This book presents a corpus-based study of spoken learner language produced by university-level ESL students in the classroom. Using contemporary theories as a guide and employing cutting-edge corpus analysis tools and methods, the authors analyse a variety of learner speech to offer many new insights into the nature and characteristics of the spoken language of college ESL learners. Focusing on types of speech that are rarely examined, this original work makes a significant contribution to the study and understanding of ESL spoken language at university level. It will appeal to students and scholars of applied linguistics, corpus linguistics, second language acquisition and discourse analysis.

This is the first major study on this scale of Irish performance, North and South, in the twentieth century. Although stressing the primacy of politics in Irish public affairs, it argues that Irish politics must be understood in the broad context of economic, social, administrative, cultural, and intellectual history. The book fully explores the relationship between rhetoric and reality in the Irish mind and views political behavior largely as a product of collective psychology. "The Irish experience" is placed firmly in a comparative context. The book seeks to assess the relative importance of British influence and of indigenous impulses in shaping an independent Ireland, and to identify the relationship between personality and process in determining Irish history. Particularly close attention is paid to individuals such as Eamon de Valera, Michael Collins, W.T. Cosgrove, Sir James Craig, J.J. McElligott, Sean Lemass, Terence O'Neill, and Ian Paisley, and to the limits within which even the most powerful personalities were forced to operate.