This book brings together a wide range of studies, practical applications and reflective accounts written by academics working at a university in Japan to present a cohesive overview of their collaborative efforts to promote learner reflection within their institution. The book contributes to a shift in language education towards promoting learner responsibility and ownership of their learning through developing a deeper sense of awareness of and motivation for the learning process. It makes a convincing case for showing that not only is promoting reflection possible, but it can also be effectively integrated into language learning activities with significant benefits to the learners. The chapters are highly practical for researchers and practitioners, with the research chapters containing instruments which make them ideal for replication studies. The text includes a wealth of practical tools and activities for practitioners, who will be able to experience first-hand how to facilitate student success and increase satisfaction.

This book brings together a wide range of studies, practical applications and reflective accounts written by academics working at a university in Japan to present a cohesive overview of their collaborative efforts to promote learner reflection within their institution. The book contributes to a shift in language education towards promoting learner responsibility and ownership of their learning through developing a deeper sense of awareness of and motivation for the learning process. It makes a convincing case for showing that not only is promoting reflection possible, but it can also be effectively integrated into language learning activities with significant benefits to the learners. The chapters are highly practical for researchers and practitioners, with the research chapters containing instruments which make them ideal for replication studies. The text includes a wealth of practical tools and activities for practitioners, who will be able to experience first-hand how to facilitate student success and increase satisfaction.

Deceptively relaxed in tone, these verse letters - sometime serious, sometimes whimsical - are addressed to people who, for various reasons, have been of importance in Neil Curry's life. Ranging from Angela Carter to the Venerable Bede and from Odysseus to Gilbert White's tortoise, they cover topics as diverse as smallpox and the paintings of Vermeer, landscape-gardening, the King James Bible and Eddie Stobart's lorries on the M6. There has not been a collection of verse letters of this nature since the Epistles of the Roman poet Horace and, fittingly, it is to Horace that the final letter is addressed, partly by way of apology.

This close and sensitive study shows Christopher Smart (1722-1771) to be one of the finest and most important English religious poets between George Herbert and Gerard Manley Hopkins. In contrast to the grimness of much evangelical writing and despite his own personal hardships, Smart is seen here as a poet of adoration and joy.