This edited book approaches the learning experience as a creative, constructive process from an epistemological orientation that combines transdisciplinary, participatory, and collaborative approaches to explore the most constructive ways forward for a networked constructivist (project- and problem-based) pedagogy. The volume emphasizes the value of a number of modes of inquiry that, among others, include ethnography, auto-ethnography, corpus analysis, narrative analysis, and their many intersections in the process of academic maturation and growth. This book will be of interest to applied linguists, sociolinguists, researchers, and educators of topics related to higher education and academic maturation, networked learning, qualitative inquiry and transdisciplinary studies.

Growing out of an International Society of the Study of Behavioral Development-sponsored symposium, this book discusses the basic assumptions that led the contributors to conduct research in the field of narrative development. This collection gathers their research reflections and varying approaches to narrative and its development. It illustrates each type of approach and highlights their respective motives. The book presents some of the basic motivating assumptions of each approach and provides insight into what holds each set of assumptions together, potentially transforming them into actions. This book will serve as an excellent text for courses emphasizing multiple approaches to the study of narrative. The editor has organized this volume in accordance with the six main points of the symposium: * Specification of the Domain--how narratives are defined in terms of textual structures, knowledge thereof, interactive moves, sociocultural conventions, and the like. * The Individual's Involvement in the Developmental Process--the relationship between some internal or external forces and the organism's own active participation in the developmental process. * The Course of Development--if it is continuous or discontinuous; whether it proceeds in an additive fashion or whether regressive phases occur; and what changes at different points in the developmental process signify. * The Goal of Development--the implicit notion of a telos, a target or end-point that needs to occur in the developmental process. * Mechanisms of Development--the forces and/or conditions that both instigate the developmental process and keep it moving toward its telos. * Methodology--where and how to look in the establishment of a developmental framework. This book is an indispensable text in the fields of narrative and/or discourse, linguistics, language studies, psychology, and education in general.

A range of electronic corpora has become increasingly accessible via the WWW and CD-ROM. This development coincided with improvements in the standards governing the collecting, encoding and archiving of such data. Less attention, however, has been paid to making other types of digital data available. This is especially true of that which one might describe as 'unconventional', namely, dialects, child language and bilingual databases. This book is a first step toward developing similar standards for enriching and preserving these neglected resources.

In Men and the Language of Emotions Dariusz Galasinski challenges the commonly held association of rationality with masculinity, involving distancing from the language of emotions. Drawing on a major study of heterosexual men talking about their life and relationships, he demonstrates that men are capable of speaking of emotions and can do so in direct and uninhibited ways. He also discusses the crucial role of emotionality in constructions of masculine identities - those of men, fathers or husbands. The book ends with a proposal for a radically contextual understanding of gender and gender identities.

Heritage speakers are native speakers of a minority language they learn at home, but due to socio-political pressure from the majority language spoken in their community, their heritage language does not fully develop. In the last decade, the acquisition of heritage languages has become a central focus of study within linguistics and applied linguistics. This work centres on the grammatical development of the heritage language and the language learning trajectory of heritage speakers, synthesizing recent experimental research. The Acquisition of Heritage Languages offers a global perspective, with a wealth of examples from heritage languages around the world. Written in an accessible style, this authoritative and up-to-date text is essential reading for professionals, students, and researchers of all levels working in the fields of sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, education, language policies and language teaching.

This book will be of special interest to the general reader concerned with the issue of language in the United States, as well as the language specialist and sociolinguist. It has been written to inform those wishing to learn more about the role that languages other than English have had, and continue to have, in the life of the most important United States city, New York. At the same time this volume makes an important contribution to the scholarly literature on urban multilingualism and the sociology of language. The book contains chapters on languages of ethnolinguistic groups who arrived early in New York and which have been somewhat silenced (Irish, German, Yiddish), the languages of groups who made early contributions and continue to be heard in the city (Italian, Greek , Spanish, Hebrew), and languages which are acquiring an important voice in the city today (Chinese, Indian languages, English creoles, Haitian Creole).

The current state of knowledge of African American language is examined from a broad, multidisciplinary perspective that includes its structure, history, social role and educational implications, as well as the linguistic scholarship from which it derives, as a case study of language planning. Diverse including hip-hop culture, the African American church, and the Ebonics controversy are unified by a pervasive theme of latent conflict between academic knowledge of African American language and "real world" knowledge of the same.

Noam Chomsky's first book on syntactic structures is one of the first serious attempts on the part of a linguist to construct within the tradition of scientific theory-construction a comprehensive theory of language which may be understood in the same sense that a chemical, biological theory is understood by experts in those fields. It is not a mere reorganization of the data into a new kind of library catalogue, nor another specualtive philosophy about the nature of man and language, but rather a rigorus explication of our intuitions about our language in terms of an overt axiom system, the theorems derivable from it, explicit results which may be compared with new data and other intuitions, all based plainly on an overt theory of the internal structure of languages; and it may well provide an opportunity for the application of explicity measures of simplicity to decide preference of one form over another form of grammar.

