The last few decades have seen an upsurge of research interest in metaphor and figurative language. This interest has also become part of a larger enquiry into the relationship between language and other processes of mind, an enquiry that is producing the field known as cognitive linguistics. This book is very much a product of this new interest and its rapidly expanding literature. However, the book’s primary objective is not to add to that already extensive body of research; my concern here is to explore the relevance of this knowledge for another related area, that of language teaching.
Present blog is created to help TEFL and TESOL experts to have easy access for the books, resources and materials they need in doing their researches, teachings, and learnings in the field of ESL and EFL. Moreover, there are books and materials that can be helpful for English learners to improve their language skills.
Thursday, April 28, 2011
Mind, Metaphor and language teaching
The last few decades have seen an upsurge of research interest in metaphor and figurative language. This interest has also become part of a larger enquiry into the relationship between language and other processes of mind, an enquiry that is producing the field known as cognitive linguistics. This book is very much a product of this new interest and its rapidly expanding literature. However, the book’s primary objective is not to add to that already extensive body of research; my concern here is to explore the relevance of this knowledge for another related area, that of language teaching.
Language and Gender: An advanced resource book
Language and Gender: An advanced resource book provides a rich diversity of material for students in this field, particularly those who wish to contribute through their own research as well as learn about and appreciate the significance of others’ work. The target audience for the series is upper undergraduates and postgraduates on Language, Applied Linguistics and Communication Studies programmes as well as teachers and researchers in professional-development and distance-learning programmes. High-quality applied research resources are also much needed for teachers of EFL/ESL and foreign-language students at higher-education colleges and universities worldwide.The Introduction ‘A’ units establish key terms and concepts, provide a discursive summary and overview, and preview what is to come in the corresponding extension (‘B’) and exploration (‘C’) units.
Memory, Psychology and Second Language Learning
This book aims to review the work done in psychology and linguistics on language processing and to relate it to the learning of a second language. It is aimed at the student language teacher who will also be studying aspects of linguistics such as phonology alongside psychological theories and theories of language learning. It is an attempt to pull together the two disciplines with a specific focus on the second language learner. It will also be of interest to postgraduate students in offering them a wide variety of sources for further research. It is also, I hope, an aid for the experienced teacher who is interested in putting current theories of language learning and teaching into a new perspective. In particular, the inclusion of the neuropsycholical evidence for established psycholinguistic models provides a interesting perspective for the more general reader who is interested in language processing.
WASHBACK IN LANGUAGE TESTING: Research Contexts and Methods
Washback and the impact of tests more generally has become a major area of study within educational research, and language testing in particular, as this volume testifies. The extensive use of examination scores for various educational and social purposes in society nowadays has made the washback effect a distinct educational phenomenon. This is true both in general education and in teaching English as a second/foreign language (ESL/EFL), from Kindergarten to Grade 12 classrooms to the tertiary level. Washback is a phenomenon that is of inherent interest to teachers, researchers, program coordinators/directors, policymakers, and others in their day-to-day educational activities. The purpose of the present volume, then, is twofold; first to update teachers, researchers, policymakers/administrators, and others on what is involved in this complex issue of testing and its effects, and how such a phenomenon benefits teaching and learning, and second, to provide researchers with models of research studies on which future studies can be based. In order to address these two main purposes, the volume consists of two parts. Part I provides readers with an overall view of the complexity of washback, and the various contextual factors entangled within testing, teaching, and learning. Part II provides a collection of empirical washback studies carried out in many different parts of the world, which lead the readers further into the heart of the issue within each educational context.
Understanding Language Teaching; From Method to Postmethod
“Break the pattern which connects the items of learning,” warned the celebrated anthropologist, Gregory Bateson, “and you necessarily destroy all quality” (1979, p. 8, italics in original). He issued this warning in a letter to his fellow regents of the University of California, complaining about American schools that teach the students “almost nothing of the pattern which connects” (p. 8). The pattern which connects. That’s what this book is all about. Not the so profound pattern that governs the evolution and ecology of all life on earth, but the more mundane pattern that connects the various elements of learning, teaching, and teacher education in the narrow field of teaching English to speakers of other languages. It may appear to be inappropriate or even anticlimactic, to link the concern for an understanding of the ecological macrocosm with the concern for an understanding of the pedagogical microcosm. But the whole point, if we follow the Batesonian argument, is that the elements constituting each are indeed interconnected in ways that may not be readily apparent.The book is divided into three parts: (1) Language, Learning, and Teaching, (2) Language Teaching Methods, and (3) Postmethod Perspectives. I make it a point to highlight the underlying links within and between the parts in order to bring out the pattern which connects.
