Today's world is in turmoil. Economic crises are bringing countries to the brink of ruin, and old models are being questioned. The same sense of crisis also exists in contemporary education, and there is a need to explore new educational models. Digital Learning Lives: Trajectories, Literacies, and Schooling is a contribution in this direction. This book explores the importance of the adoption of digital technologies by contemporary education systems. Partly a synthesis of findings from projects carried out in Norway by the author over the past 15 years, the data have been extended to raise key questions about the effectiveness of current education strategies for the Facebook and YouTube generation. Along the way, a promising approach for future developments in education is introduced that embraces the engagement of digital media - what Ola Erstad terms 'learning lives'. Use of digital media in schools and in everyday culture becomes the catalyst for exploring learning as life-deep (studying identity processes), life-wide (studying learners across contexts), and life-long (studying learning as trajectories and timescales). The book is targeted toward courses on digital learning, educational change, school development, and formal-informal learning.

This volume explores the complex relations between normsand exemplars of genres from business and technical communication. Contributors compare a variety of types of norm with textual practices in a variety of ways. The genres examined are typical of the range of audiences and media of workplace and business communication: product withdrawal notices, press releases, job ads, oral presentations, sales letters and tenders, chairman's reports, and technical reports. They are compared with norms set by teachers, by unimaginative practice, by more or less self-appointed experts, or by practioners who may not share the national or professional culture of their colleagues. However accurate these may be they never do justice to the complexity of 'reality'. The contributors to this volume use a wide variety of methods in their attempt to capture this reality. Many analyse texts, but all combine this procedure with at least one other approach and often more: questionnaires, experiments assessing the effect of manipulated texts, analysis of practitioner comments, and use of natural sources of practitioner judgements like award for good practice.

In light of the crisis surrounding traditional media and the radical changes resulting from the advent of the Internet and the social media, various media outlets have argued, or more subtly, hinted at the demise of the printed news, or the end of traditional media. This backdrop forms the genesis for this thought-provoking and provocative volume for imagining life without media. While there is some skepticism toward the radical hypothesis of the death of the media, there is mounting concern, at the same time, regarding the changing media space(s) and the relevance of the media's roles and places in different and diverse social spheres. Unanimously, contributors report that while these roles and places have changed, the difficulty lies in where and how to delineate them. The chapters provide some answers to the hypothesis of life without media, and in many instances raise new questions and doubts.

This edited collection comprises foundational texts and new contributions that revisit the theory of the "audience commodity" as first articulated by Dallas Smythe. Contributors focus on the historical and theoretical importance of this theory to critical studies of media/communication, culture, society, economics, and technology - a theory that has underpinned critical media studies for more than three decades, but has yet to be compiled in a single edited collection. The primary objective is to appraise its relevance in relation to changes in media and communication since the time of Smythe's writing, principally addressing the rise of digital, online, and mobile media. In addition to updating this perspective, contributors confront the topic critically in order to test its limits. Contextualizing theories of the audience commodity within an intellectual history, they consider their enduring relationship to the field of media/communication studies as well as the important legacy of Dallas Smythe.

First published in 1983, this book represents a substantial body of detailed research on children's language and communication, and more generally on the nature of interactive spoken discourse. It looks at areas of competence often examined in young children's speech have that have not been described for adults - leading to insights not only in the character of adult conversation but also the process of acquiring this competence. The authors set forward strategies for conversing at different stage of life, while also relating these strategies to, and formulating hypotheses concerning, the dynamics of language variation and change.

In light of the crisis surrounding traditional media and the radical changes resulting from the advent of the Internet and the social media, various media outlets have argued, or more subtly, hinted at the demise of the printed news, or the end of traditional media. This backdrop forms the genesis for this thought-provoking and provocative volume for imagining life without media. While there is some skepticism toward the radical hypothesis of the death of the media, there is mounting concern, at the same time, regarding the changing media space(s) and the relevance of the media's roles and places in different and diverse social spheres. Unanimously, contributors report that while these roles and places have changed, the difficulty lies in where and how to delineate them. The chapters provide some answers to the hypothesis of life without media, and in many instances raise new questions and doubts.

