This book presents a selection of empirical papers dealing with second and multiple language acquisition, in which qualitative research methodology is employed. Each of the studies reported in individual chapters is based on a solid theoretical background and an overview of studies in a given area. Although the main focus is on qualitative methods, some of the papers demonstrate the complementarity of quantitative and qualitative approaches in studying language acquisition.

This collection of research has attempted to capture the essence and promise embodied in the concept of "identity" and built a bridge to the realm of second language studies. However, the reader will notice that we did not build just one link. This volume brings to light the diversity of research in identity and second language studies that are grounded the notions of community, instructors and students, language immersion and study abroad, pop culture and music, religion, code switching, and media. The chapters reflect the efforts of contributors from Canada, Japan, Norway, New Zealand, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States who performed their research in the countries just mentioned and in other regions around the world. Because of this, this volume truly offers an international perspective.

Theta Theory explores the lexicon as an interface in the strict sense, as facilitating the flow of information between cognition and the computational system of language. It argues for the traditional concept of a listed lexicon, where semantic roles are encoded as features of verbs, and against event decomposition. Part one of the book discusses the link between cognition and the lexicon. Mainstream theories of lexical semantics are critically reviewed. Furthermore, this part provides an extensive description of the relevant data in German, including agentivity, causation, psychological predicates, and different types of diathesis alternations. Part two is devoted to the link between the lexicon and syntax. It develops a parallel model of grammatical derivation, which allows the formulation of robust generalizations over thematic role assignment, but at the same time acknowledges the relevance of other components, in particular morpho-phonology and narrow syntax. The theory is applied to a wide range of German constructions including modal infinitives, the present and gerundive participle, the past/passive/adjectival participle, verbal particles, auxiliary selection, and unaccusatives/reflexives. The book is of interest for students and scholars of lexical semantics, for descriptive German linguistics, and for linguists concerned with the development of the Minimalist Program.

The goals of this volume are twofold: on a general level the volume explores whether evidence for teaching and learning can be found in mother-child interactions during the course of first language acquisition and whether these processes can be objectively described; on a sublevel, the volume investigates whether the denials of frequency and reinforcement effects found in the literature withstand closer scrutiny. The findings support a teaching/learning approach to first language acquisition and demonstrate some of the major principles involved in this process.

This ground-breaking work is a detailed account of an innovative and in-depth study of the attitudes of in excess of 500 Japanese learners towards a number of standard and non-standard as well as native and non-native varieties of English speech. The research conducted refines the investigation of learner attitudes by employing a range of pioneering techniques of attitude measurement. These methods are largely incorporated from the strong traditions that exist in the fields of social psychology and second language acquisition and utilize both direct and indirect techniques of attitude measurement. The author locates the findings in the context of the wealth of literature on native speaker evaluations of languages and language varieties. The study is unique in that the results provide clear evidence of both attitude change and high levels of linguistic awareness among the informants of social and geographical diversity within the English language. These findings are analyzed in detail in relation to the global spread of English as well as in terms of the pedagogical implications for the choice of linguistic model employed in English language classrooms both inside and outside Japan. The issues examined are of particular interest to educators, researchers and students in the fields of applied linguistics, TESOL, second language acquisition, social psychology of language and sociolinguistics. The pedagogical and language policy implications of the findings obtained make essential reading for those with a specific focus on the role of the English language and English language teaching, both in Japan and beyond.

Dynamic Assessment (DA) reconceptualizes classroom interactions by arguing that teaching and assessment should not be distinct undertakings but must be integrated as a single activity that seeks to understand learner abilities by actively supporting their ongoing development. DA is based in the Vygotskian notion of the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) which captures the uniquely human potential to exceed our present capabilities by working in cooperation with others whose dialogic interaction mediates us to higher levels of functioning. DA offers a framework for co-constructing a ZPD with learners in order to simultaneously reveal the full range of their abilities and promote development. This book presents the first in-depth analysis of DA's application to particular problems of L2 development. It includes detailed discussions of the core theoretical tenets as well as guidelines for implementing DA principles in L2 classrooms. The book will be of interest to language teacher educators, language testers, classroom practitioners, and students and researchers in the areas of SLA, language pedagogy, and assessment.

The book concerns theoretical, interdisciplinary and methodological issues in L2 acquisition research. It gives an accurate and up-to-date overview of high quality work currently in progress in research methodology, processing, principles and parameters theory, phonology, the bilingual lexicon, input and instruction. The volume will have the purpose of a handbook for teachers, students and researchers in the area of second language acquisition. The aim is to provide the reader with an acquisition perspective on processes of second and foreign language learning.

This book analyses processes of mode-switching in second language acquisition as they relate to Korean learners of English. In this empirical study, the author examines how native language influences and shapes usage of second language, particularly when the two are so dramatically different both in terms of grammar and the cultures in which they are anchored. Learning to speak English, she argues, entails switching from the formulaic to the strategic mode so that varying speaking norms and linguistic values are fully understood. This results in a mode switch towards the target culture. This intriguing book will be of interest to students and scholars of applied linguistics, sociolinguistics and English language education.