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
Teaching English as a Foreign Language
TEACHING AND LEARNING IN TWO LANGUAGES: Bilingualism & Schooling in the United States
The major purpose of the Multicultural Education Series is to provide preservice educators, practicing educators, graduate students, scholars, and policy makers with an interrelated and comprehensive set of books that summarizes and analyzes important research, theory, and practice related to the education of ethnic, racial, cultural, and language groups in the United States and the education of mainstream students about diversity. The books in the Series provide research, theoretical, and practical knowledge about the behaviors and learning characteristics of students of color, language-minority students, and low-income students. They also provide knowledge about ways to improve academic achievement and race relations in educational settings.The book addresses an increasingly important challenge confronted by schools in the United States: educating to high standards students from diverse language, culture, and social-class groups. This book is timely and significant because the author uses a research based, nuanced, and complex analysis to describe the ways in which students learn a second language and how schools can best facilitate the acquisition of a second language by bilingual students. GarcÃa provides a comprehensive description of the theory and research on second-language teaching and learning, identifies the characteristics of effective bilingual education programs, and presents examples of school programs that exemplify these characteristics.
Sociolinguistic Variation
Why does human language vary from one person, or one group, to another? In what ways does it vary? How do linguists go about studying variation in, say, the sound system or the sentence structure of a particular language? Why is the study of language variation important outside the academic world, in say education, the law, employment, or housing? This book provides an overview of these questions, bringing together a team of experts to survey key areas within the study of language variation and language change. Covering both the range of methods used to research variation in language, and the applications of such research to a variety of social contexts, it is essential reading for advanced students and researchers in sociolinguistics, communication, linguistic anthropology, and applied linguistics.
Spoken English, TESOL and Applied Linguistics: Challenges for Theory and Practice
This collection of essays by leading researchers in the field of spoken discourse and language teaching pursues two aims. Its first aim is to present an issues-led discussion of the present state of research into spoken language. Contributors address issues concerning, for example, the extent to which new data regarding the nature of spoken discourse challenge existing language theories, models or paradigms; and the question whether there is a ‘paradigm-shift’ taking place due to the weight of evidence that spoken discourse is a distinctive form in its own right, or whether this evidence will be absorbed into existing models and theories.
The collection’s second aim is to address some of the complex and rewarding opportunities offered by these emerging insights for language teaching. Can the insights of current research on spoken language easily be accommodated into existing language teaching, whether at the level of pedagogic grammars, or methods; or do they present challenges which break new ground? Is there such a thing as a ‘spoken genre’, and how can this concept inform materials production or language teaching? Will current research on spoken forms have an impact on the assessment of speaking? And what weight should be given to the phonetic and paralinguistic meaning-bearing elements of the spoken form, either in language description or in the curriculum?Click here to download this book
Monday, April 25, 2011
Linguistics An Introduction
Written by a team based at one of the world’s leading centres for linguistic teaching and research, the second edition of this highly successful textbook offers a unified approach to language, viewed from a range of perspectives essential for students’ understanding of the subject. A language is a complex structure represented in the minds of its speakers, and this textbook provides the tools necessary for understanding this structure. Using clear explanations throughout, the book is divided into three main parts: sounds, words and sentences. In each, the foundational concepts are introduced, along with their application to the fields of child language acquisition, psycholinguistics, language disorders and sociolinguistics, giving the book a unique yet simple structure that helps students to engage with the subject more easily than other textbooks on the market. This edition includes a completely new section on sentence use, including an introduction and discussion of core areas of pragmatics and conversational analysis; new coverage of sociolinguistic topics, introducing communities of practice; a new subsection introducing the student to Optimality Theory; a wealth of new exercise material and updated further reading.
Language Testing and Validation: An Evidence-based Approach
Research and Practice in Applied Linguistics is an international book series from Palgrave Macmillan which brings together leading researchers and teachers in Applied Linguistics to provide readers with the knowledge and tools they need to undertake their own practice-related research. Books in the series are designed for students and researchers in Applied Linguistics, TESOL, Language Education and related subject areas, and for language professionals keen to extend their research experience.
