This book closes the gap between theory and classroom application by capitalizing on learners' individuality in second or foreign language learning. The book examines the existing literature and theoretical underpinnings of each of the most prominent learner characteristics including anxiety, beliefs, cognitive abilities, motivation, strategies, styles and willingness to communicate. This strong foundation, coupled with the wide variety of activities that are suggested at the end of each chapter, arms the reader with ideas to conquer the problems created by negative affect and to capitalize on positive, facilitative emotions. The tasks are unrestricted by language and can be modified for use with technology, emergent learners and large classes, making this book a useful resource for both in-service teachers and pre-service teachers in university language teacher education programs.

To Advanced Proficiency and Beyond: Theory and Methods for Developing Superior Second Language Ability addresses an important issue in Second Language Acquisition - how to help learners progress from Intermediate and Advanced proficiency to Superior and beyond. Due to the pressures of globalization, American society encounters an ever-increasing demand for speakers with advanced language abilities. This volume makes available cutting edge research on working memory and cognition and empirical studies of effective teaching. In addition it can serve as a practical handbook for seasoned and pre-professional instructors alike. The bringing together of the latest in second language acquisition theory, decades of empirical research, and practical classroom application makes for an unprecedented volume examining the achievement of Superior-level foreign language proficiency.

This volume brings together ten contributions to the study of untutored (mainly) second but also first language acquisition. All chapters have been written from a functionalist perspective and take as the main theoretical framework a model of spontaneous second language acquisition centered on the "basic variety" as proposed by Klein and Perdue. The chapters in the volume are grouped around two research themes. The first theme concerns the acquisition of scope phenomena (negation, scope particles), the second one deals with referential movement (reference to person, time and space). Both parts provide insights in the structure of learner varieties at various stages of development, and are followed by a discussion chapter. Scope phenomena, such as negation and frequency adverbials present an important learning problem, as learners have to reconcile the logical structure of their utterances with the syntactic specifics of the language being learned. Their acquisition has been relatively neglected in studies up to date, however, and we even lack detailed knowledge about the interpretation of scope particles in the target languages. The chapters in this part of the volume set out to provide more knowledge about scope phenomena in general; more detailed descriptions of the particles in the languages under consideration; and a more general understanding of how scope is acquired. Strong findings resulting from the "ESF" project suggested universal trends in how untutored learners deal with acquisition in the very early stages (the basic variety). Chapters in this second part of the volume on referential movement look at acquisition at more advanced stages, including the production of near native speakers. Learners who progress beyond the basic variety increasingly grammaticalise their productions. This later development is supposedly more variable, as more specific aspects of the target languages are now being acquired. Chapters in this part allow to shed more light on the question regarding universal and language-specific influences on language acquisition.

This book synthesises current theory and research on L2 motivation in the EFL Japanese context carried out by internationally recognized researchers and upcoming researcher-educators working in various educational contexts in Japan. Topics covered include the issues of cultural identity, demotivation, language communities, positive psychology, possible L2 selves and internationalisation within a key EFL context. The studies in the book utilise a wide variety of research methodologies aiming to narrow the gap between theory and practice and examine L2 motivation in primary, secondary and tertiary education. This volume will be of interest to research/teacher professionals who are currently engaged in active ESL/EFL practice, EFL educators, researchers, and teacher-trainers both inside and outside Japan, who are interested in research on L2 motivation in general and within the Japanese context in particular, as well as graduate and postgraduate researchers.

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.

Affectivity is at the core of everything we do in life. Thus, its development is also central to learning/acquisition and is important for educational contexts. The studies presented in this volume consider the different contexts of language learning and examine different types of participants in this process. Most of them look at a formal instruction context, while others look beyond the classroom and even report on the author's own affectivity and its involvement in learning experiences. Affectivity is discussed here in relation to learners but also to teachers in their own professional contexts of teaching foreign languages. In the majority of cases, affectivity is explored in the case of bilinguals, but there are also articles which focus on multilingual language users and their affectivity as an evolving factor.

