Tax Policy and the Economy publishes current academic research findings on taxation and government spending that have both immediate bearing on policy debates and longer-term interest. The articles in Volume 23 address a range of topics, including Social Security, understanding corporate tax losses, the influence of globalization on the design of a tax system, and the question of whether federal provision of goods and services crowds out their provision by lower levels of government or the private sector.
Tax Policy and the Economy publishes current academic research findings on taxation and government spending that have both immediate bearing on policy debates and longer-term interest. The papers in this volume range from topics as broad as the relative efficacy of tax cuts versus spending increases as a form of economic stimulus to a targeted analysis of the Low Income Housing Tax Credit. Also included are two papers at that examine different aspects of policies designed to provide fiscal stimulus, as well as an examination of the effects of recent reforms in the Earned Income Tax Credit.
“This is the first book to systematically examine the variation in policies of Eastern European countries. There is a theoretical contribution to understandings of variation in tax policies, but just as impressive is the in-depth empirical analysis and in particular the data from interviews with key players in the process.”
—Yoshiko Herrera, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Post-Communist tax reform, like institutional reform in other areas of the post-Communist transition, holds tremendous material consequences for different groups in society. Consequently, one would expect the allocation of resources and the distribution of the financial burden of that allocation to be highly sensitive to domestic politics. Indeed the political stakes should be especially high since post-Communist tax reform requires not merely a simple adjustment at the margin, but the fundamental reallocation of the responsibility for government revenue. In Eastern Europe, however, important areas of tax policy do not reflect traditional domestic variables (e.g., interest groups and partisanship) so much as the international imperatives associated with regional and global economic integration.
In Tax Politics in Eastern Europe, Hilary Appel analyzes the domestic and international factors that drive tax policy. She begins with a review of the greatest challenges in the initial creation of the capitalist tax systems in former Communist states and then turns to the evolution of specific forms of taxation in order to gauge the relative impact of domestic politics on tax policy. Appel concludes that, although some tax areas, such as personal income taxes, remain politicized, most other taxes, such as corporate income taxes and all forms of consumption taxes, have been less subject to domestic political pressures because of powerful constraints resulting from regional and global economic integration.
The Alliance for Progress was a program intended to stimulate and aid the economic development of the peoples of Latin America. It proposed that the United States and nineteen Latin American republics pool financial and technical resources to aid the peoples of all these republics in achieving better living standards, greater human dignity, and increased political freedom. Although achievement of these goals depended partially upon the availability of external assistance, it depended even more upon the ability and willingness of the Latin Americans themselves to make numerous far-reaching institutional reforms within their countries.
One of the most important needs was in the area of tax reform, which had been made a quid pro quo for the twenty billion dollars promised by the United States through the program. This limitation upon the use of United States funds made obvious the need for a means of evaluating the adequacy of Latin American tax-reform efforts. In this study Raynard M. Sommerfeld presents an examination of this problem and recommends basic criteria for such evaluation. The study reviews the objectives of the Alliance for Progress, investigates the prevailing tax systems in the Latin American republics, and offers recommendations for tax-reform efforts to harmonize tax policy with the economic development goals stipulated in the Charter of Punta del Este.
The author emphasizes and reiterates the fact that thorough studies of the individual countries are necessary for the planning of truly adequate tax reform. He offers the facts developed in his study as interim tools for United States Alliance for Progress agencies in evaluating Latin American tax-reform efforts, for Latin American planners seeking to guide their countries most easily on the road to economic maturity, and for all scholars, teachers, and students interested in the fields of Latin American economics, taxation, and political history.
A tax revolt almost as momentous as the Boston Tea Party erupted in California in 1978. Its reverberations are still being felt, yet no one is quite sure what general lessons can be drawn from observing its course. This book is an in-depth study of this most recent and notable taxpayers' rebellion: Howard Jarvis and Proposition 13, the Gann measure of 1979, and Proposition 9 (Jarvis II) of 1980. The people of California, speaking directly through referenda, redirected their state from an intense and expensive concern for the welfare of its citizens to a far more circumspect role. The sequence involved cutting property taxes, limiting tax growth, and then rejecting a state income tax cut.
