The Handbook of Applied Linguistics

The focus of applied linguistics is on trying to resolve language-based problems that people encounter in the real world, whether they be learners, teachers, supervisors, academics, lawyers, service providers, those who need social services, test takers, policy developers, dictionary makers, translators, or a whole range of business clients.

This is one of the best and greatest handbooks published about applied linguistics.

With 886 pages, it covers almost all problems discussed in applied linguistics.

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laugh and learn

95 ways to use humor for more effective teaching and training

This book is written to provide a low-risk, affordable way for teachers, trainers, and speakers to start putting humor to work for them. In the process, however, it’s hoped this book lead all communicators to an appreciation of how humor can help them convey virtually any topic far more effectively, resulting in substantial long-term benefits for themselves, their listeners, and their organizations. Readers will be fascinated that humor fulfills for biological purposes—a major one of which seems to be to make you think and work better. Like every other biological function, humor seems essentially to have been implanted to ensure the continuance of the species.

It is intented that after reading this book you will:

❖ Feel clear about the benefits humor can bring to the invaluable

work you do

❖ Be convinced to start using humor

❖ Have a ready “tool box” of tried-and-true techniques to draw on

❖ Feel fearless about using humor in your classroom (and outside

it, too)

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Planning and Task Performance in a Second Language

The LL&LT monograph series publishes monographs as well as edited volumes on applied and methodological issues in the field of language pedagogy. The focus of the series is on subjects such as classroom discourse and interaction; language diversity in educational settings; bilingual education; language testing and language assessment; teaching methods and teaching performance; learning trajectories in second language acquisition; and written language learning in educational settings.

Planning and its role in task-based performance are of both theoretical interest to second language acquisition (SLA) researchers and of practical significance to language teachers. In the case of SLA researchers, planning is important because it links in with the current interest in the role of attention in language learning.

The purpose of this book is to bring together a series of articles on the nature of planning and its effects on task-based performance in laboratory, classroom and testing contexts. The idea for the book originated in a colloquium on this topic given at AILA Conference in Singapore in December 2002. Papers given by Bygate and Samuda, Elder and Iwashita, Ellis and Fanguan, and Sanguran were subsequently developed into chapters for this book.

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Handbook of Multilingualism and Multilingual Communication

It has been estimated that the majority of children across the globe grow up speaking more than one language, but these bilingual and multilingual children differ from each other in terms of when exposure to each language began, and the sociolinguistic context in which their languages are spoken. These differences have consequences for acquisition patterns and rates of the languages, as well as for ultimate proficiency in each language. Furthermore, the research issues and questions surrounding dual and multiple language acquisition are often different depending on the kind of child bilingual/multilingual.

This great source covers concepts such as:

1. Different kinds of child bilinguals and multilinguals
2. Multilingualism and the family
3. Growing up in a multilingual community: Insights from language socialization
4. Becoming bi- or multi-lingual later in life
5. Becoming bilingual through bilingual education
6. Bilingual children in monolingual schools
7. From minority programmes to multilingual education
8. From biliteracy to pluriliteracies
9. Multilingualism and Specific Language Impairment (SLI)
10. Measuring bilingualism
11. Code-switching as a conversational strategy
12. Mixed codes
13. Multilingual forms of talk and identity work
14. Crossing – negotiating social boundaries
15. Bilingual professionals
16. Multilingualism in the workplace
17. Multilingualism and commerce
18. Societal multilingualism: reality, recognition and response
19. Multilingualism of autochthonous minorities
20. Multilingualism of new minorities (in migratory contexts)
21. Multilingualism in ex-colonial countries
22. Multilingualism and transnationalism

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How to Write a Thesis

How to Write a Thesis provides a down-to-earth guide to help students shape their theses. It offers valuable advice as well as practical tips and techniques, incorporating useful boxed summaries and checklists to help students stay on track or regain their way.

The book is the culmination of many years of work with postgraduates and academics and covers all aspects of the research, writing and editing involved in the process of successfully completing a thesis.

In this book, the author moves beyond the basics of thesis writing, introducing practical writing techniques such as free writing, generative writing and binge writing. This edition now deals with the range of different doctorates on offer and integrates more examples of thesis writing. Building on the success of the evidence-based approach used in the first edition, there is also new coverage of Masters theses and undergraduate research projects, along with outlines of useful generic structures for social science and humanities projects.

How to Write a Thesis is the most grounded guide available to students on the practicalities surrounding thesis writing and should be recommended reading for, and by, all supervisors.

