How do some language learners triumph against all odds, despite not having obvious heritage links or spending extended periods of time in the L2 environment pre-adulthood? This book delves into the autobiographical stories of learners who achieve nativelike proficiency, opening a narrative window into their experiences and offering insights into their pathways to success. The in-depth analysis ties together a wide range of potentially relevant topics, from motivational vision and international posture to issues of identity, endurance and even musical ability, among other themes. The authors explore whether these successes can be repeated by others and the book will be of use to language teachers interested in learner motivation and the antecedents to high-level ultimate attainment. The book will also be of great interest to researchers working in the areas of language learner psychology, especially in topics concerning language learning motivation, identity and narrative inquiry.

'Could there be a more relevant book for our times? Vengoechea implores us to truly hear other people (maybe for the first time) and is the perfect author of a book on why we should listen like we mean it' - Nir Eyal, bestselling author of Hooked and Indistractable Hear me out. Does this sound like you? You end a team meeting and can't recall a single thing that was said. You leave a conversation with a friend feeling disconnected and unfulfilled. You think you and your boss are on the same page, only to find out you haven't been meeting expectations. Fortunately, listening, like any communication skill, can be improved, and Ximena Vengoechea can show you how. As a user researcher, she has spent nearly a decade facilitating hundreds of conversations at LinkedIn, Twitter and Pinterest. It's her job to uncover the truth behind how people use, and really think about, her company's products. In Listen Like You Mean It, she reveals the tips and tricks of the trade, including: - How to quickly build rapport with strangers - Which questions help people unlock what they need to say - When it's time to throw out the script entirely - How to recover from listener's drain

Every elementary teacher deals with students who struggle as readers on a daily basis. Each struggling child is complex and each has a unique history as a learner. In "One Child at a Time," experienced literacy specialist and consultant Pat Johnson provides a framework she has used in numerous K-6 classrooms to help teachers understand and assist individual children. The four-step process outlined in the book enables teachers to focus carefully on specific strategies and behaviors; analyze them with theoretical and practical lenses; design targeted instruction in keeping with current research on reading process; and then assess and refine the teaching in conferences with the child. The framework is by no means an easy answer to a difficult problem, but through its use teachers learn how the reading process works for proficient readers and how to support struggling readers as they construct their own reading process.

The text is packed with examples of actual conferences with students, detailing how and when Pat and her colleagues intervene to instruct and assess. The examples of follow-up assessment and analysis of struggling readers over days and weeks provide an indispensable model for teachers.

Pat shows how to use this framework successfully with a range of learners, including young children, English language learners, and students in the upper elementary grades who are stalled in their literacy progress. She builds upon her decades of work as a classroom teacher, literacy specialist, and consultant in schools with high poverty and diversity, to demonstrate how this framework can be useful in any setting.

The Gothic Language: Grammar, Genetic Provenance and Typology, Readings, now in its second edition, is designed for students and scholars of the oldest known language with a sizeable corpus, belonging to the English, German, Dutch, and Scandinavian language clade. The Gothic language is seminal to the history of the study of each of these languages. Gothic grammar is a standard text in courses on Indo-European and general linguistics since Gothic serves as the prototype Germanic language in the study of historical comparative world language typologies. Particularly pan-Germanic is the innermost core of the grammar, the genetic phonology, which is reconstructed within the most recent approaches of laryngeal and glottalic theories. Most challenging to traditional viewpoints is the total novel restructuring of Gothic synchronic phonology via current theoretical approaches such as underspecification theory and optimality theory. While the Gothic inflectional morphology is rendered in full paradigmatic display, its understanding is enhanced by the application of underspecification theory and the use of inheritance networks, a computational linguistic concept. Brief "Syntactic Considerations" concluding the grammar present a network of head-driven phrase structures. This book also brings the reader into the ambience of the fourth-century Goths. Readings from the Wulfilian Bible, the extant eight pages of the Skeireins, together with a glossary, definitions of linguistic technical terms, a bibliography, and an index complete this volume.