This is a comprehensive introduction to English text-linguistics. It deals with those areas of text-linguistics that have enjoyed widespread attention in English linguistics, notably aspects of cohesion and coherence. Further topics are corpus-based studies in lexical patterns and in text classifications, psycho-linguistic and cognitive studies in text constitution and decoder-orientation. One special feature of this book is that it not only covers abstract lexical and grammatical structures but also medium-dependent written and spoken presentation.

This volume focuses on the nature of official correspondence produced m the period after 1500, from Early Modern to nineteenth-century English. The contributions reflect the extent to which the genre is somewhat plastic in this period, gradually acquiring distinguishing conventions and protocols as the situations in which the letters themselves are encoded acquire more distinctiveness. Although correspondence has long been the object of diachronic studies, very little seems to be available as far as specialized usage is concerned, hence the specific interest in letters exchanged within scientific, diplomatic, and business networks. In addition, the study of business and official correspondence offered here profits from a multi-disciplinary and multi-methodological approach, as it relies on a rich array of databases and corpora of correspondence, ranging from highly specialized collections to more broadly constructed diagnostic corpora, in which correspondence is just one register or text-type. While specific attention is paid to phenomena relating to the expression of positive and negative politeness through the investigation of authentic (rather than constructed) texts, methodological issues are also taken into consideration.

This edited collection comprises foundational texts and new contributions that revisit the theory of the "audience commodity" as first articulated by Dallas Smythe. Contributors focus on the historical and theoretical importance of this theory to critical studies of media/communication, culture, society, economics, and technology - a theory that has underpinned critical media studies for more than three decades, but has yet to be compiled in a single edited collection. The primary objective is to appraise its relevance in relation to changes in media and communication since the time of Smythe's writing, principally addressing the rise of digital, online, and mobile media. In addition to updating this perspective, contributors confront the topic critically in order to test its limits. Contextualizing theories of the audience commodity within an intellectual history, they consider their enduring relationship to the field of media/communication studies as well as the important legacy of Dallas Smythe.

This volume is a collection of empirical studies investigating the ways and means through which culturally-shaped identities are manifested in and through discourse in documents and texts from multiple spheres of social action. It also looks at possible ways in which understanding and acceptance of diverse cultural identities can be moulded and developed through appropriate education. Language being one of the most evident and powerful 'markers' of cultural identity, discourse and text are sites where cultures are both constructed and displayed and where identities are negotiated. The approaches to the analysis of culture and identity adopted here to account for the multifaceted realisations of cultural identities in the texts and documents taken into consideration span from multimodality, to discourse and genre analysis, to corpus linguistics and text analysis. The volume then offers a varied picture of approaches to the scientific enquiry into the multifaceted manifestations of identity in and across national, professional, and disciplinary cultures.

With World English, learners experience the world through content and ideas from National Geographic and TED, providing the motivation to talk about what's most important to them.

Computer games have fascinated millions of users for more than 30 years. Today, they constitute the strongest sector in the media-entertainment industry and are part of the experience of digital daily life. Computer Game Studies require a deep understanding of functional and communicational mechanisms of games that support the player's immersion in virtual worlds. Unfortunately, the discussion and the academic research about usage and effects of computer games mostly takes place isolated within different scientific contexts with various theoretical and methodological approaches. Therefore, this anthology combines the perspectives of Media Studies, Game Studies, and Communication Studies, and presents their findings in an interdisciplinary approach.

This volume reflects the results of a workshop on the investigation of specialized discourse in a diachronic perspective, held within the 15th European Symposium on Language for Special Purposes ('New Trends in Specialized Discourse', Bergamo 2005). The articles deal with developments from the late medieval period to the present day, and the book encompasses studies in which the long-established tradition of domain-specific English is highlighted. The fields of contributions range from scientific to legal to political and business discourse. Special attention is given to argumentation, in an attempt to assess the time-depth of typical rhetorical strategies. Some methodological innovations are introduced in corpus linguistics. Numerous contributions bring new materials to scholarly discussion, as recently released or in-progress 'second-generation' corpora are used as data. Recent changes in present-day legal and scientific writing are also discussed as they witness fast adaptation to new requirements, due to the advent and growing familiarity of new technologies, international law and changes in academia.