In the disciplines of applied linguistics and second language acquisition (SLA), the study of pragmatic competence has been driven by several fundamental questions: What does it mean to become pragmatically competent in a second language (L2)? How can we examine pragmatic competence to make inference of its development among L2 learners? In what ways do research findings inform teaching and assessment of pragmatic competence? This book explores these key issues in Japanese as a second/foreign language. The book has three sections. The first section offers a general overview and historical sketch of the study of Japanese pragmatics and its influence on Japanese pedagogy and curriculum. The overview chapter is followed by eight empirical findings, each dealing with phenomena that are significant in Japanese pragmatics. They target selected features of Japanese pragmatics and investigate the learners' use of them as an indicator of their pragmatic competence. The target pragmatic features are wide-ranging, among them honorifics, speech style, sentence final particles, speech acts of various types, and indirect expressions. Each study explicitly prompts the connection between pragmalinguistics (linguistic forms available to perform language functions) and sociopragmatics (norms that determine appropriate use of the forms) in Japanese. By documenting the understanding and use of them among learners of Japanese spanning multiple levels and time durations, this book offers insight about the nature and development of pragmatic competence, as well as implications for the learning and teaching of Japanese pragmatics. The last section presents a critical reflection on the eight empirical papers and prompts a discussion of the practice of Japanese pragmatics research.

TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS is a series of books that open new perspectives in our understanding of language. The series publishes state-of-the-art work on core areas of linguistics across theoretical frameworks, as well as studies that provide new insights by approaching language from an interdisciplinary perspective. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS considers itself a forum for cutting-edge research based on solid empirical data on language in its various manifestations, including sign languages. It regards linguistic variation in its synchronic and diachronic dimensions as well as in its social contexts as important sources of insight for a better understanding of the design of linguistic systems and the ecology and evolution of language. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS publishes monographs and outstanding dissertations as well as edited volumes, which provide the opportunity to address controversial topics from different empirical and theoretical viewpoints. High quality standards are ensured through anonymous reviewing.

This volume is based on one of the first interdisciplinary meetings to focus on early developmental neurocognition. It has now been clearly established that human infants process complex events such as faces and speech sounds quite early in their life. The crucial problem nowadays is to elucidate how these competences emerge and develop: what kinds of mechanisms are involved that make information processing systems both so specific and so adaptive to the relevant biological signals, how the interactions with the environmental inputs contribute to the neuronal functional organization, to the onset and changes in competences, and how the various successive changes in infants' abilities and competences relate to each other. These are some of the questions addressed in the present volume: they constitute major challenges to neurobiologists, neuropsychologists, psychologists and linguists. Not only is human cognitive development a fascinating and important issue per se, it is also crucial to understanding the neurobiological mechanisms involved in adult competences. The meeting on which this volume was based was held in July 1992. It brought together some outstanding international specialists in the relevant scientific fields in a spirit of interdisciplinary exchange. Their contributions cover the latest research on these topics and include some exciting new conceptual advances.

This book offers an examination of the verbal participation of learners in Japanese as a Foreign Language classrooms. The verbal participation of learners in language classrooms offers a rich seam of data to the applied linguist. Overt and covert participation, when examined, can reveal both the structures of a classroom and elicit privileged information on participant's self-perceptions. This book examines the verbal participation of learners in Japanese as a Foreign Language classrooms. Verbal interactions with teachers and classmates and 'private' speech acts are examined in relation to the classroom context and also sociocultural factors such as the learner's motivation and the teacher's belief in their own methods. The examination of corrective feedback episodes and learners' private speech uses recorded speech and stimulated recall interviews recorded over the period of a year. The book's main focus is on Corrective Feedback episodes, and it explains not only the language used in class but also teacher's and learner's own perceptions. This book will be of interest to researchers in applied linguistics and second language acquisition, especially those involved with Japanese as a second or other language. It will also appeal to teachers of second and foreign languages.

Hans-Christian Schmitz argues that a speaker has to utter a sentence in a way that makes the hearer perceive at least those words that are sufficient for understanding the entire sentence. In spoken language the speaker has to accentuate these words. Semantics effects of accentuation appear as epi-phenomena of their pragmatic function. The author defines a formal model for the interpretation of incompletely recognized sentences and derives a context-sensitive rule of accentuation. The rule of accentuation is experimentally evaluated.

This book brings together many of Peter Culicover's most significant observations on the nature of syntax and its place within the architecture of human language. Over four decades he has sought to understand the cognitive foundations of linguistic theory and the place of syntactic theory in explaining how language works. This has led him to specific proposals regarding the proper scope of syntactic theory and to a re-examination of the empirical basis of syntactic analyses, which reflect judgements reflecting not only linguistic competence but the complexity of the computations involved in acquiring and using language. After a brief a retrospective the author opens the book with the Simpler Syntax Hypothesis, an article written with Ray Jackendoff, that proposes significant restrictions on the scope of the syntactic component of the grammar. The work is then divided into parts concerned broadly with representations, structures, and computation. The chapters are provided with contextual headnotes and footnote references to subsequent work, but are otherwise printed essentially as they first appeared. Peter Culicover's lively and original perspectives on syntax and grammar will appeal to all theoretical linguists and their advanced students.