This book follows the rationale and structure of the Research and Practice in Applied Linguistics Series in first providing a theoretical overview of the field, followed by detail of how this works in practice and then suggesting focuses and methods for researching key areas. In Part 1 we map out the types of validation evidence we need to provide if we are to have any confidence that the results of performance on a test give us an accurate picture of the underlying abilities or constructs we are attempting to measure. In Part 2 we unpack validity further in relation to actual examples and procedures taken from tests from around the world and provide an evidence-based validity framework for asking questions of any exam or form of assessment. In Part 3 we suggest a number of research activities, which will generate data on whether a test matches up to various criteria in the framework. Lastly, in Part 4, we detail a number of electronic and paper-based resources.
Language Testing and Assessment: An advanced resource book
The target audience for the series is upper undergraduates and postgraduates on language, applied linguistics and communication studies programmes as well as teachers and researchers in professional development and distance learning programmes. High-quality applied research resources are also much needed for teachers of EFL/ESL and foreign language students at higher education colleges and universities worldwide.This book has three main sections, each made up of approximately ten units:
A: An Introduction section: in which the key terms and concepts are introduced, including introductory activities and reflective tasks, designed to establish key understandings, terminology, techniques of analysis and the skills appropriate to the theme and the discipline.
B: An Extension section: in which selected core readings are introduced (usually edited from the original) from existing books and articles, together with annotations and commentary, where appropriate. Each reading is introduced, annotated and commented on in the context of the whole book, and research/follow-up questions and tasks are added to enable fuller understanding of both theory and practice. In some cases, readings are short and synoptic and incorporated within a more general exposition.
C: An Exploration section: in which further samples and illustrative materials are provided with an emphasis, where appropriate, on more open-ended, studentcentred activities and tasks, designed to support readers and users in undertaking their own locally relevant research projects. Tasks are designed for work in groups or for individuals working on their own.
Language and the internet
David Crystal investigates the nature of the impact which the Internet is making on language. There is already a widespread popular mythology that the Internet is going to be bad for the future of language – that technospeak will rule, standards be lost, and creativity diminished as globalization imposes sameness. The argument of this book is the reverse: that the Internet is in fact enabling a dramatic expansion to take place in the range and variety of language, and is providing unprecedented opportunities for personal creativity. The Internet has now been around long enough for us to ‘take a view’ about the way in which it is being shaped by and is shaping language and languages, and there is no one better placed than David Crystal to take that view. His book is written to be accessible to anyone who has used the Internet and who has an interest in language issues.
Language and Politics
In the last two decades, applied linguistics has abandoned the structuralist view of language as a self-contained, neutral system, in favour of a conception of language as political from top to bottom, in its structure as well as its use. This book examines the consequences of that conceptual shift, as it draws together key topics including language choice, linguistic correctness, (self-)censorship and hate speech, the performance of ethnic and national identity in language, gender politics and ‘powerful’ language, rhetoric and propaganda, and changing conceptions of written language, driven in part by technological advances.This series of single-author volumes published by Edinburgh University Press takes a contemporary view of applied linguistics. The intention is to make provision for the wide range of interests in contemporary applied linguistics which are provided for at Master’s level.
Conversation Analysis and Discourse Analysis
This book has three objectives. First, it sets out to introduce conversation analysis (CA) and discourse analysis (DA) as methodological approaches to the study of talk, both of which have far-reaching implications for our understanding of social interaction and the role of discourse and communication in everyday lifeThe book is organized into three parts. Assuming no prior knowledge, the first four chapters introduce students to the way in which conversation analysis has transformed our understanding of how people interact together when they are talking. These first four chapters are designed for undergraduates with no prior knowledge of conversation or discourse analysis. Chapters 5 and 6 outline two foci for discourse analytic research since its emergence in social psychology. Chapter 7 departs from discourse analysis to cover critical discourse analysis and Foucauldian discourse analysis. In Chapters 8 and 9, there is the assess of the strength of two related criticisms of conversation analysis.
