addresses the requisite competencies in learning to read in each of the languages, how language and writing system properties affect the way children learn to read, and the extent and ways in which literacy learning experience in one language can play a role in subsequent reading development in another. Both common and distinct aspects of literacy learning experiences across languages are identified, thus establishing a basis for determining which skills are available for transfer in second-language reading development.

Learning to Read Across Languages is intended for researchers and advanced students in the areas of second-language learning, psycholinguistics, literacy, bilingualism, and cross-linguistic issues in language processing.

Information and communication technology (ICT) has dramatically altered the world's social and economic landscape and is now gaining momentum in the realm of language studies. Corpora and ICT in Language Studies attempts to signal and document this phenomenon by bringing together twenty-nine contributions authored by both seasoned researchers and newcomers to the field. The contributions range from more traditional corpus-based or corpus-driven studies to those incorporating ICT as an integral part of their methodology. The volume includes a selection of conference papers given at PALC 2005, the fifth conference in the biennial cycle of meetings organized by the Department of English Language at Lodź University, as well as a number of invited papers. The papers are grouped in three parts: corpora in empirical language studies, cognitive linguistics and e-learning.

Advanced language learning has only recently begun to capture the interest and attention of applied linguists and professionals in language education in the United States. In this breakthrough volume, experts in the field lay the groundwork for approaching the increasingly important role of advanced language learning in the larger context of multilingual societies, globalization, and security. This volume presents both general and theoretical insights and language-specific considerations in college classrooms spanning a range of languages, from the commonly taught languages of English, French, and German to the less commonly taught Farsi, Korean, Norwegian, and Russian. Among theoretical frameworks likely to be conducive to imagining and fostering instructed "advancedness" in a second language, this volume highlights a cognitive-semantic approach. The theoretical and data-based findings make clear that advanced learners in particular are characterized by the capacity to make situated choices from across the entire language system, from vocabulary and grammar to discourse features, which suggests the need for a text-oriented, meaning-driven approach to language teaching, learning, and research. This volume also considers whether and how information structuring in second-language composition reveals first-language preferences of grammaticized concepts. Other topics include curricular and instructional approaches to narrativity, vocabulary expansion, the demands on instructed programs for efficiency and effectiveness in order to assure advanced levels, and learners' ability to function in professional contexts with their diverse oral and written genre requirements. Finally, the volume probes the role and nature of assessment as a measurement tool for both researching and assessing advanced language learning and as an essential component of improving programs.

This landmark volume offers an introduction to the field of teaching Arabic as a foreign or second language. Recent growth in student numbers and the demand for new and more diverse Arabic language programs of instruction have created a need that has outpaced the ability of teacher preparation programs to provide sufficient numbers of well-qualified professional teachers at the level of skill required. Arabic language program administrators anticipate that the increases in enrollment will continue into the next decades. More resources and more varied materials are seriously needed in Arabic teacher education and training. The goal of this Handbook is to address that need. The most significant feature of this volume is its pioneer role in approaching the field of Arabic language teaching from many different perspectives. It offers readers the opportunity to consider the role, status, and content of Arabic language teaching in the world today. The Handbook is intended as a resource to be used in building Arabic language and teacher education programs and in guiding future academic research. Thirty-four chapters authored by leaders in the field are organized around nine themes: Background of Arabic Language Teaching; Contexts of Arabic Language Teaching; Communicative Competence in Arabic; The Learners; Assessment; Technology Applications; Curriculum Development, Design, and Models; Arabic Language Program Administration and Management; and Planning for the Future of Arabic Language Learning and Teaching. The Handbook for Arabic Language Teaching Professionals in the 21st Century will benefit and be welcomed by Arabic language teacher educators and trainers, administrators, graduate students, and scholars around the world. It is intended to create dialogue among scholars and professionals in the field and in related fields--dialogue that will contribute to creating new models for curriculum and course design, materials and assessment tools, and ultimately, better instructional effectiveness for all Arabic learners everywhere, in both Arabic-speaking and non-Arabic speaking countries.

This volume gives language teachers, software designers, and researchers who wish to use technology in second or foreign language education the information they need to absorb what has been achieved so far and to make sense of it. It is designed to enable the kind of critical reading of a substantial literature that leads to a balanced and detailed knowledge of the field." "Chapter by chapter, the book builds, through description, analysis, examples, and discussion, a detailed picture of modern CALL.
In this book, the label "CALL" is interpreted broadly to include technology-enhanced language learning, Web-enhanced language learning, and information and communication technologies for language learning. The work is distinguished by its attention to a range of languages rather than just English.
The authors first set the scene and introduce major areas of interest and growth in CALL, and then look in depth at seven important dimensions: design, evaluation, computer-mediated communication, theory, research, practice, and technology. Chapters on each of these topics include a description that reviews the recent literature, identifies themes, and presents representative projects that illustrate the dimension, followed by a discussion that provides in-depth analysis, and a conclusion offering suggestions for further work. Detailed references and links connect the description and discussion with original works and primary sources so the reader can follow up easily on areas of personal interest. Two concluding chapters discuss how the various dimensions might be brought together, the first from a practical point of view, the second with a view to the development of CALL as a whole.

The last two decades have alerted applied linguists and their bureaucratic counterparts--those who make or advise government on language policy--to the issue of dealing with language problems in an accountable fashion. Why do these problems seem so intractable? How is it that these problems have not yet satisfactorily been solved? What is it that continues to drive the interest in this? To the scholars from many parts of the world who have been invited to discuss this anew in the proposed volume, it was evident that language planners, policy makers and language managers do not know just how much work there is for language teachers to do if all of the academically desirable arrangements or policies proposed are to be implemented successfully. Indeed, the challenge to implement these at times ambitious plans of language policy makers is normally much bigger than the policy makers estimate.