This book challenges the view that digital communication in Africa is limited and relatively unsophisticated and questions the assumption that digital communication has a damaging effect on indigenous African languages. The book applies the principles of Digital African Multilingualism (DAM) in which there are no rigid boundaries between languages. The book charts a way forward for African languages where greater attention is paid to what speakers do with the languages rather than what the languages look like, and offers several models for language policy and planning based on horizontal and user-based multilingualism. The chapters demonstrate how digital communication is being used to form and sustain communication in many kinds of online groups, including for political activism and creating poetry, and offer a paradigm of language merging online that provides a practical blueprint for the decolonization of African languages through digital platforms.

This book challenges the view that digital communication in Africa is limited and relatively unsophisticated and questions the assumption that digital communication has a damaging effect on indigenous African languages. The book applies the principles of Digital African Multilingualism (DAM) in which there are no rigid boundaries between languages. The book charts a way forward for African languages where greater attention is paid to what speakers do with the languages rather than what the languages look like, and offers several models for language policy and planning based on horizontal and user-based multilingualism. The chapters demonstrate how digital communication is being used to form and sustain communication in many kinds of online groups, including for political activism and creating poetry, and offer a paradigm of language merging online that provides a practical blueprint for the decolonization of African languages through digital platforms.

The theme of this volume, a selection of papers from the 2003 conference of the British Association of Applied Linguistics, celebrates the productive interface between Applied Linguistics research and other disciplinary ways of knowing, forms of professional practice and issues of public concern. In the last two decades, the scope of applied linguistic research has broadened considerably to encompass a wider range of topics, issues and settings, drawing on rich and diverse methodologies. Topics covered in this collection illustrate this diversity, including conversational analytic perspectives on computer mediated communication, academic literacies, the sociolinguistics of English in Africa, L1/L2 writing, classroom discourse analysis, the psycholinguistics of second and foreign language acquisition, phonological awareness in second language learning. The contributions, all based on empirical research, address issues of language learning and use in a range of languages: Chinese, English, Italian, German, Greek, Japanese, Spanish.

This book unpacks recent changes in the landscape of literature and language teaching, and aims to find new explanations for the altered relationships between readers and writers, the democratisation of authorship, and the emergence of new ways of using language. By examining topics as various as literature and technology, multimodality, and new Englishes, the authors take a fresh look at the use of literature as a tool in the teaching of English to second-language speakers. More than simply a way of teaching aesthetic and ethical values and rhetorical skills, they argue that literature can also be used to help students to critically evaluate assumptions about society, culture and power which underpin the production and reception of texts. The book relates theories of language acquisition and literary criticism to examples of literary texts from a wide range of global literature in English, and discusses new ways of engaging with it, such as transmedia story telling, book blogs and slam poetry. It will be of interest to language teachers and teacher trainers, and to students and scholars of applied linguistics, TESOL, and digital literacies.

Identity is a problematic concept in-as-much-as we recognise it now as non-fixed, non-rigid and always being co-constructed by individuals of themselves, or by people who share certain core values or perceive another group as having such values. This volume re-examines the analytical tools employed in the sociolinguistic research of 'identity' in order to assess their efficiency, establish the roles of language in the identity claims of specific communities of people, and determine the place of identity in a variety of social contexts, including work places and language classrooms. It will be of interest to academics researching sociolinguistics, applied linguistics and second language learning.

Across the social and behavioural sciences there has been an increased interest in identity as a subject of inquiry. Despite this, there remain questions to which researchers need to find answers and challenges to be made to older paradigms of analysis in order to continue to push the frontiers of knowledge in this research domain. Identity is a problematic concept inasmuch as we recognise it now as non-fixed, non-rigid and always being co-constructed by individuals of themselves, or by people who share certain core values or perceive another group as having such values. This volume re-examines the analytical tools employed in the sociolinguistic research of 'identity' in order to assess their efficiency, establish the roles of language in the identity claims of specific communities of people, and determine the place of identity in a variety of social contexts, including work places and language classrooms. It will be of interest to academics and students working in sociolinguistics, applied linguistics and second language learning.