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Globalization and Language Teaching

‘This book represents a major theoretical and empirical statement on the impact of globalization on language policies and practice around the world. It addresses diverse and complex questions on the subject from a variety of perspectives, and in a broad and richly comprehensive manner . . . An invaluable resource.’

Language is a vital commodity in the globalized world. The services- and information based economy makes increasing demands on workers’ language skills; new technologies and media change the cultural landscape; migration produces more linguistically diverse populations worldwide.

These developments change the conditions in which languages are learned and taught. Globalization and Language Teaching considers the issues globalization raises for second language learning and teaching. Drawing together various strands in the globalization debate, this rich collection combines theory with case studies, exploring concerns that range from literacy to bilingualism and from identity to the internet.

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Explorations in Pragmatics

This volume consists of selected papers from the LAUD Symposium held on March 27–30, 2006 in Landau, Germany, including the keynote address by John Searle, six of the plenary talks and four selected papers from the conference. These papers reflect current trends in international research in pragmatics over recent years. The authors, coming from 10 different countries, represent all angles of pragmatics.

The papers address these issues from a variety of directions.

• ·         Language use and pragmatics from philosophical perspective.
• ·         cognitive aspect of pragmatics
• ·         Intercultural aspects of pragmatics.
• ·         Corpus based methodology in different ways within pragmatics
• ·         Cross-linguistic and cross-cultural

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Expertise in Second Language Learning and Teaching

There is a sense in which almost any statement about language, language learning or language teaching may be said to hold implications for a view about language learning or teaching expertise. Thus an observation about the nature of language implies a view about what it is that an expert user of the language is able to do. Similarly, a statement about language learning is interpretable as an observation about the processes which an expert learner has successfully undertaken.

By now, at the start of the twenty-first century, expertise studies have been undertaken in a large number of domains (and Table 1.1 of Chapter 1 lists a number of them). Applied linguistics is a relative newcomer to the list, and this is in itself a major reason why the time is ripe for a volume looking at what has been done in other domains, as well as what is emerging in the areas of second language learning and teaching.

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Experimental Pragmatics

How does our knowledge of language on the one hand, and of the context on the other permit us to understand what we are told, resolve ambiguities, grasp both explicit and implicit content, recognize the force of a speech act, appreciate metaphor and irony? These issues have been studied in two disciplines: pragmatics and psycholinguistics, with limited interactions between the two. Pragmatics is rooted in the philosophy of language and in linguistics and has spawned competing theories using as evidence a mixture of intuitions about interpretation and observations of behaviour.

Psycholinguistics has developed sophisticated experimental methods in the study of verbal communication, but has not used them to test systematic pragmatic theories. This volume lays down the bases for a new field, Experimental Pragmatics, that draws on pragmatics, psycholinguistics and also on the psychology of reasoning. Chapters in this volume either review pioneering work or present novel ways of articulating theories and experimental methods in the area. In this introduction we outline some core pragmatic issues and approaches and relate them to experimental work in psycholinguistics and in the psychology of reasoning.

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Task-Based Language Teaching

The concept of ‘task’ has become an important element in syllabus design, classroom teaching and learner assessment. It underpins several significant research agendas, and it has influenced educational policymaking in both ESL and EFL settings.

This book began life as the second edition to Designing Tasks for the Communicative Classroom. The original volume was written in the mid- 1980s, and was published in 1989. At that time, task-based language teaching was beginning to arouse attention. Although it was more than a distant prospect, it was far from a mainstream concept. As with the original book, this volume is aimed at practising teachers in ELT and applied linguists (teacher trainers, language planners, and materials writers), as well as teachers in preparation.

In addition to a complete revamping and updating of principles and ideas from Designing Tasks, four areas deserved their own chapter length treatment. These were:

• A model for task-based language teaching (TBLT) that articulated the

relationship between tasks and other curricular elements.

• The empirical basis for TBLT.

• The place of a focus on form in TBLT.

• Assessing TBLT.

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Teaching and Learning in early years

This book is an attempt to distil the current state of knowledge about the ways in which young children (up to the age of 7) develop and learn, to show how educational principles derive from this, and to illustrate these principles with practical examples drawn from work in early years classrooms. It is principally directed at early years trainee teachers, but it is also hoped that it contains material which will be of interest to the whole range of teaching and non-teaching professionals and other adults concerned with the education of young children. .

