Language as a Local Practice addresses the questions of language, locality and practice as a way of moving forward in our understanding of how language operates as an integrated social and spatial ...activity.
By taking each of these three elements – language, locality and practice – and exploring how they relate to each other, Language as a Local Practice opens up new ways of thinking about language. It questions assumptions about languages as systems or as countable entities, and suggests instead that language emerges from the activities it performs. To look at language as a practice is to view language as an activity rather than a structure, as something we do rather than a system we draw on, as a material part of social and cultural life rather than an abstract entity.
Language as a Local Practice draws on a variety of contexts of language use, from bank machines to postcards, Indian newspaper articles to fish-naming in the Philippines, urban graffiti to mission statements, suggesting that rather than thinking in terms of language use in context, we need to consider how language, space and place are related, how language creates the contexts where it is used, how languages are the products of socially located activities and how they are part of the action.
Language as a Local Practice will be of interest to students on advanced undergraduate and post graduate courses in Applied Linguistics, Language Education, TESOL, Literacy and Cultural Studies.
1. Introduction: Language as a Local Practice 2. 'Press 1 for English': Practice as the ‘Generic Social Thing’ 3. The Reverend on Ice Again: Similarity, Difference and Relocalization 4. Talking in the City: The Linguistic Landscaping of Locality 5. Kerala Tuskers: Language as Already Local 6. Alibangbang and Ecologies of Local Language Practices. 7 "Molding Hearts… Leading Minds… Touching Lives" Practice as the new discourse? 8. Conclusion: Language as a Local Practice
" Language as a Local Practice is one of the most refreshing linguistics books to appear in a decade. Weaving together different strands of current research, Alastair Pennycook provides new framings and directions for the study of language." - David Barton, University of Lancaster , UK
Spelling matters to people. In America and Britain every day, members of the public write to the media on spelling issues, and take part in spelling contests. In Germany, a reform of the spelling ...system has provoked a constitutional crisis; in Galicia, a 'war of orthographies' parallels an intense public debate on national identity; on walls, bridges and trains globally, PUNX and ANARKISTS proclaim their identities orthographically. The way we spell often represents an attempt to associate with, or dissociate from, other languages. In Spelling and Society, Mark Sebba explores why matters of orthography are of real concern to so many groups, as a reflection of culture, history and social practices, and as a powerful symbol of national or local identity. This 2007 book will be welcomed by students and researchers in English language, orthography and sociolinguistics, and by anyone interested in the importance of spelling in contemporary society.
This innovative collection examines key questions on language diversity and multilingualism running through contemporary debates in psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics. Reinforcing ...interdisciplinary conversations on these themes, each chapter is co-authored by two different researchers, often those who have not written together before. The combined effect is a volume showcasing unique and dynamic perspectives on such topics as multilingualism across the lifespan, bilingual acquisition, family language policy, language and ageing, language shift, language and identity, and multilingualism and language impairment. The book builds on Elizabeth Lanza’s pioneering work on multilingualism across the lifespan, bringing together cutting-edge research exploring multilingualism as an evolving phenomenon at landmarks in individuals’, families’, and communities’ lives. Taken together, the book offers a rich portrait of the different facets of multilingualism as a lived reality for individuals, families, and communities. This ground-breaking volume will be of particular interest to students and scholars in multilingualism, applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, and psycholinguistics.
This volume features the latest research findings on L2 interactional competence to demonstrate the potential for developing and implementing research-based pedagogy that targets interactional ...competence (IC) in early instruction in a variety of L2 learning and teaching contexts. Incorporating contributions from both leading and emerging researchers in the area, the book is organized into four sections to provide a systematic account of interactional competence, defined as a set of skills required to co-construct an effective interaction with a variety of interlocutors in a variety of settings, and advocates for IC to be part of a well-rounded curriculum of L2 instruction. The volume provides a comprehensive overview of the different theoretical perspectives on IC within Conversation Analysis, and moves into a discussion of conversation-analytic research findings from a variety of contexts and of their pedagogical implications.The book then presents examples of pedagogy in practice and also illustrates the potential for implementing IC in testing settings. This volume makes a valuable contribution to the growing literature on interactional competence and will be of particular interest to graduate students and researchers in applied linguistics, SLA, language education, curriculum and instruction studies, and educational linguistics.