This book adds the missing link between post-foundational discourse theory and the methods of empirical research, and in doing so it develops a post-foundational discourse analysis research program. The book offers a structure of the research program, and explores the methodologization of other discourse analytical approaches.

Language, Nation and Power provides students with a discussion of the ways in which language has been (and is being) used to construct national (or ethnic) identity. It focuses on the processes by which a language can be planned and standardized and what the results of these processes are. Particular emphasis is given to the historical and social effects which nationalism has had on the development of language since the French Revolution. For students of linguistics, sociology and politics.

Featuring contributions from an international team of leading and up-and-coming scholars, this innovative volume provides a comprehensive sociolinguistic picture of current spoken British English based on the Spoken BNC2014, a brand new corpus of British speech. The book begins with short introductions highlighting the state-of-the-art in three major areas of corpus-based sociolinguistics, while the remaining chapters feature rigorous analysis of the research outcomes of the project grounded in Spoken BNC2014 data samples, highlighting English used in everyday situations in the UK, with brief summaries reflecting on the sociolinguistic implications of this research included at the end of each chapter. This unique and robust dataset allows this team of researchers the unique opportunity to focus on speaker characteristics such as gender, age, dialect and socio-economic status, to examine a range of sociolinguistic dimensions, including grammar, pragmatics, and discourse, and to reflect on the major changes that have occurred in British society since the last corpus was compiled in the 1990s. This dynamic new contribution to the burgeoning field of corpus-based sociolinguistics is key reading for students and scholars in sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics, pragmatics, grammar, and British English.

Internationally, there is increasing research and interest in the processes of the production and reception of texts for specific purposes and in the historical development of genres and registers within Languages for Specific Purposes (LSP), psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, anthropology and the sociology of science. Studies of professional communication have traditionally been biased towards the written medium and have been carried out with little, if any, connection to LSP. Disciplinary boundaries and interest groupings have thus kept these different approaches to the study of professional communication and interaction separate. The editors of this volume unite these different perspectives and approaches and bring together recent research from linguistics, sociolinguistics, ethnography of communication, anthropology and sociology to provide an up-to-date analysis of different varieties of professional discourse and their historical development. Chapters written by leading exponents in the field deal with the core theoretical issue of how language, written genres and spoken discourse are constructed as a successive and continuous interplay between language and social realities. The volume includes chapters on the moral construction of discourse in the social care profession, the discourse of dispute negotiation, narrative accounts in clinical research, doctor-patient interaction, legal and other kinds of institutional discourse. A key text for students of applied linguistics and sociolinguistics at both advanced, undergraduate and MA levels.

The term "hedging" was introduced by G. Lakoss at the beginning of the 1970s and since then has provided a starting point for theoretical and empirical studies, especially in pragmatics. This volume reviews the present state of research in the area and contains studies of hedging strategies in English, German, Finnish and Russian, using academic text-types as exemplar.This volume reviews the present state of research in the area and contains studies of hedging strategies in English, German, Finnish and Russian, using academic text-types as exemplar.

Introducing Linguistics brings together the work of scholars working at the cutting-edge of the field of linguistics, creating an accessible and wide-ranging introductory level textbook for newcomers to this area of study. The textbook: * Provides broad coverage of the field, comprising five key areas: language structures, mind and society, applications, methods, and issues; * Presents the latest research in an accessible way; * Incorporates examples from a wide variety of languages - from isiZulu to Washo - throughout; * Treats sign language in numerous chapters as yet another language, rather than a 'special case' confined to its own chapter; * Includes recommended readings and resource materials, and is supplemented by a companion website. This textbook goes beyond description and theory, giving weight to application and methodology. It is authored by a team of leading scholars from the world-renowned Lancaster University department, who have drawn on both their research and extensive classroom experience. Aimed at undergraduate students of linguistics, Introducing Linguistics is the ideal textbook to introduce students to the field of linguistics.

Language acquisition is a human endeavor par excellence. As children, all human beings learn to understand and speak at least one language: their mother tongue. It is a process that seems to take place without any obvious effort. Second language learning, particularly among adults, causes more difficulty. The purpose of this series is to compile a collection of high-quality monographs on language acquisition. The series serves the needs of everyone who wants to know more about the problem of language acquisition in general and/or about language acquisition in specific contexts.

