We -- the users turned creators and distributors of content -- are TIME's Person of the Year 2006, and AdAge's Advertising Agency of the Year 2007. We form a new Generation C. We have MySpace, YouTube, and OurMedia; we run social software, and drive the development of Web 2.0. But beyond the hype, what's really going on? In this groundbreaking exploration of our developing participatory online culture, Axel Bruns establishes the core principles which drive the rise of collaborative content creation in environments, from open source through blogs and Wikipedia to Second Life. This book shows that what's emerging here is no longer just a new form of content production, but a new process for the continuous creation and extension of knowledge and art by collaborative communities: produsage. The implications of the gradual shift from production to produsage are profound, and will affect the very core of our culture, economy, society, and democracy.

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By focusing on a wide range of reading and study skills required in the academic world, Reading and Study Skills gives instructors the flexibility to address student needs that might otherwise require several texts. The highly versatile organization divides topics into focused, self-contained modules that can be covered in any order resulting in a text that can be adapted to fit any teaching or learning situation. From its step-by-step, comprehensive coverage of the essential reading and study skills, to its practical, sensible style and tone, this text encourages and motivates students to get the most out of their reading and shows them how to master key study skills in order to have rewarding college experiences.

Essays are a major form of assessment in higher education today and this is a fact that causes some writers a great deal of anxiety. Fortunately, essay writing is a skill that can be learned, like any other. Through precise explanations, this fully updated edition of Writing Essays gives you the confidence to express yourself coherently and effectively. It demystifies the entire process of essay writing, helping you to become proficient and confident in every aspect. Writing Essays reveals the tricks of the trade, making your student life easier. You'll learn how to impress tutors by discovering exactly what markers look for when they read your work. Using practical examples selected from real student assignments and tutor feedback, this book covers every aspect of composition, from introductions and conclusions, down to presentation and submission. It also advises you on stress-free methods of revision, helps with exam essays, explains the principles of effective secondary source management, and shows you how to engage meaningfully with other critics' views. A new chapter will also guide you through the intricacies of the undergraduate dissertation. As a full-time university professor, Richard Marggraf Turley counsels students and assesses their work every day, helping him to recognise the challenges that they face. Accessible, concise and full of practical examples, Writing Essays is a response to these challenges and will be an invaluable companion for Humanities students who wish to improve their grades and become confident in the art of essay writing.

This book examines the concept of authentic English in today's world, where cultures are in constant interaction and the English language works as a binding agent for many cross-cultural exchanges. It offers a comprehensive review of decades of debate around authenticity in language teaching and learning and attempts to synthesise the complexities by presenting them as a continuum. This continuum builds on the work of eminent scholars and combines them within a flexible framework that celebrates the process of interaction whilst acknowledging the complexity and individual subjectivity of authenticity. Authenticity is approached as a complex dynamic construct that can only be understood by examining it from social, individual and contextual dimensions, in relation to actual people. Authenticity is a problem not just for language acquisition but one which affects us as individuals belonging to society.

This book contains a selection of articles on new developments in translation and interpreting studies. It offers a wealth of new and innovative approaches to the didactics of translation and interpreting that may well change the way in which translators and interpreters are trained. They include such issues of current debate as assessment methods and criteria, assessment of competences, graduate employability, placements, skills labs, the perceived skills gap between training and profession, the teaching of terminology, and curriculum design. The authors are experts in their fields from renowned universities in Europe, Africa and North-America. The book will be an indispensable help for trainers and researchers, but may also be of interest to translators and interpreters.

This book constitutes a holistic study of how and why late starters surpass early starters in comparable instructional settings. Combining advanced quantitative methods with individual-level qualitative data, it examines the role of age of onset in the context of the Swiss multilingual educational system and focuses on performance at the beginning and end of secondary school, thereby offering a long-term view of the teenage experience of foreign language learning. The study scrutinised factors that seem to prevent young starters from profiting from their extended learning period and investigated the mechanisms that enable late beginners to catch up with early beginners relatively quickly. Taking account of contextual factors, individual socio-affective factors and instructional factors within a single longitudinal study, the book makes a convincing case that age of onset is not only of minimal relevance for many aspects of instructed language acquisition, but that in this context, for a number of reasons, a later onset can be beneficial.