The enthymeme in education is essential because it reflects what humans do when they think. It informs not only how we make inferences about the world to discover new knowledge, but also how we express those discoveries to influence the minds of others. Thus, the enthymeme provides an effective pedagogical approach to the analysis and synthesis of ideas in the classroom. In this volume, such an approach is applied to composition instruction, second-language learning, advertising, specialized medical texts, and detective fiction to help prepare students for the challenges of modern life. (Michael D. Hood)

An inviting and highly readable new translation of Aristotle's complete Poetics-the first and best introduction to the art of writing and understanding stories Aristotle's Poetics is the most important book ever written for writers and readers of stories-whether novels, short fiction, plays, screenplays, or nonfiction. Aristotle was the first to identify the keys to plot, character, audience perception, tragic pleasure, and dozens of other critical points of good storytelling. Despite being written more than 2,000 years ago, the Poetics remains essential reading for anyone who wants to learn how to write a captivating story-or understand how such stories work and achieve their psychological effects. Yet for all its influence, the Poetics is too little read because it comes down to us in a form that is often difficult to follow, and even the best translations are geared more to specialists than to general readers who simply want to grasp Aristotle's profound and practical insights. In How to Tell a Story, Philip Freeman presents the most readable translation of the Poetics yet produced, making this indispensable handbook more accessible, engaging, and useful than ever before. In addition to its inviting and reliable translation, a commentary on each section, and the original Greek on facing pages, this edition of the Poetics features unique bullet points, chapter headings, and section numbers to help guide readers through Aristotle's unmatched introduction to the art of writing and reading stories.

A follow-on from Actors' Audition Speeches" this title includes speeches from plays written and produced in the 1990s, with extracts from West End productions ("Art" and "Cressida"), and films ("Pulp Fiction"). Comments from directors, casting directors, actors and teachers are included."

Be memorable.

Whether you like it or loathe it, public speaking is something many of us have to do. Be it presentations to colleagues or speeches to a room full of near strangers, we all want to shine...or at least get through it with our dignity intact. Luckily Philip Collins, former Chief Speech Writer to Tony Blair, knows exactly what's needed to give a storming speech.

The secret, according to Philip, is content. Too many of us focus on "how" we're presenting, and don't spend enough time thinking about "what" we're presenting. The secret to memorable, polished speeches is to think more about the material you're sharing - to pay attention to detail and choose your works carefully. Speech writing is and art - and art we can all learn.

When the content's right, the confidence will follow.

In "The Art of Speeches and Presentations" Philip Collins provides you with a concise set of tools, preparing you for any speaking occasion. Ranging from the ancient history of rhetoric to what makes Barack Obama such a good speaker, it's packed with practical examples and tips to teach you the craft of speaking well and making people remember what to say.

"Does Phil Collins know what he is talking about? Here's the answer - he isn't just good, he is the best. It's as simple as that. I spent years writing speeches for major politicians and I now speak publicly myself all the time, and yet there is so much that I can pick up from him and anyone who re4ads this book will too."--Daniel Finkelstein, Executive Editor, "The Times "and former speech writer to William Hague

From high-tech kitchen gadgets and magazines to the Food Network, the last few decades have seen a huge rise in food-focused consumption, media, and culture. The discourses surrounding food range from media coverage of school lunchrooms and hunger issues, to news stories about urban gardening or buying organic products at the local farmers market. Food is no longer viewed merely as a means of survival. International and comprehensive in approach, this volume is the first book-length study of food from a communication perspective. Scholars examine and explore this emerging field to provide definitive and foundational examples of how food operates as a system of communication, and how communication theory and practices can be understood by considering food in this way. In doing so, the book serves to inspire future dialogues on the subject due to its vast array of ideas about food and its relationship to our communication practices.

alieNATION presents research conducted by a national election team and leading scholars in political communication that explores a range of important topics and variables affecting voter attitudes and behavior in the 2012 U.S. presidential election. In exploring the messages, issues, and voters of the 2012 election, these studies employ multiple methods including experimental design, content analysis, rhetorical criticism, and survey research. Whereas other election research tends to investigate either the content or effects of campaign communication, the more comprehensive and systematic nature of this collection enables alieNATION to cohere thematically around considerations of voter alienation, political engagement, political efficacy, and ultimately, citizens' voting decisions.