Language use is a principal means by which we distinguish ourselves and our group from others. In the modern age, language use often divides ethnic groups and nations: Germans are Germans because they speak German; French citizens must accept that Standard French is a central part of their national identity. Sociologists of language consider this equation of personal language use and national identity to be a product of the nationalism which developed in Europe from the eighteenth century on. Authority and Identity: A Sociolinguistic History of Europe before the Modern Age is the first attempt to take the theoretical and methodological insights of macrosociolinguistics and apply them to the history of Europe before 1500. It analyses the recurrent tensions felt since writing technology first began to be used in Europe some 3,500 years ago between centrifugal and centripetal forces, demonstrating how similar linguistic ecologies can produce different kinds of linguistic authority and identity in individuals and groups due to differing sociolinguistic conditions.

Vernacular Palaver examines the continuing appeal of the idea of 'the local' for cultural brokers in West Africa, even in instances where they have a growing interaction with diverse global and continental languages of wider communication. It highlights the contribution of foreign and indigenous languages of wider communication to the formation of the new alliances and sodalities that are testing the relevance of locality, and reshaping the concept of local culture, in West Africa. The author traces the role of discourse about language in West African identity politics from the cultural nationalists of the early 20th century to the religious transnationals of the contemporary period. Using examples from video film, popular literature, the activity of religious associations, and educational practice, this book seeks to advance our understanding of the varied functions of non-native languages in multilingual societies.

This book brings together the fields of language policy and discourse studies from a multidisciplinary theoretical, methodological and empirical perspective. The chapters in this volume are written by international scholars active in the field of language policy and planning and discourse studies. The diverse research contexts range from education in Paraguay and Luxembourg via businesses in Wales to regional English language policies in Tajikistan. Readers are thereby invited to think critically about the mutual relationship between language policy and discourse in a range of social, political, economic and cultural spheres. Using approaches that draw on discourse-analytic, anthropological, ethnographic and critical sociolinguistic frameworks, the contributors in this collection explore and refine the 'discursive' and the 'critical' aspects of language policy as a multilayered, fluid, ideological, discursive and social process that can operate as a tool of social change as well as reinforcing established power structures and inequalities.

For the last twenty-five years, "Language, Discourse, Society" has been the most intellectually challenging series in English. Its titles range across the disciplines from linguistics to biology, from literary criticism to law, combining vigorous scholarship and theoretical analysis at the service of a broad political engagement. This anniversary reader brings together a fascinating group of thinkers from both sides of the Atlantic with an introductory overview from the editors which considers the development of theory and scholarship over the past two decades.

This book analyses the complex relationship between directness, indirectness, politeness and impoliteness. Definitions of directness and indirectness are discussed and problematised from a discursive theoretical perspective.

This book presents research on the instruction of two heritage languages and two foreign languages in Israeli schools. The authors explore language policy and the way languages are studied from the point of view of students, teachers, schools and curricula. Language in Israel is a loaded concept, closely linked to ideological, political, and social issues. The profound changes in language policy in the West along with two large waves of immigration from the Former Soviet Union and Ethiopia resulted in new attitudes towards immigrant languages and cultures in Israel. Are these new attitudes strong enough to change the language policy in the future? What do students and teachers think about the language instruction at school? Are the teaching materials updated and do they address modern demands? This book provides answers to these and other questions. As well as describing the instruction of two heritage languages, Russian and Amharic, and two foreign languages, French and Spanish, the book also contains an extensive background on the immigration history and acculturation process of the speakers of each of these languages. An in-depth understanding of the case of Israel will serve as a guide for other countries contending with similar issues pertaining to the adjustment of language policies in light of immigration and other challenging circumstances.

In this book, Shelby Chan examines the relationship between theatre translation and identity construction against the sociocultural background that has led to the popularity of translated theatre in Hong Kong. A statistical analysis of the development of translated theatre is presented, establishing a correlation between its popularity and major socio-political trends. When the idea of home, often assumed to be the basis for identity, becomes blurred for historical, political and sociocultural reasons, people may come to feel "homeless" and compelled to look for alternative means to develop the Self. In theatre translation, Hongkongers have found a source of inspiration to nurture their identity and expand their "home" territory. By exploring the translation strategies of various theatre practitioners in Hong Kong, the book also analyses a number of foreign plays and their stage renditions. The focus is not only on the textual and discursive transfers but also on the different ways in which the people of Hong Kong perceive their identity in the performances.

The Southwest Pacific from Southern China through Indonesia, Australia and the Pacific Islands constitutes the richest linguistic region of the world. That rich resource cannot be taken for granted. Some of its languages have already been lost; many more are under threat. The challenge is to describe the languages that exist today and to adopt policies that will support their maintenance.

The history of translation has focused on literary work but this book demonstrates the way in which political control can influence and be influenced by translation choices. In this book, new research and specially commissioned essays give access to existing research projects which at present are either scattered or unavailable in English.

This is a detailed study of understanding in a second language, related to the actual lives of minority workers. The focus is on everyday interactions between these workers and the bureaucrats of the society in which they are now resident. It provides an important contribution to the debate about the function of language as a social practice, adding a new perspective to the psycholinguistic and experimental paradigms, currently existing in second language acquisition research.