There follows a section on basic principles and approaches, which discusses issues related to the management of the early years learning environment. This is followed by a series of chapters concerned with play and language, the basics of early years education. A further section examines the wider curriculum of the arts, maths, technology and science, the social sciences and physical development. Each chapter examines basic principles and illuminates them with inspiring, practical examples of classroom, outdoor and out-of-school activities.

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Discourse analysis and the study of classroom language and literacy events : a microethnographic perspective

The purpose of this book is to provide a description of an approach to the discourse analysis of classroom language and literacy events. The approach can be described as a social linguistic or social interactional approach. It combines attention to how people use language and other systems of communication in constructing language and literacy events in classrooms with attention to social, cultural, and political processes.

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Dictionary of Language and Linguistics

The present dictionary differs fundamentally from these monumental works. In its scope and format, it fills a gap which, in spite of David Crystal’s Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics (Oxford 19852), has existed up until now: in a handy one-volume format, this dictionary provides a thorough overview of all areas of linguistics. Not restricted to specific theories, it encompasses descriptive and historical, comparative and typological linguistics, as well as the applied subdisciplines. Along with the traditional core areas (phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics), interdisciplinary fields (such as sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics and ethnolinguistics), as well as stylistics, rhetoric and philosophy of language are represented. In addition, the dictionary includes basic terminology from logic, mathematical and computational linguistics as well as applied linguistics; finally, descriptions of individual languages and language families are provided. With this broad range of content and its succinctly written articles, this dictionary is meant for both students and professional scholars in linguistics and allied fields.

This book is the result of over twenty years of development, in which numerous scholars from Germany and other countries were involved. The first German edition appeared in 1983 as the result of this author’s ten-year efforts. Owing to the rapid development of linguistics, a second, completely revised edition became necessary.

Seventeen scholars revised, corrected and extended the texts of the first edition. Their work was based on dozens of peer reviews and, no less importantly, on their own research.

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Computer-mediated Communication for Linguistics and Literacy: Technology and Natural Language Education

Computer-mediated Communication (CMC) is an amazingly multi- and inter-disciplinary subject area that spans fields as diverse as computer science, information technology, communication studies, linguistics, literacy, education, business, ethics, and law. Given this vast subject-matter it would be practically impossible for any single volume to cover all aspects of CMC to any appreciable depth. There is thus the need to focus on one or the other of these component disciplines.

Within this wider, interdisciplinary arena, this book, titled, Computer-mediated Communication for Linguistics and Literacy: Technology and Natural Language Education, occupies an important position. It has a clear focus on the linguistic, literacy and educational aspects of CMC. The book investigates the way humans communicate through the medium of information technology gadgets. Based on extensive research on how we use natural languages like English and Chinese in media such as emails, MSN, and mobile phones, the book outlines new forms and ways of speaking, reading, and writing in an age in which there is a pervasive presence of communication technologies in offices and homes. This interaction between human language and technology has created new forms and uses of language and literacy the study of which has given birth to this exciting new field of Computer mediated Communication (CMC) that we are about to delve into.

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Appraising Research in Second Language Learning

This book is written to guide student and novice researchers through their critical reading of a research paper in the field of second language learning. They will be shown ways of approaching the appraisal of the abstract and the introductory section of the study, both of which set the stage by describing the rationale as well as the objective of the work. Similarly, the reader will be given ideas about how to assess the method and procedures section so that he or she can decide, for example, whether the research design was appropriate, and what precautions were taken to guard against threats of validity to the findings. They will become more familiar with, and confident about, interpreting results from commonly-used descriptive or inferential statistical procedures and checking how appropriately these have been presented. Finally, the reader should be in a position critically to evaluate the researcher’s own interpretation of the findings in terms of the extent to which the conclusion is justified, can be generalized, and has limitations.

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An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and Method

Discourse analysis considers ho language, both spoken and written, enacts social and cultural perspectives and identities. In this book, James Pual Gee introduces the field and presents his unique integrated approach it.

Assuming no prior knowledge of linguistics, the author presents both a theory of language-in-use and a method of research. Clearly structures and written in a highly accessible style, An Introduction to discourse Analysis incorporates perspectives from a variety of approaches and disciplines, including applied linguistics, education, psychology, anthropology, and communication, to help students and scholars from a range of backgrounds to formulate their own views on discourse and engage in their own discourse analysis.

The second edition has been completely revised and updated and contains substantial new material and examples of oral and written language, ranging from group discussions with children, adults, students, and teachers to conversation, interviews, academic texts, and policy documents.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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