Why did Californians vote to lower some taxes and not others? How fundamental is the American disposition toward tax revolt? Will it happen again? The authors consider a variety of partial answers: the self-interest of certain groups, the apathy of others, the role of party affiliation, the specter of symbolic racism, the meaning of mass mood surges. The interplay between class politics and symbolic protest embodied in the California Tax Revolt has since spread to other states—for example, Proposition 21/2 in Massachusetts, which lowered property taxes—and has reached the federal level. President Reagan, with Republican and conservative Democrat support, has enacted major spending cuts and long-range tax relief. The new revolutionary strand in the fabric of the American political culture appears to be strong.
A tax revolt almost as momentous as the Boston Tea Party erupted in California in 1978. Its reverberations are still being felt, yet no one is quite sure what general lessons can be drawn from observing its course. This book is an in-depth study of this most recent and notable taxpayers' rebellion: Howard Jarvis and Proposition 13, the Gann measure of 1979, and Proposition 9 (Jarvis II) of 1980. The people of California, speaking directly through referenda, redirected their state from an intense and expensive concern for the welfare of its citizens to a far more circumspect role. The sequence involved cutting property taxes, limiting tax growth, and then rejecting a state income tax cut.
Why did Californians vote to lower some taxes and not others? How fundamental is the American disposition toward tax revolt? Will it happen again? The authors consider a variety of partial answers: the self-interest of certain groups, the apathy of others, the role of party affiliation, the specter of symbolic racism, the meaning of mass mood surges. The interplay between class politics and symbolic protest embodied in the California Tax Revolt has since spread to other states—for example, Proposition 21/2 in Massachusetts, which lowered property taxes—and has reached the federal level. President Reagan, with Republican and conservative Democrat support, has enacted major spending cuts and long-range tax relief. The new revolutionary strand in the fabric of the American political culture appears to be strong.
Documenting the evolution of economic development and fiscal policies in Taiwan over the last four decades, this work explores the effectiveness of specific tax and trade policies. The authors make a major revision to the previously accepted role played by the export processing zones and the protection of domestic producers from foreign competition. The extensive use of duty exemption systems enabled the government to create competition among the exporting firms, and the innovative design of economic policies and administrative systems helped the private sector generate savings, expand investments, and promote exports.
This work analyzes how unique fiscal policies and administrative practices were designed to foster the rapid growth and development of Taiwan during this period.
This important contribution to tax analysis presents seven related theoretical essays that examine the effects of capital income taxation on the behavior of firms. It is divided into three sections, focusing on optimal tax design, firm financial policy, and inflation. Taken together, the essays demonstrate the powerful role taxes play in shaping the behavior of American corporations, and also provide insights into the difficult task of tax reform.
Alan Auerbach’s results suggest policies the government might adopt to promote the optimal accumulation of capital. He examines the implications for capital taxation of discrepancies between nominal depreciation rates and real economic depreciation, and suggests appropriate rules of thumb for determining when capital taxation is neutral among alternative investment projects. He also makes important contributions to the debate over the integration of corporate and personal taxes on capital income and to the behavioral puzzle of why corporations pay dividends to their shareholders.
"In tax administration," writes the author, "all countries can learn from each other." This revealing case study of the development of Israel's tax system--a system which has dealt with the full panoply of problems that tax administrators must face and which is further characterized by heavy taxation--offers a wealth of noteworthy examples for other countries.
Harold C. Wilkenfeld presents a detailed account of the historical and economic realities that forged Israel's elaborate tax structure from the Ottoman period to the present day. He scrutinizes such areas as the crises that Israel's tax administration faced shortly after the State achieved its independence, the problems which had to be solved, the formulation of administrative policy, the interplay of a developing civil service and a developing citizenry. All of these areas are viewed in the context of an evolving economy and a continuing external conflict.