The "Synagoge" (Gk: collection of useful word explanations) is one of the most important lexicographical sources from early Byzantine times. The anonymous author quotes extracts from the works of ancient authors which have not been preserved elsewhere and gives details of customs and myths from the epoch. At the same time, he presents his own age and provides a rich source of information on education and scholarship. The present edition combines all the available manuscripts of the oldest version of the "Synagoge," and thus provides the first complete and critical survey of the context of the genesis and developmental stages of this work. In addition, the second part presents a new edition of the letter alpha from manuscript B, which contains particul-arly valuable data and thus required a new edition, the only previous version dating back to 1828. Comprehensive indexes provide access to the edition.

This book details innovative developments in the pragmatics and lexicogrammar of speakers using English as a lingua franca. There have been considerable recent demographic shifts in the use of English worldwide. English is now undoubtedly(and particularly) an international lingua franca, a lingua mundi. The sociolinguistic reality of English language use worldwide, and its implications, continue to be hotly contested. Plenty of research has questioned, for example, the ownership of English, but less attention has been paid to the linguistic consequences of the escalating role English plays. This is one of the first books to provide a detailed and comprehensive account of recent empirical findings in the field of English as a lingua franca (ELF). Dewey and Cogo analyze and interpret their own large corpus of naturally occurring spoken interactions and focus on identifying innovative developments in the pragmatics and lexicogrammar of speakers engaged in ELF talk. Dewey and Cogo's work makes a substantial contribution to the emerging field of empirical ELF studies. As well as this practical focus, this book looks at both pragmatic and lexicogrammatical issues and highlights their interrelationship. In showcasing the underlying processes involved in the emergence of innovative patterns of language use, this book will be of great interest to advanced students and academics working in applied linguistics, ELF, sociolinguistics, and corpus linguistics.

Lexical errors are a determinant in gaining insight into vocabulary acquisition, vocabulary use and writing quality assessment. Lexical errors are very frequent in the written production of young EFL learners, but they decrease as learners gain proficiency. Misspellings are the most common category, but formal errors give way to semantic-based lexical errors as proficiency increases, likewise, the direct influence of the L1 also reduces in favour of more elaborated transfer mechanisms and L2 influence. The different categories of lexical errors indicate the stage of learning. This book uses a study of young EFL learners to suggest that lexical accuracy is a crucial component of writing assessment, and that lexical errors are useful in predicting writing quality.

In the last few years a lively discussion on information packaging has arisen, where traditional dichotomies Theme/Rheme, Topic/Comment and Focus/Background have been taken up again and partly reinterpreted. The discussion is mainly being held in syntax, but also in the fields of semantics and pragmatics. Some remarkable progress has been made especially in Focus phonology. Even if the role of information conveying and information packaging in the Indoeuropean languages was hinted at as early as in the classical studies of the Neogrammarians, this field has remained neglected in today's historical linguistics. This volume tries to partly cover this lack with a sample of papers which offer a various range of new empirical data analyzed from the point of view of information structure. The novelty of the papers consists in the modern theoretical perspective from which the data are analyzed and in the various phenomena considered, which range from the rise of clitic elements to word order change and verb movement. Editorial board Dr. habil. Kai Alter (Newcastle University Medical School) Prof. Dr. Ulrike Demske (Universitat des Saarlandes) Prof. Dr. Ewald Lang (Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin) Prof. Dr. Rosemarie Luhr (Friedrich-Schiller-Universitat Jena) Prof. Dr. Thomas Pechmann (Universitat Leipzig) Prof. em. Dr. Anita Steube (Universitat Leipzig)

A truly original book in every sense of the word, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows poetically defines emotions that we all feel but don't have the words to express, until now-from the creator of the popular online project of the same name. Have you ever wondered about the lives of each person you pass on the street, realizing that everyone is the main character in their own story, each living a life as vivid and complex as your own? That feeling has a name: "sonder." Or maybe you've watched a thunderstorm roll in and felt a primal hunger for disaster, hoping it would shake up your life. That's called "lachesism." Or you were looking through old photos and felt a pang of nostalgia for a time you've never actually experienced. That's "anemoia." If you've never heard of these terms before, that's because they didn't exist until John Koenig began his epic quest to fill the gaps in the language of emotion. Born as a website in 2009, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows has garnered widespread critical acclaim, inspired TED talks, album titles, cocktails, and even tattoos. The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows "creates beautiful new words that we need but do not yet have," says John Green, bestselling author of The Fault in Our Stars. By turns poignant, funny, and mind-bending, the definitions include whimsical etymologies drawn from languages around the world, interspersed with otherworldly collages and lyrical essays that explore forgotten corners of the human condition-from "astrophe," the longing to explore beyond the planet Earth, to "zenosyne," the sense that time keeps getting faster. The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows is for anyone who enjoys a shift in perspective, pondering the ineffable feelings that make up our lives, which have far more in common than we think. With a gorgeous package and beautifully illustrated throughout, this is the perfect gift for creatives, word nerds, and people everywhere.