SLA literature tends to focus predominantly on what motivates language learners, but what demotivates them has not been widely discussed. This book, focusing exclusively on demotivation, will help readers to understand motivational issues from a different perspective. The aims of the work are threefold: to present the current developments of demotivation research in the field of SLA and bridge motivational theory/research and demotivation research; to promote the understanding of possible causes of demotivation; and to expand the focus of demotivation research through a reflection on current motivation theory/research and a discussion of methodological issues. The research presented in this book is situated in Japanese English-teaching contexts and will serve as a foundation for anyone wishing to better understand the causes of demotivation in SLA and to explore the topic in their own contexts.

Understanding metaphor raises key questions about the relationship between language and meaning, and between language and mind. This book explores how this understanding can impact upon the theory and practice of language teaching. After summarising the cognitive basis of metaphor and other figures of speech, it looks at how this knowledge can inform classroom practice. Finally, it sets out how we can use these insights to re appraise language learning theory in a way that treats it as consonant with the cognitive nature of language. MARKET 1: Academic libraries and departments of English as a Second Language, Modern Languages, Linguistics, especially Applied Linguistics and Language Learning Theory, and Cognitive Linguistics MARKET 2: English language teachers

This volume depicts the phenomenon of cross-linguistic influences in the specific context of multilingual language acquisition. It consists of articles on various issues relating to the syntactic and lexical development of foreign language learners from different L1 backgrounds, in many cases involving languages which are typologically distant from English, such as Russian, Croatian, Greek and Portuguese. Individual chapters highlight different areas expected to be especially transfer-prone at the level of grammatical and lexical transfer in particular contexts of language contact.

Stress is an increasingly popular subject and is studied across a range of areas within psychology. Examples relate to everyday issues like school, family and stress within the workplace. New edition examines stress related to current hot topics, like stress and technology.

The book addresses a controversial current topic in language acquisition studies: the impact of frequency on linguistic structure in child language. A major strength of the book is that the role of input frequency in the acquisition process is evaluated in a large variety of languages, topics and the two major theoretical frameworks: UG-based and usage-based accounts. While most papers report a clear frequency effect, different factors that may be interacting with pure statistical effects are critically assessed. An introductory statement is made by Thomas Roeper who calls for caution as he identifies frequency as a non-coherent concept and argues for a precise definition of what can and cannot be explained by statistical effects.

This book provides rare insights into motivation among extremely successful learners of English and languages other than English (LOTEs) through the analysis of a longitudinal study and the examination of the factors involved in becoming multilingual in a non-multilingual environment. Based on sixteen interview sessions, conducted over the course of nine years while the learners progressed from high school to the world of work, this book offers the story of how two learners persist in English/LOTE learning. The study illuminates the long-term processes through which the interviewees develop ideal English/LOTE selves in an environment where multilingualism is not emphasized and where both English and LOTEs can still be described as foreign languages. Educators and researchers will learn from this study, which stretches our understanding of motivation beyond the recent theorizing of L2 motivation and contributes to the limited research in long-term motivational trajectories and LOTE learning motivation, which is particularly scarce in non-European contexts. The book will be of interest not only to readers in Japan but also to those in other contexts as it offers an example of successful learners who go beyond the pragmatic and instrumentalist view of language learning to hold a more holistic view, thus revealing the factors which can sustain multiple language learning, even in foreign language contexts.

This major new textbook offers an accessible introduction to many of the most interesting areas in the study of multilingualism. It consists of twelve lectures, written by leading researchers, each dedicated to a particular topic of importance. Each lecture offers a state-of-the-art, authoritative review of a subdiscipline of the field. The volume sheds light on the ways in which the use and acquisition of languages are changing, providing new insights into the nature of contemporary multilingualism. It will be of interest both to undergraduate and postgraduate students working in linguistics-related disciplines and students in associated social sciences.

This book explores second language pragmatic development with a specific focus on two areas: classroom-based pragmatic instruction in the study abroad context, and using technology for developing and assessing pragmatic competence. Teaching Pragmatics and Instructed Second Language Learning directly compares the effects of technology platforms and traditional paper-based tasks within the second language environment for developing pragmatic competence. These analyses are based on empirical research of how undergraduate Chinese learners of English receive explicit instruction in classrooms using different training materials. The book makes an original and innovative contribution to collecting oral speech act data in the form of computer-animated production tasks (CAPT) designed to enhance learner engagement and performance. Using this tool, it explores the beneficial role of technology in teaching and learning, offering practitioners and researchers practical ways to maximise second language pragmatic development in the classroom.