The author presents practical guidelines for countries interested in advancing the effectiveness of tax administration. For instance, many of the Israeli administration's tactics against tax evasion may be transplantable to other nations. Likewise, a number of the technical solutions to administrative problems of both direct and indirect taxes can certainly and readily be adapted to conditions in a number of developing countries.
Taxes and People in Israel comes as a welcome addition to a field which offers few critical, historical studies of the entire tax system of a country. It will be of considerable interest to tax administrators and ought to be read by every new head of a tax administration. It should also prove a valuable source to public administrators, lawyers, sociologists, economists, and anyone concerned with giving fiscal advice to the developing countries.
Insightful, good-humored essays on the possibilities of alien life and the uses of space exploration, based on an astrobiologist’s everyday conversations with his fellow humans—taxi drivers, to be precise. “This is a joy to read.” —Publishers Weekly
If you’ve ever sat in the back seat of a taxi, you know that cabbies like to talk. Sports or politics, your job or theirs, taxi drivers are fine conversationalists on just about any topic. And when the passenger is astrobiologist Charles Cockell, that topic is usually space and what, if anything, lives out there.
Inspired by conversations with drivers all over the world, Taxi from Another Planet tackles the questions that everyday people have about the cosmos and our place in it. Will we understand aliens? What if there isn’t life out in the universe? Is Mars our Plan B? And why is the government spending tax dollars on space programs anyway? Each essay in this genial collection takes questions like these as a starting point on the way to a range of insightful, even poignant, observations. Cockell delves into debates over the inevitability of life and looks to both human history and scientific knowledge to consider what first contact will be like and what we can expect from spacefaring societies. He also offers a forceful argument for the sympathies between space exploration and environmentalism.
A shrewd and entertaining foray into the most fundamental mysteries, Taxi from Another Planet brings together the wisdom of scientific experts and their fellow citizens of Earth, the better to understand how life might unfold elsewhere.
“Timely…Cockell makes us consider a gamut of new possibilities that boggle the mind.”
—Bruce Dorminey, Forbes
“Taxi from Another Planet conveys an array of ideas—all fascinating, and some profound—with a light touch and utter clarity. Accessible to anyone curious about the cosmos.”—Martin Rees, coauthor of The End of Astronauts
“Entertaining and informative in equal measure.”—Morgan Hollis, Nature Astronomy
If you’ve ever sat in the back seat of a taxi, you know that cabbies like to talk. Sports or politics, your job or theirs, taxi drivers are fine conversationalists on just about any topic. And when the passenger is astrobiologist Charles Cockell, that topic is usually space and what, if anything, lives out there.
Inspired by conversations with drivers all over the world, Taxi from Another Planet tackles the questions that everyday people have about the cosmos and our place in it. Will we understand aliens? What if there isn’t life out in the universe? Is Mars our Plan B? And why is the government spending tax dollars on space programs anyway? Each essay in this genial collection takes questions like these as a starting point on the way to a range of insightful, even poignant, observations. Cockell delves into debates over the inevitability of life and looks to both human history and scientific knowledge to consider what first contact will be like and what we can expect from spacefaring societies. He also offers a forceful argument for the sympathies between space exploration and environmentalism.
A shrewd and entertaining foray into the most fundamental mysteries, Taxi from Another Planet brings together the wisdom of scientific experts and their fellow citizens of Earth, the better to understand how life might unfold elsewhere.
Tea growing was a prosperous industry in Sichuan when Wang Anshi's New Policies created a Tea Market Agency to buy up Sichuanese tea and trade it to Tibetan tribesmen for cavalry horses. At first the highly autonomous Agency not only acquired the needed horses but made a profit. After the Jurchen conquest of North China, however, market realities changed and the combined Tea and Horse Agency's once successful policies ruined tea farmers, failed to meet quotas for horses, and ran a deficit. Smith details the workings of Sichuan tea farming and the tea trade, examines the geopolitical factors that forced the Song to buy horses, and graphically describes the difficulties of driving them more than a thousand miles through rugged mountains with only inexperienced conscripts as trail hands.