Inheritance, which has its origins in the field of artificial intelligence, is a framework focusing on shared properties. When applied to inflectional morphology, it enables useful generalizations within and across paradigms. The inheritance tree format serves as an alternative to traditional paradigms and provides a visual representation of the structure of the language's morphology. This mapping also enables cross-linguistic morphological comparison. In this book, the nominal inflectional morphology of Old High German, Latin, Early New High German, and Koine Greek are analyzed using inheritance trees. Morphological data is drawn from parallel texts in each language; the trees may be used as a translation aid to readers of the source texts as an accompaniment to or substitute for traditional paradigms. The trees shed light on the structural similarities and differences among the four languages.

In 1940, Hans Augusto Rey and Margret Rey built two bikes, packed what they could, and fled wartime Paris. Among the possessions they escaped with was a manuscript that would later become one of the most celebrated books in children's literature-Curious George. Since his debut in 1941, the mischievous icon has only grown in popularity. After being captured in Africa by the Man in the Yellow Hat and taken to live in the big city's zoo, Curious George became a symbol of curiosity, adventure, and exploration. In Curious about George: Curious George, Cultural Icons, Colonialism, and US Exceptionalism, author Rae Lynn Schwartz-DuPre argues that the beloved character also performs within a narrative of racism, colonialism, and heroism. Using theories of colonial and rhetorical studies to explain why cultural icons like Curious George are able to avoid criticism, Schwartz-DuPre investigates the ways these characters operate as capacious figures, embodying and circulating the narratives that construct them, and effectively argues that discourses about George provide a rich training ground for children to learn US citizenship and become innocent supporters of colonial American exceptionalism. By drawing on postcolonial theory, children's criticisms, science and technology studies, and nostalgia, Schwartz-DuPre's critical reading explains the dismissal of the monkey's 1941 abduction from Africa and enslavement in the US, described in the first book, by illuminating two powerful roles he currently holds: essential STEM ambassador at a time when science and technology is central to global competitiveness and as a World War II refugee who offers a "deficient" version of the Holocaust while performing model US immigrant. Curious George's twin heroic roles highlight racist science and an Americanized Holocaust narrative. By situating George as a representation of enslaved Africans and Holocaust refugees, Curious about George illuminates the danger of contemporary zero-sum identity politics, the colonization of marginalized identities, and racist knowledge production. Importantly, it demonstrates the ways in which popular culture can be harnessed both to promote colonial benevolence and to present possibilities for resistance.

Research writing: breaking the barriers is a title for those who regularly write documents based on research. If you find your writing is stale and you are unable to improve it, or you are trying to understand why you cannot finish a paper, or perhaps you are feeling jaded and disillusioned with the environment of 'publish or perish' and would like to gain a sense of control, enjoyment and inspiration from doing research and publishing, then this title is for you. While it is conceptualised around qualitative research writing in an academic context, the title focuses on generating quality ideas, demystifying the writing process and breaking the barriers of real and imagined writing restrictions. Any researcher can benefit from this creative adventure.

This anthology focuses on the writing process itself and on fundamentals of compositional theory. Essays explore the psychology of composition, research on writing anxiety, the relationship of literary theory to composition, and reading theory as it relates to the composing process. The historical development of research methodologies in the field is examined, with particular emphasis on evaluation methods and construction of effective writing sequences and assignments. With recent educational trends toward basic writing, even teachers of the most advanced composition classes will welcome the contributions on sentence structure, spelling, punctuation, paragraphs, and volcabulary development. The essays that place composition within larger intellectual traditions will be particularly valuable to scholars currently extending their research into other disciplines. Two appendixes on text books and evaluation are designed to help composition educators and scholars select useful, innovative texts and handbooks.