Beyond Methods
This book is about language teaching in a postmethod era. It reflects the heightened awareness that the L2 profession witnessed during the waning years of the twentieth century The book consists of thirteen chapters. The first deals with the concept of teaching in general and the second with the concept of postmethod pedagogy in particular. Thus, these two chapters lay the philosophical and conceptual foundation needed to make sense of what follows. The last chapter pulls together ideas from different chapters, and offers a classroom observational scheme that can be used by teachers to monitor how well they theorize what they practice, and to practice what they theorize. All the chapters have built-in reflective tasks that encourage readers to pause at crucial points along the text and think critically about the issues in light of their own personal as well as professional experience.Applied cultural linguistics
The basis for this volume was a theme session with the title of Applied CulturalLinguistics, which was part of the 8th International Cognitive Linguistics Conference
held at the University of Logrono, La Rioja, Spain, July 20-25, 2003. The chapters in this volume explore implications of research carried out within the general area of cultural linguistics for the learning of second languages and intercultural communication. Cultural linguistics draws on, but is not limited to, the theoretical notions and analytical tools of cognitive anthropology and cognitive linguistics. Through these, it explores the relationship between language, culture, and conceptualization
Click here to download this book
Click here to download this book
Sunday, April 24, 2011
Stephen D Krashen "Second Language Acquisition and Second Language Learning"
This book is concerned with what has been called the "Monitor Theory" of adult second language acquisition. Monitor Theory hypothesizes that adults have two independent systems for developing ability in second languages, subconscious language acquisition and conscious language learning, and that these systems are interrelated in a definite way: subconscious acquisition appears to be far more important.
Saturday, April 23, 2011
An Introduction to Applied Linguistics
This new textbook series provides advanced introductions to the main areas of study in contemporary Applied Linguistics, with a principal focus on the theory and practice of language teaching and language learning and on the processes and problems of language in use.This Second Edition of the foundational textbook ccc provides a state-of-the-art account of contemporary applied linguistics. The kinds of language problems of interest to applied linguists are discussed and a distinction drawn between the different research approach taken by theoretical linguists and by applied linguists to what seem to be the same problems. Professor Davies describes a variety of projects which illustrate the interests of the field and highlight the marriage it offers between practical experience and theoretical understanding. The increasing emphasis of applied linguistics on ethicality is linked to the growth of professionalism and to the concern for accountability, manifested in the widening emphasis on critical stances. This, Davies argues, is at its most acute in the tension between giving advice as the outcome of research and taking political action in order to change a situation which, it is claimed, needs ameliorisation. This dilemma is not confined to applied linguistics and may now be endemic in the applied disciplines.
Key features
• surveys current issues in applied linguistics, including the concept of the Native Speaker and the development of World Englishes
• examines the influence of linguistics, cognitive science and philosophy on applied linguistics and makes a contrast with educational linguistics
• proposes that a key issue for the profession will increasingly be the tension between advice and action
• suggests that applied linguistics is a theorising rather than a theoretical discipline.
Researching in Second Language Classroom
This book is addressed to novice researchers, whether they be graduate students, teachers, or administrators, who want to become familiar with methods commonly used in L2 classroom research. It is all about gathering evidence to answer questions about L2 teaching and learning. Whereas research methods differ in the kind of evidence they gather, all L2 classroom research involves the formulating of questions, as well as the gathering and analysis of evidence or data to answer these questions. The book begins with a general introduction to major research purposes and research types as they relate to classroom research. In chapter 2, Researching Teachers and Learners, research methods that can be used to examine teachers’ and learners’ attitudes and behavior are introduced. Chapter 3, Researching Classroom Discourse, deals with methods that can be used to study the oral and written discourse of classrooms. The book ends with a chapter on writing research papers, with attention to both thesis writing and journal articles.
Questionnaires in Second Language Research
One of the most common methods of data collection in second language(L2) research is to use questionnaires of various kinds. The popularity of questionnaires is due to the fact that they are easy to construct, extremely versatile, and uniquely capable of gathering a large amount of information quickly in a form that is readily processable. In spite of the wide application of questionnaires in the L2 field, there does not seem to be sufficient awareness in the profession about the theory of questionnaire design and processing. Although questionnaire design, and more generally, survey research, has a substantial literature in the social sciences, this has not been sufficiently reflected in L2 methodology texts. The structure of the book is straightforward. After an initial chapter that discusses the nature, the merits, and the shortcomings of questionnaires, separate chapters cover the construction and the administration of the questionnaire, as well as the processing of questionnaire data. The book is concluded by a detailed checklist that summarizes the main principles and recommendations.
A Guide to Doing Statistics in Second Language Research Using SPSS
Click here to download this book
Thursday, April 21, 2011
Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics
This dictionary includes the core vocabulary of both language teaching and applied linguistics. The field of language teaching is concerned with the development of language programs and courses, teaching methodology, materials development, second language acquisition theory, testing, teacher training and related areas. The dictionary includes terms from the following areas of study in the field of language teaching:• teaching methods and approaches in language teaching
• curriculum development and syllabus design
• second language acquisition
• the teaching of listening, speaking, reading and writing
• computer assisted language learning
• teacher education in language teaching
• English grammar and pronunciation
• language testing, research methods, and basic statistics
Click here to download this dictionary
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