In this first book-length treatment of collaborative writing in second language (L2) classrooms, Neomy Storch provides a theoretical, pedagogical and empirical rationale for the use of collaborative ...writing activities in L2 classes, as well as some guidelines about how to best implement such activities in both face-to-face and online mode. The book discusses factors that may impact on the nature and outcomes of collaborative writing, and examines the beliefs about language learning that underpin learners' and teachers' attitudes towards pair and group work. The book critically reviews the available body of research on collaborative writing and identifies future research directions, thereby encouraging researchers to continue investigating collaborative writing activities.
What is involved in acquiring a new dialect - for example, when Canadian English speakers move to Australia or African American English-speaking children go to school? How is such learning different ...from second language acquisition (SLA), and why is it in some ways more difficult? These are some of the questions Jeff Siegel examines in this book, which focuses specifically on second dialect acquisition (SDA). Siegel surveys a wide range of studies that throw light on SDA. These concern dialects of English as well as those of other languages, including Dutch, German, Greek, Norwegian, Portuguese and Spanish. He also describes the individual and linguistic factors that affect SDA, such as age, social identity and language complexity. The book discusses problems faced by students who have to acquire the standard dialect without any special teaching, and presents some educational approaches that have been successful in promoting SDA in the classroom.
Natural Language Processing (NLP) makes use of Artificial Intelligence algorithms to extract meaningful information from unstructured texts, i.e., content that lacks metadata and cannot easily be ...indexed or mapped onto standard database fields. It has several applications, from sentiment analysis and text summary to automatic language translation. In this work, we use NLP to figure out similar structural linguistic patterns among several different languages. We apply the word2vec algorithm that creates a vector representation for the words in a multidimensional space that maintains the meaning relationship between the words. From a large corpus we built this vectorial representation in a 100-dimensional space for English, Portuguese, German, Spanish, Russian, French, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Italian, Arabic, Hebrew, Basque, Dutch, Swedish, Finnish, and Estonian. Then, we calculated the fractal dimensions of the structure that represents each language. The structures are multi-fractals with two different dimensions that we use, in addition to the token-dictionary size rate of the languages, to represent the languages in a three-dimensional space. Finally, analyzing the distance among languages in this space, we conclude that the closeness there is tendentially related to the distance in the Phylogenetic tree that depicts the lines of evolutionary descent of the languages from a common ancestor.
Over the last thirty years, two social developments have occurred that have led to a need for change in language policy in Japan. One is the increase in the number of migrants needing opportunities ...to learn Japanese as a second language, the other is the influence of electronic technologies on the way Japanese is written. This book looks at the impact of these developments on linguistic behaviour and language management and policy, and at the role of language ideology in the way they have been addressed. Immigration-induced demographic changes confront long cherished notions of national monolingualism and technological advances in electronic text production have led to textual practices with ramifications for script use and for literacy in general. The book will be welcomed by researchers and professionals in language policy and management and by those working in Japanese Studies.
Language, this book argues, is political from top to bottom, whether considered at the level of an individual speaker’s choice of language or style of discourse with others (where interpersonal ...politics are performed), or at the level of political rhetoric, or indeed all the way up to the formation of national languages. By bringing together this set of topics and highlighting how they are interrelated, the book will function well as a textbook on any applied or sociolinguistic course in which some or all of these various aspects of the politics of language are covered. The chapter headings include:
*How politics permeates language (and vice-versa)
*Language and nation
*The social politics of language choice and linguistic correctness
*Politics embedded in language
*Taboo language and its restriction
*Rhetoric, propaganda and interpretation
*Power, hegemony and choices
Code Choice in the Language Classroom argues that the foreign language classroom is and should be regarded as a multilingual community of practice rather than as a perpetually deficient imitator of ...an exclusive second-language environment. From a sociocultural and ecological perspective, Levine guides the reader through a theoretical, empirical, and pedagogical treatment of the important roles of the first language, and of code-switching practices, in the language classroom. Intended for SLA researchers, language teachers, language program directors, and graduate students of foreign languages and literatures, the book develops a framework for thinking about all aspects of code choice in the language classroom and offers concrete proposals for designing and carrying out instruction in a multilingual classroom community of practice.
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