Although there is broad agreement that preparing global citizens for the digital age is a core responsibility of educators and schools, there is debate and uncertainty about how best to prepare students for this future. Technologies for Enhancing Pedagogy, Engagement and Empowerment in Education: Creating Learning-Friendly Environments explores how technology-based learning can enhance student engagement, performance, and empowerment. This book provides researchers, educators, and practitioners with insights from educational programs, classroom teaching, and theory-into-practice research; places educational technologies appropriately in their social and cultural contexts; and reflects upon challenges and problems in evaluating and implementing changes in the field. It shows how computer-enhanced education can improve teaching and learning without confusing the increase of computer facilities with the quality of education.

While there are many books on language and literacy education, there is an urgent need to provide a book which makes an essential link between theory, research and pedagogy with a focus on the two interrelated fields of linguistics and language education. This book is a timely contribution to the current academic discourse for such a study. It is a big challenge for lecturers and university students of educational linguistics to be fully aware of new developments in the field of linguistics and language education. This book provides some essential insights and directions which have shaped innovative ideas, practices and research implications in this broad field. The chapters of the book are grouped into three parts with different focuses: theory into research, cultural and social aspects which influence theory and practice of language education, and finally pedagogical implications. The book is a collective contribution of scholars with intensive research and professional experiences from different countries, levels of education and global contexts.

This book was published in response to the need to provide a comprehensive book dealing with the multidimensional complexity of language and literacy education. This book is carefully designed to capture three major interrelated aspects of language and literacy education in a changing and challenging world: to introduces some fundamental theoretical concepts and issues about the nature and functions of language, particularly with insights gained from linguistics and applied linguistics; to focus on language and literacy education in context; and to deal with social and cultural aspects of language and literacy in an intercultural context. This book provides a comprehensive and integrated range of theoretical and practical insights beyond the limited traditional focus on language and literacy pedagogy.

This book is unique in the sense that it presents a broad and dynamic research narrative, which is filled with phenomena, issues and challenges facing researchers in various disciplines, cultural contexts, linguistic and ethical discourses. The content of the book is addressing three overarching research issues: What are the diverse challenges, opportunities, and limitations different cohorts of individuals face? Why and how do these cohorts respond to these challenges, opportunities, and limitations? How, where, when, and why do researchers interact with these challenges and what have they learned from their investigations? One of the strengths of this edited book is, each of the contributors has explored these three issues from a somewhat unique perspective, but collectively they provide a rich discourse and milieu around the purpose of research and how and why it is conducted and interpreted within a contemporary multimodal context. Across all the chapters the contributions have focused on the process of researching and as a consequence there are two recurring discourses identified. The first discourse relates to conducting the research and involves topics, such as methodology, ethics, research populations, assessment, data, and linguistic complexity. The second discourse is around the researchers, because they are the "lens" through which their research is conceived, guided, articulated, and interpreted. For too long now, too many books about research, particularly social science related research, have been locked into a narrow discourse around the benefits of either qualitative or quantitative research methods. While this topic is explored in this text, it is not dominated by this one, rather artificial dichotomy. What is exciting about the book is its diversity and the range of dichotomies that are explored and the range of contexts and issues that are reviewed. There is a strong narrative quality throughout the chapters where the voice of the researchers and their purpose is amplified. The book is of special interest to research-orientated students as well as to those who want to learn more about conducting research in a challenging discourse of diverse paradigms.

The world is becoming more and more intricately multidimensional, both culturally and linguistically. Language is so deeply embedded in culture that cultural identity is defined to a great extent in terms of language. Based on this premise, the loss of one's language contributes to the loss of one's culture. This is the reason it is essential to maintain one's linguistic integrity in order to protect one's cultural identity. This new book captures the fundamental concepts and issues raised in this context.

The title of this book 'Critical Discourse Analysis: An Interdisciplinary Perspective' is purposely chosen to emphasise the interdisciplinary nature of critical discourse analysis (CDA). This book has the following key features: The chapter authors bring to the book their diversified backgrounds. They are linguists, educators, computer scientists, health professionals, and social consultants. Although they all share a common interest in CDA, their academic and cultural experiences are different and this intercultural and interdisciplinary feature provides interesting insights into the understanding of CDA and its wider application. Thus, it appeals to a wide range of readers such as students, educators, researchers, health professionals and others. The book is divided into three parts to reflect the main interdisciplinary aspects of CDA: Part One is about some introductory aspects of CDA. It gives readers some basic ideas about CDA as an emerging field. Part Two is on CDA across different subjects and disciplines such as language education, information technology, and heath sciences. Part Three deals with CDA across cultures. It includes the use of CDA in examining social and linguistic issues in different nations and cultures such as Spain, Nigeria, Indonesia, New Zealand. For those who do not have backgrounds in linguistics, two introductory chapters on aspects of linguistics and functional grammar, which are relevant to CDA, are included in this book. They are essential for understanding CDA.