Teaching Children to Listen in the Early Years contains a wealth of interventions to teach young children the rules of good listening and why they are important. It is perfect for Early Years practitioners and settings where poor listening is an increasing barrier to teaching and growing numbers of children find it a challenge to stay focused on a task and follow even simple instructions, especially as technology proliferates. This affects young children's learning in all curriculum areas and their resultant distractible behaviour can make it more difficult for the rest of the class to pay attention. Specialist Speech and Language Therapists Liz Spooner and Jacqui Woodcock offer clear ideas for differentiation along with ideas to help children apply their improved skills, whilst supporting target setting and evaluation of progress. They also make suggestions for adapting the Early Years learning environment to maximise listening and they consider how listening can be encouraged by analysing language and expression when addressing children in the classroom. This practical guide not only contains photocopiable resources, a full-colour plate section, assessments and teaching suggestions with clear and digestible explanations from professionals who work directly with children on a daily basis, but it also pinpoints the behaviours that children need to learn in order to become good listeners. Teaching Children to Listen in the Early Years is an invaluable resource perfect for Early Years practitioners and settings. For activities aimed specifically at primary-age children, check out Teaching Children to Listen in Primary School.

Exam Essentials Practice Tests provide students with an invaluable combination of exam information, task guidance and up-to-date exam practice. This revised edition provides updated tests along with two completely new tests written by experts in the field and are at least the same level as the real Cambridge English exam. Students can be confident that if they do well in the Practice Tests, they'll do well in the real exam

This book is an introduction to the mathematical description of information in science and engineering. The necessary ma- thematical theory will be treated in a more vivid way than in the usual theoretical proof structure. This enables the reader to develop an idea of the connections between diffe- rent information measures and to understand the trains of thoughts in their derivation. As there exist a great number of different possible ways to describe information, these measures are presented in a coherent manner. Some examples of the information measures examined are: Shannon informati- on, applied in coding theory; Akaike information criterion, used in system identification to determine auto-regressive models and in neural networks to identify the number of neu- rons; and Cramer-Rao bound or Fisher information, describing the minimal variances achieved by unbiased estimators.

World English is an exciting new four-skills program which uses National Geographic content, images, and video to teach the language that learners need to succeed in their daily lives. The series is built upon clear and practical learning goals which are presented and practiced through appropriate themes and topics. World English uses real people, real places, and real language to connect English language learners to the world. Each level in the World English series is accompanied by World English Writing Portfolio which is specially written to develop learners writing skills from basic word and sentence formation to writing connected paragraphs in a variety of writing contexts.

What did eighth-century Japanese sound like? How does one decode its complex script? This book provides the definitive answers to these questions using an unprecedented range of data from the past and the present, including Chinese, Vietnamese, Sanskrit and Tibetan sources, and enables the reader to approximate the original pronunciation of Old Japanese literature.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203510720

This lively and informative text examines children's first experience of non-fiction during the pre-school and foundation years. Its careful consideration of different kinds of quality non-fiction, including books, posters, charts and computer software will provide a helpful framework from which Early Years teachers can work. With annotated lists, notes and suggestions for further reading, this is an ideal source of inspiration and stimulation for the busy classroom teacher, placing literacy teaching in a fresh, modern context.

The book offers a rich resource of information, with illustrative case studies and many examples of children's responses to non-fiction, providing:

* coverage of pre-school and foundation years for children up to 6 years of age
* references to research findings on the place of non-fiction in early years
* references to The National Literacy Strategy, Early Learning Goals and the National Curriculum for English
* an evaluation of the place of e-books, CDROMs and video-film in Early Years

The author's zest and expertise helps to give this book an infectious enthusiasm that will permeate the classroom, providing the nursery and primary school teacher, student teacher, or classroom assistant with an invaluable guide and resource tool.

Through the application of self-determination theory (SDT) to research and practice, this book deepens our understanding of how autonomous language learning can be supported and understood within environments outside of the classroom. Theoretical, empirical and practice-focused chapters examine autonomy support in a range of contexts and settings, dealing with learning environments and open spaces, communities and relationships, and advising and self-access language learning. They reveal what occurs beyond the classroom, how socializing agents support autonomous motivation and wellness, and how SDT can enhance our understanding of supporting language learner autonomy. It will be of interest to language teachers, university lecturers and learning advisors who are providing support outside the classroom, as well as to graduate students and researchers who are working in the fields of applied linguistics and TESOL.