This book offers new insights into the language gains of adult learners enrolled in an English-medium instruction (EMI) degree programme. It provides longitudinal empirical evidence of the phonological gains of the learners; discusses which individual factors contribute to the changes in the learners' pronunciation and investigates whether and to what extent increased exposure to the target language in EMI classrooms leads to incidental learning of second language pronunciation. Furthermore, it expands on the discussions surrounding the Critical Period Hypothesis, the native-speaker norm, foreign language accent and the role of English as a Lingua Franca. The comparative and longitudinal design of the research study fills a significant gap in the literature and the book offers considerable original and important research-informed insights into the fields of EMI, bilingual education and second language acquisition. As such, it is a valuable resource and must-read book for researchers, practitioners and policymakers in these areas.

In 1940, Hans Augusto Rey and Margret Rey built two bikes, packed what they could, and fled wartime Paris. Among the possessions they escaped with was a manuscript that would later become one of the most celebrated books in children's literature-Curious George. Since his debut in 1941, the mischievous icon has only grown in popularity. After being captured in Africa by the Man in the Yellow Hat and taken to live in the big city's zoo, Curious George became a symbol of curiosity, adventure, and exploration. In Curious about George: Curious George, Cultural Icons, Colonialism, and US Exceptionalism, author Rae Lynn Schwartz-DuPre argues that the beloved character also performs within a narrative of racism, colonialism, and heroism. Using theories of colonial and rhetorical studies to explain why cultural icons like Curious George are able to avoid criticism, Schwartz-DuPre investigates the ways these characters operate as capacious figures, embodying and circulating the narratives that construct them, and effectively argues that discourses about George provide a rich training ground for children to learn US citizenship and become innocent supporters of colonial American exceptionalism. By drawing on postcolonial theory, children's criticisms, science and technology studies, and nostalgia, Schwartz-DuPre's critical reading explains the dismissal of the monkey's 1941 abduction from Africa and enslavement in the US, described in the first book, by illuminating two powerful roles he currently holds: essential STEM ambassador at a time when science and technology is central to global competitiveness and as a World War II refugee who offers a "deficient" version of the Holocaust while performing model US immigrant. Curious George's twin heroic roles highlight racist science and an Americanized Holocaust narrative. By situating George as a representation of enslaved Africans and Holocaust refugees, Curious about George illuminates the danger of contemporary zero-sum identity politics, the colonization of marginalized identities, and racist knowledge production. Importantly, it demonstrates the ways in which popular culture can be harnessed both to promote colonial benevolence and to present possibilities for resistance.

This volume contains a selection of the papers presented at the Conference on Historical News Discourse (Chined) that was held in Florence (Italy) on 2-3 September 2004. The aim of the Conference was to provide a forum for the presentation and discussion of recent research in the field of news discourse in early modern Britain. The first section of the volume focuses on news discourse in serial publications while the second part examines aspects of news language in non-serial works. Contributions include synchronic and diachronic analyses of reportage, polemic, propaganda, review journalism and advertisements in a wide range of texts including newsletters, pamphlets and newspapers. Each section is structured chronologically so that the reader can appreciate aspects of the general historical development of news discourse. The variety of topics and methodologies reflects some of the most interesting research being carried out in the field.

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

The Natural Speaker is a friendly step-by-step guide to public speaking that explores the fundamental skills necessary to present a natural and rewarding speech to any audience. By providing an overview of speech construction, practice, and delivery, this book is designed to enhance and improve upon students' natural strengths. Featuring a warm and humorous writing style, The Natural Speaker illustrates the concepts and skills required for enjoyable public speaking, and Randy Fujishin invites readers to view speaking as a life-long journey. This tenth edition features a new chapter on speaking in online contexts, including leading or participating in online meetings, using digital presentation tools, and guidelines for effective online PowerPoint presentations, as well as additional focus on intercultural considerations and new Internet student activities at the end of each chapter. This book serves as an accessible core textbook for Public Speaking and Introduction to Communication courses and also provides guidance for individual readers and public speaking workshops. Online resources include an instructor's manual with sample test questions and exercises.