Corporations engage young people and musicians in brand-building activities. These activities unfold in media-dense social spaces. Social networking sites, the user-generated content of web 2.0, live music events, digital cameras and cell phones are all used in constructing valuable brands. This book addresses the integration of popular music culture, corporate branding, and young people's mediated cultural practices. These intersections provide a rich site for examining how young people build brands within spaces and practices that they perceive as meaningful. The book is based on extensive ethnographic empirical research, drawing on participant observation, textual analysis and interviews with young people, musicians, marketers and other participants in the cultural industries. Contemporary theories of marketing and branding are brought together with critical and cultural accounts of mediated social life. The book explores the distinctive concerns and debates of these different perspectives and the lively interface between them.

What are the points of contact between the study of language and the study of history? What are the possibilities for collaboration between linguists and historians, and what prevents it? This volume, the proceedings of an international conference held at the University of Bristol in April 2009, presents twenty-two articles by linguists and historians, exploring the relationship between the fields theoretically, conceptually and in practice. Contributions focus on a variety of European and American languages, in historical periods from the Middle Ages to the present day. Key themes at the intersection of these two disciplines are the standardization and classification of languages, the social and demographic history of medieval and early modern Europe, the study of language and history 'from below', and the function of language in modern politics. The value of interdisciplinary collaboration is demonstrated in a wide-ranging set of case studies, on topics including language contact in Northern and Central Europe, the relationship between peninsular and transatlantic Spanish, and new approaches to the recent histories of Nicaragua, Luxembourg and Bulgaria. The volume seeks out the interdependencies between the two fields and asks why exchanges between linguists and historians remain the exception rather than the rule.

Dieses Buch gibt eine Einführung in das sonderpädagogische Fachgebiet der Unterstützten Kommunikation. Unterstützte Kommunikation zielt darauf, nichtsprechenden Menschen möglichst effektive Kommunikationsmöglichkeiten zur Verfügung zu stellen. Zu diesem Zweck werden Hilfsmittel, Techniken und Strategien entwickelt, die Lautsprache ergänzen oder ersetzen können. Im empirischen Teil der Arbeit wird ein Beitrag zur Bewertung moderner elektronischer Kommunikationshilfen geleistet. Die gesprächsanalytisch orientierte Studie untersucht ein Videomaterial von insgesamt 240 Minuten 1:1-Interaktionen zwischen nichtsprechenden Menschen und ihren natürlichsprechenden Partnern/Partnerinnen. Die Auswirkungen des Einsatzes von Sprachcomputern im Vergleich zu Kommunikationstafeln auf die Gesprächssituation werden analysiert.

The Jewish Press' purpose is to promote Jewish Orthodoxy. The book explores this popular American Jewish newspaper and more precisely the development of the paper's ideology over a period of forty years offering a new understanding of the phenomenon Orthodoxy. Orthodoxy must be understood as a dynamic concept continually changing as a result of historical developments and hegemonic struggles with other ideologies about telling the Jew in modern society how he is to understand himself and the surrounding world.

Lankshear (literacy and new technologies, James Cook U. Australia) and Knobel (language and literacy education, Queensland U. of Technology, Australia) have chosen the contributors to this volume based on the idea of emphasizing the plurality of digital literacies, by which they mean to refer to the diversity of specific accounts of digital literacy that exist and consequent implications for digital literacy policy, the strength and usefulness of a sociocultural perspective on literacy as practice (according to which literacy is best understood as literacies), and the benefits that may accrue from adopting an expansive view of digital literacy and its significance for educational learning. They present 12 chapters addressing such subjects as the required cognitive skills for Internet literacy, digital literacy as information savvy, digital literacy policies in the European Union, digital literacy in enterprises, the digital literacies of online shoppers, digital literacy and participation in online social networking spaces, and digital literacy and the law.

Since the eve of the war in Afghanistan, Al-Jazeera has become a global household name and a news source that cannot be ignored. Globalization theorists argue that Al-Jazeera promotes a cross-cultural debate, enforcing a counter-hegemonic perspective on the West not evident in former crises. Through a comprehensive empirical analysis covering the re-broadcasting of Al-Jazeera's images on major U.S. television networks since 9/11, this book draws an alternative picture, revealing that the advent of Al-Jazeera has actually eroded the counter-hegemonic debate in U.S. war reporting. It shows how the U.S. government persuaded television networks to systematically reformat legitimate war images from Al-Jazeera, labeling it a deviant network, in order to eliminate criticism of the war. Moreover, an examination of the U.S. reception by bloggers and network carriers of Al-Jazeera's English-language website and channel reveals the U.S. administration's continued resolve and ability to limit public discourse.