Routledge A Level English Guides equip students with the skills they need to explore, evaluate and enjoy English. Books in the series are built around the various skills specified in the assessment objectives (AOs) for all AS and A2 Level English courses. Focusing on the AOs most relevant to their topic, the books help students to develop their knowledge and abilities through analysis of lively texts and contemporary data. Each book in the series covers a different example of language and literary study and offers accessible explanations, examples, exercises, a glossary of key terms and suggested answers. This series has been written by senior examiners in the light of how the new specifications have actually worked out in practice. "Writing for Assessment" helps students to develop the writing skills they need to succeed in AS and A2 Level English. It offers a step-by-step guide to approaching writing tasks and structuring a response, looks at a range of writing tasks - from argumentative essays to data-based investigations - provides Personal Audit Sheets (PASS) to help students assess their own writing skills and make practical steps to develop them, and can be used as preparati

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 gets beyond simple descriptions of the values and processes involved in community media and is deliberately seeking argument and structured debate around the issues of this vibrant sector of the media. The contributors examine the dilemmas that have emerged within this sector and provide an incisive overview. The chapters use case studies and data research to illustrate the major debates facing community media, along with a sideways look at the dilemmas that community media practitioners and their audiences must engage with. This collection provides an international perspective and covers the traditional formats as well as newer media technologies. It also gives some intriguing examples of community media, which get beyond simple good practices.

This volume offers a new perspective on the evaluation of writing. The first half of the volume reviews research on composing and examines existing methods of evaluating writing. The second half sets some limitations in assessing changes in
composing processes, describes some methods researchers in other areas have used to investigate cognitive processes, and outlines a model of writers' knowledge that can lead to comprehensive assessments of writing skills.

Designed for courses on theories and methods of teaching college writing, this text is distinguished by its emphasis on giving teachers a foundation of knowledge for teaching writing to a diverse student body. As such, it is equally relevant for teacher training in basic writing, ESL, and first year composition, the premise being that in most colleges and universities today teachers of each of these types of courses encounter similar student populations and teaching challenges. Many instructors compile packets of articles for this course because they cannot find an appropriate collection in one volume. This text fills that gap. It includes in one volume:
*the latest thinking about teaching and tutoring basic writing, ESL, and first year composition students;
*seminal articles, carefully selected to be accessible to those new to the field, by classic authors in the field of composition and ESL, as well as a number of new voices;
*attention to both theory and practice, but with an emphasis on practice; and
*articles about non-traditional students, multiculturalism, and writing across the disciplines.
The text includes suggestions for pedagogy and invitations for exploration to engage readers in reflection and in applications to their own teaching practice.

Each chapter represents a personal account of a reading disorder through which details of the features of the disorder, methods used for testing, and theoretical accounts are illustrated. Controversies are explained, theories evaluated and anomalies pointed out.
From this emerges a picture of the central properties of each disorder and the contribution of each to our understanding of the reading system as a whole. However, the picture is not complete: loose threads tantalise, some findings are hard to explain, and some newly controversial theories are put forward. The intention is to provide information that will help to equip the reader with the knowledge and expertise necessary to take the study of these reading disorders forward.

The majority of children acquire language effortlessly but approximately 10% of all children find it difficult especially in the early or preschool years with consequences for many aspects of their subsequent development and experience: literacy, social skills, educational qualifications, mental health and employment. With contributions from an international team of researchers, this book is the first to draw together a series of new analyses of data related to children's language development, primarily from large-scale nationally representative population studies, and to bring a public health perspective to the field. The book begins with a section on factors influencing the patterns of language development. A second section explores continuity and change in language development over time. The third explores the impact on individuals with developmental language disorders (DLD), the effectiveness of available interventions, and broader issues about the need for equity in the delivery of services to those with DLD.

TED talks have redefined the elements of a successful presentation and become the gold standard for public speaking around the world. And yet the techniques that top TED speakers use are the same ones that will make any presentation more dynamic, fire up any team, and give anyone the confidence to overcome their fear of public speaking.

Communications coach and bestselling author of The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs, Carmine Gallo has broken down the top TED talks and interviewed the most popular TED presenters to uncover the nine secrets of all successful TED presentations. From 'Unleashing the Master Within' and 'Delivering Jaw Dropping Moments' to 'Sticking to the 18-minute Rule' Gallo provides a step-by-step method that makes it possible for anyone to create, design, and deliver a TED-style presentation that is engaging, persuasive, and memorable.

Ideas are the true currency of the 21st century, and Talk Like TED gives readers a way to create presentations around the ideas that matter most to them, presentations that will energize their audiences to spread those ideas, launch new initiatives, and reach their highest goals.