This wide-ranging survey of issues in intercultural language teaching and learning covers everything from core concepts to program evaluation, and advocates a fluid, responsive approach to teaching ...language that reflects its central role in fostering intercultural understanding.Includes coverage of theoretical issues defining language, culture, and communication, as well as practice-driven issues such as classroom interactions, technologies, programs, and language assessmentExamines systematically the components of language teaching: language itself, meaning, culture, learning, communicating, and assessments, and puts them in social and cultural contextFeatures numerous examples throughout, drawn from various languages,international contexts, and frameworksIncorporates a decade of in-depth research and detailed documentation from the authors’ collaborative work with practicing teachersProvides a much-needed addition to the sparse literature on intercultural aspects of language education
In recent years the study of English and its global varieties has grown rapidly as a field of study. The English language in Singapore, famous for its vernacular known as 'Singlish', is of particular ...interest to linguists because it takes accent, dialect and lexical features from a wide range of languages including Malay, Mandarin, Hokkien and Tamil, as well as being influenced by the Englishes of Britain, Australia and America. This book gives a comprehensive overview of English in Singapore by setting it within a historical context and drawing on recent developments in the field of indexicality, world Englishes and corpus research. Through application of the indexicality framework Jakob Leimgruber offers readers a new way of thinking about and analysing the unique syntactic, semantic and phonological structure of Singapore English. This book is ideal for researchers and advanced students interested in Singapore and its languages.
How do we construct national identities in discourse? Which topics, which discursive strategies and which linguistic devices are employed to construct national sameness and uniqueness on the one ...hand, and differences to other national collectives on the o
How can we envisage a new language and culture pedagogy that breaks with the tradition of viewing language as part of a closed national universe of culture, history, people and mentality, and begins ...to see itself as a field operating in a complex and dynamic world characterised by transnational flows of people, commodities and ideas? Initially, to understand the field and its current challenges, we must understand its history, and the first part of this book contains a critical analysis of the history of the international field of culture teaching – the first historical treatment of this field ever written. The next part of the book focuses on how we can build a framework for a new transnational language and culture pedagogy that aims at the education of world citizens whose intercultural competence includes critical multilingual and multicultural awareness in a global perspective.
"Written forms of Arabic composed during the era of the Ottoman Empire present an immensely fruitful linguistic topic. Extant texts display a proximity to the vernacular that cannot be encountered in ...any other surviving historical Arabic material, and thus provide unprecedented access to Arabic language history. This rich material remains very little explored. Traditionally, scholarship on Arabic has focussed overwhelmingly on the literature of the various Golden Ages between the 8th and 13th centuries, whereas texts from the 15th century onwards have often been viewed as corrupted and not worthy of study. The lack of interest in Ottoman Arabic culture and literacy left these sources almost completely neglected in university courses. This volume is the first linguistic work to focus exclusively on varieties of Christian, Jewish and Muslim Arabic in the Ottoman Empire of the 15th to the 20th centuries, and present Ottoman Arabic material in a didactic and easily accessible way. Split into a Handbook and a Reader section, the book provides a historical introduction to Ottoman literacy, translation studies, vernacularisation processes, language policy and linguistic pluralism. The second part contains excerpts from more than forty sources, edited and translated by a diverse network of scholars. The material presented includes a large number of yet unedited texts, such as Christian Arabic letters from the Prize Paper collections, mercantile correspondence and notebooks found in the Library of Gotha, and Garshuni texts from archives of Syriac patriarchs."
Language and Society in Japan deals with issues important to an understanding of language in Japan today, among them multilingualism, language and nationalism, and literacy and reading habits. It is ...organised around the theme of language and identity, in particular how language is used to construct national, international and personal identities. Contrary to popular stereotypes, Japanese is far from the only language used in Japan, and does not function in a vacuum, but comes with its own particular cultural implications. Language has played an important role in Japan's cultural and foreign policies, and language issues are intimately connected both with technological advance and with minority group experiences. Nanette Gottlieb is a leading authority in this field. This 2005 book builds on and develops her previous work, and promises to be essential reading for students, scholars, and all those wishing to understand the role played by language in Japanese society.
The demand of white, affluent society that all Americans should speak, read, and write proper English causes many people who are not white and/or middle class to attempt to talk in a way that feel ...peculiar to their mind, as a character in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple puts it. In this book, Sonja Lanehart explores how this valorization of proper English has affected the language, literacy, educational achievements, and self-image of five African American women—her grandmother, mother, aunt, sister, and herself. Through interviews and written statements by each woman, Lanehart draws out the life stories of these women and their attitudes toward and use of language. Making comparisons and contrasts among them, she shows how, even within a single family, differences in age, educational opportunities, and social circumstances can lead to widely different abilities and comfort in using language to navigate daily life. Her research also adds a new dimension to our understanding of African American English, which has been little studied in relation to women.
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