In this book we take a fresh look at imitation. With the knowledge of some 20 years of research after Chomsky's initial critique of the behavioristic approach to language learning, it is time to explore imitation once again. How imitation is viewed in this book has changed greatly since the 1950s and can only be under stood by reading the various contributions. This reading reveals many faces, many forms, many causes, and many functions of imitation-cognitive, social, information processing, learning, and biological. Some views are far removed from the notion that an imitation must occur immediately or that it must be a per fect copy of an adult sentence. But the essence of the concept of imitation is retained: Some of the child's language behavior originates as an imitation of a prior model. The range of phenomena covered is broad and stimulating. Imitation's role is discussed from infancy on through all stages of language learning. Individual differences among children are examined in how much they use imitation, and in what forms and to what purposes they use it. The forms and functions of parent imitation of their child are considered. Second-language learning is studied alongside first-language learning. The juxtaposition of so many views and facets of imitation in this book will help us to study the commonalities as well as differences of various forms and functions of imitative language and will help us to discern the further dimensions along which we must begin to differentiate imitation."

This book presents, for the first time, an overarching, trans-Scandinavian, comprehensive and comparable account of linguistic developments and practices in late modern urban contact zones. The book aims to capture the multilingual realities of all young people in urban contexts, whether they are of migrant descent or not. Taking a multi-layered approach to linguistic practices, chapters in the book include structural and phonological analyses of new linguistic practices, examine how these practices and their practitioners are perceived, and discuss the sociolinguistic potentials of speakers when constructing, challenging and negotiating identities. The book also contains three short overview articles describing studies of multilingual practices in Sweden, Denmark and Norway. The editors have aimed to make Scandinavian research on urban multilingualism accessible to scholars and students who don't speak Scandinavian languages, and also to make a valuable contribution to the global study of multilingualism.

This book focuses on bilingualism in the context of migration and minorization processes. Its aim is to integrate recent research in this fast growing field of scientific and social interest into a single and coherent academic reference. The book has four parts. Part One goes into processes of early bilingual development. Part Two focuses on bilingual development of children at school age. In Part Three the constraints in processes of code-switching and borrowing are dealt with. Part Four discusses the issues related to processes of language maintenance and language loss. Taken from these four perspectives, the volume offers a comprehensive state of the art, with contributions from different combinations of language parts.

This edited volume brings together perspectives that find mutual kinship in a view of language as an embodied, semiotic, symbolic tool used for communicative and interactional purposes and an understanding of language use as the preeminent condition for language learning - perspectives that we conjoin under the umbrella term of usage based perspectives.

The book contains a selection of papers reflecting cutting-edge developments in the field of learning and teaching second and foreign languages. The contributions are devoted to such issues as classroom-oriented research, sociocultural aspects of language acquisition, individual differences in language learning, teacher development, new strands in second language acquisition research as well as methodological considerations. Because of its scope, the diversity of topics covered and the adoption of various theoretical perspectives, the volume is of interest not only to theorists and researchers but also to methodologists and practitioners, and can be used in courses for graduate students.

Although Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) is a popular teaching method, research on CLIL has nearly exclusively focused on aspects of language learning. Besides that, we are still lacking any cognitively well-grounded theory about the special features of contexts in which the focus is on content learning, but in which a foreign language is used as the medium of communicating information. This book re-examines the basis for CLIL from a cognitive perspective and investigates how the use of a foreign language as a working language influences the processing of content. It summarizes findings from cognitive psychology on thinking, problem solving and conceptual processing, and integrates them with models of language-specific mental activities such as speech processing and text composition. This provides a theoretically well-grounded basis for the understanding of the special features of CLIL, and promotes a Cognitive Linguistic perspective on CLIL pedagogy. The theoretical considerations form the basis for an empirical study that offers the first insights into what CLIL learners actually do when they solve content-focused tasks while using an L2. Through spontaneous verbalization of thought, detailed verbal protocols were elicited and analysed into language and content focused cognitive processes. The analysis shows that both language and conceptual thought interact closely and that a focus on language in general has positive effects on the processing of semantic content; the use of an L2 as working language can enhance this effect. Additionally, the study offers a thorough reflection and new perspectives on verbal protocols as research tools, in particular in L2 contexts.