The Natural Speaker is a friendly step-by-step guide to public speaking that explores the fundamental skills necessary to present a natural and rewarding speech to any audience. By providing an overview of speech construction, practice, and delivery, this book is designed to enhance and improve upon students' natural strengths. Featuring a warm and humorous writing style, The Natural Speaker illustrates the concepts and skills required for enjoyable public speaking, and Randy Fujishin invites readers to view speaking as a life-long journey. This tenth edition features a new chapter on speaking in online contexts, including leading or participating in online meetings, using digital presentation tools, and guidelines for effective online PowerPoint presentations, as well as additional focus on intercultural considerations and new Internet student activities at the end of each chapter. This book serves as an accessible core textbook for Public Speaking and Introduction to Communication courses and also provides guidance for individual readers and public speaking workshops. Online resources include an instructor's manual with sample test questions and exercises.

Recent developments in education, such as the increasing linguistic diversity in school populations and the digital revolution which has led to new ways of being, learning and socialising, have brought about fresh challenges and opportunities. In response, this book shows how technology enriches multilingual language learning, as well as how multilingual practices enrich computer assisted language learning (CALL) by bringing together two, thus far distinct, fields of research: CALL and multilingual approaches to language learning. The collection includes contributions from researchers and practitioners from three continents to illustrate how native languages, previously studied languages, heritage languages or dialects are activated through technology in formal and informal learning situations. The studies in this book showcase multilingual language use in chat rooms, computer games, digital stories, ebook apps, online texts and telecollaboration/virtual exchange via interactive whiteboards. This volume will be of interest to researchers interested in language learning and teaching and to practitioners looking for support in seizing the opportunities presented by the multilingual, digital classroom.

Ask teachers about their biggest challenges in elementary and middle school, and many will say the teaching of writing. It is often difficult for students find the joy, discovery, and satisfaction writing can yield. What Lisa Eickholdt and Patricia Vitale-Reilly have found is that adherence to genre studies can get in the way of student collaboration. Believing writing instruction should be more authentic, they offer students more choices, develop better collaboration, and sustain a sense of community, all through the implementation of writing clubs. Writing clubs offer opportunities to Collaborate throughout the process of writing Choose what to write and how to write it Examine mentor texts and study craft techniques across genres Develop speaking and listening skills Celebrate classmates' accomplishments through publication Collaboration is widely recognized as a vital life skill. Lisa and Patty present a plethora of ideas on how gratifying it can be right now, as well as in the future. There's an old proverb that says, 'If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go with others.' In Writing Clubs, we discover that there is no limit to how far young writers can go when teachers show them what it means to collaborate.

Creativity and Discovery in the University Writing Class presents ideas for teaching writing at university level which recognize the need in the current world to be continually innovating in response to rapidly changing student populations and conditions, including advances in media and writing technologies. The volume emphasizes the creativity of all forms of writing and the important role of discovery in teaching, learning, and the acquisition of knowledge of all kinds.The volume brings together distinguished scholars in writing pedagogy from different educational and cultural contexts who took part in a Summer Institute on Creativity and Discovery in the Teaching of Writing at City University of Hong Kong in June 2013. Designed for teachers of writing based on lectures and workshops given at the summer institute, this collection offers both theoretical insights and practical suggestions for classroom activities that teachers of writing will be able to go to for materials and guidance.

Using casual language and a straightforward approach, Better Writing: Beyond Periods and Commas provides students with an easy-to-read and effective guide for developing their writing skills. Rather than intimidate and overwhelm novice writers with vast sets of rules, Travis Koll utilizes simple explanations and examples to demystify the writing process. Armed with this better understanding, one that reaches far beyond the mere mechanics of punctuation and grammar, students can begin to recognize the true nature and significance of writing, its potential impact on their readers, and the importance of their voices in their communities and the world.