Through the Mist and toward the Light: Grammar for the First Year College Writer offers a new approach to grammatical concepts to encourage and improve the grammar proficiency and writing skills for beginning writers. Far from a traditional handbook, the text presents innovative, engaging, practical, and accessible approaches to grammar that is often found difficult to first year college students. Section 1 of the text builds on the premise that good sentence structure is based on a student's ability to identify how each word in a sentence is being used. To that end, the section offers an in-depth look at the parts of speech and the many rules surrounding their correct usage. Section 2 fosters writing proficiency through an analysis of the most often misused punctuation symbols in the writing of first year students, offering detailed exercises to promote correct usage. Section 3 walks students through the common inhibitors to sound sentence structure and rhythm, and focuses on concepts often found challenging for multilingual student writers. The final section helps students transition to the next level of writing proficiency by introducing them to the intricacies of structural and transformational diagramming to engage their own sentence structure, build on what they have learned, and continue to develop their mastery of grammar. Through the Mist and toward the Light is an ideal and practical resource for foundational courses in writing and composition. The text can also be used to support freshmen orientation or student success courses or programs.

To play with language is to break its rules, disrupt its patterns, exploit its weak points. Thus, paradoxically, puns and spoonerisms, neologisms, and slogans reveal and highlight the patterns to which discourse conforms -- patterns which reflect the linguistic competence of language speakers. Only those who have linguistics competence can play with it: thus language games and the poetic use of language are underpinned by unconscious use of linguistic analysis.

Using Lewis Carroll's Alice as a starting point, Marina Yaguello takes the reader on an unconventional voyage around language, charting the major themes of linguistics on the way. She shows that we can come to an understanding of language in general and of particular languages through exploring the devices of humour, word-games, and poetry -- devices which reveal the unconscious linguist in all of us. The result is an entertaining but rigorous introduction to language and linguistics for non-specialists and students alike.

The book consists of Elementary and Pre-intermediate courses with parallel French-English texts. The author maintains learners' motivation with funny stories about real life situations such as meeting people, studying, job searches, working etc. The ALARM method (Approved Learning Automatic Remembering Method) utilize natural human ability to remember words used in texts repeatedly and systematically. The author composed each sentence using only words explained in previous chapters. The second and the following chapters of the Elementary course have only 30 or less new words each. Audio tracks inclusive on www.lppbooks.com/French/FirstFrenchReader_audio/En/

A retelling of the Wizard of Oz, focusing on about 1,850 vocabulary words in context.