With an Introduction by Anthony D. Pellegrini, this work is one of the most extensive studies of early language and literacy undertaken to date. This volume describes the four interdisciplinary facets of a three-year longitudinal investigation of the early literate and linguistic experience and knowledge of a cohort of sixty 3- and 4-year-olds. Coverage includes: an extensive survey of home literate environment and development across a broad range of earliest literate and meta-literate knowledge over the three-year span of the study; links early literate experience and knowledge to differential strategies of speech act comprehension over time, showing that early literate experience heightens dependence upon linguistic as distinct from contextual information in comprehension; the employment of parent-child book reading as the matrix for a detailed analysis of lexical development, relating forms of parent-child interaction around text to variation in sophistication of reference; and finally, the examination of child-child interaction in a detailed, naturalistic framework, in relation to aspects of literate experience and knowledge.

The author, a well-known development psychologist, challenges Piagetian theories of language development. Rondal studies verbal and nonverbal interactions between children and parents from a social-behavioristic perspective.

Psycholinguist Maya Hickmann presents an original comparative study of discourse development in English, French, German, and Chinese. Hickmann discusses the main theoretical issues in the study of first language acquisition and provides a wide review of available studies in three domains of child language: person, space and time. Her findings concern the rhythm of language acquisition, its formal and functional determinants, and its universal vs. language-specific aspects. The conclusions stress the importance of relating sentence and discourse determinants of acquisition in a crosslinguistic perspective.

The architecture of the human language faculty has been one of the main foci of the linguistic research of the last half century. This branch of linguistics, broadly known as Generative Grammar, is concerned with the formulation of explanatory formal accounts of linguistic phenomena with the ulterior goal of gaining insight into the properties of the 'language organ'. The series comprises high quality monographs and collected volumes that address such issues. The topics in this series range from phonology to semantics, from syntax to information structure, from mathematical linguistics to studies of the lexicon. To discuss your book idea or submit a proposal, please contact Birgit Sievert

A collection of empirical studies on gender and the acquisition, development, meaning and use of vocabulary by female and male adult, adolescent, and young learners of English and Spanish as a second or foreign language. Up-to-date research identifies relationships between gender and vocabulary in a language classroom context.

David Winton Thomas (1901-1970) was Regius Professor of Hebrew in the University of Cambridge (1938-1968) and one of the most distinguished British lexicographers of the Hebrew language. His special contribution was the identification of words in Biblical Hebrew that had lain undetected since ancient times, sometimes because they were homonyms of other, better-known words. He called his project 'The Recovery of the Ancient Hebrew Language', the title of his inaugural lecture at Cambridge in 1939, as well as of the present book. In this volume John Day has gathered together all Winton Thomas's lexicographical articles (nearly 400 pages altogether) in a convenient format; hitherto these have been scattered around many different journals and books. In addition, he has prefaced them with a very substantial introduction of some 150 pages, in which he offers the first thorough and systematic evaluation of Winton Thomas's work. Day concludes that there are definitely occasions where Thomas has made a positive and enduring contribution to Hebrew lexicography, and it is important that modern scholars do not overlook these conclusions. On the other hand, it becomes clear that Thomas was sometimes too prone to appeal to cognate Semitic languages (especially Arabic) in the search for new meanings of Hebrew words when this was unnecessary. In seeking to make a thorough appraisal of Thomas's proposals this volume offers a valuable contribution to the study of Biblical Hebrew lexicography.

"Vocabulary and Writing in a First and Second Language" is based on a large-scale empirical study. The innovative feature of the research was that the same students were asked to do the same tasks in both languages while reporting their thinking as they went along. Furthermore, they had to undertake the same tasks even though they were of very different experience, ranging from young children at school to university students. Three areas of learners' competencies and skills were explored: vocabulary knowledge, word guessing strategies and writing. The authors further explore the relationship between the skills and describe the level of development for individual learners within the three areas. In all cases, statistical and qualitative analyses are offered, the latter being based on the learners' own 'think-aloud' reports. Both researchers and teachers of language will find this in-depth approach useful in understanding the processes of both first and second language performance.

Based on comparative analyses of diachronic data, the articles in this volume address both theoretical and methodological issues in the study of grammaticalization and lexicalization in both Eastern and Western languages. The central question raised and discussed in this volume is how, if any, typological properties of the two genetically unrelated language families interact with the processes of grammaticalization and lexicalization.

How do children develop bilingual competence? Do bilingual children develop language in the same way as monolinguals? Set in the context of findings on language development, this book examines the acquisition of English and Spanish by two brothers in the first six years of their lives. Based on in-depth and meticulous analyses of naturalistic data, it explores how the systems of both languages affect each other as the children develop, and how different levels of exposure to each language influence the nature of acquisition. The author demonstrates that the children's grammars and lexicons follow a developmental path similar to that of monolinguals, but that cross-linguistic interactions affecting lexical, semantic and discourse-pragmatic aspects arise in Spanish when exposure to it diminishes around the age of four. The first of its kind, this original study is a must-read for students and researchers in bilingualism, child development, language acquisition and language contact.