In this study of fiscal sociology, Smith also explains how the Tea and Horse Agency transformed the Sichuan local elite, which was notorious for its resistance to state power, into imperial civil servants eager to tax their own region. He draws on modern theories of corporate behavior to explain what made the inner workings of the Agency an extraordinary departure for the Chinese civil service; and he demonstrates how the Agency put into practice the most radical New-Policies theories of state economic activism. The Agency made entrepreneurs out of bureaucrats, but ultimately became ruinously tyrannical as the system of state rewards and punishments drove its personnel to actions that crippled key sectors of the economy.
From chai to oolong to sencha, tea is one of the world’s most popular beverages. Perhaps that is because it is a unique and adaptable drink, consumed in many different varieties by cultures across the globe and in many different settings, from the intricate traditions of Japanese teahouses to the elegant tearooms of Britain to the verandas of the deep South.
In Tea food historianHelen Saberi explores this rich and fascinating history. Saberi looks at the economic and social uses of tea, such as its use as a currency during the Tang Dynasty and 1913 creation of a tea dance called “Thé Dansant” that combined tea and tango. Saberi also explores where and how tea is grown around the world and how customs and traditions surrounding the beverage have evolved from its legendary origins to its present-day popularity.
Featuring vivid images of teacups, plants, tearooms, and teahouses as well as recipes for both drinking tea and using it as a flavoring, Tea will engage the senses while providing a history of tea and its uses.
Winner, LASA Mexico Humanities Book Prize, 2017
Among the surviving documents from the colonial period in Mexico are rare Maya-authored manuscript compilations of Christian texts, translated and adapted into the Maya language and worldview, which were used to evangelize the local population. The Morely Manuscript is well known to scholars, and now The Teabo Manuscript introduces an additional example of what Mark Z. Christensen terms a Maya Christian copybook. Recently discovered in the archives of Brigham Young University, the Teabo Manuscript represents a Yucatecan Maya recounting of various aspects of Christian doctrine, including the creation of the world, the Fall of Adam and Eve, and the genealogy of Christ.
The Teabo Manuscript presents the first English translation and analysis of this late colonial Maya-language document, a facsimile and transcription of which are also included in the book. Working through the manuscript section by section, Christensen makes a strong case for its native authorship, as well as its connections with other European and Maya religious texts, including the Morely Manuscript and the Books of Chilam Balam. He uses the Teabo Manuscript as a platform to explore various topics, such as the evangelization of the Maya, their literary compositions, and the aspects of Christianity that they deemed important enough to write about and preserve. This pioneering research offers important new insights into how the Maya negotiated their precontact intellectual traditions within a Spanish and Catholic colonial world.
The twelve stories in Teach the Free Man mark the impressive debut of Peter Nathaniel Malae. The subject of incarceration thematically links the stories, yet their range extends beyond the prison’s barbed wire and iron bars. Avoiding sensationalism, Malae exposes the heart and soul in those dark, seemingly inaccessible corridors of the human experience.
The stories, often raw and startlingly honest, are distinguished by the colloquial voices of California’s prison inmates, who, despite their physical and cultural isolation, confront dilemmas with which we can all identify: the choice to show courage against peer pressure; the search for individual rights within a bureaucracy; and the desperate desire for honor in the face of great sacrifice. These stories present polished and poetic examples of finding something redemptive in the least among us.
The book’s epigraph by W. H. Auden, from which the book takes its title, exemplifies the spirit of these dynamic stories:
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start.
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
Research has shown that very young children can learn sign language before they learn to speak. Teach Your Tot to Sign: The Parents’ Guide to American Sign Language provides parents and teachers the opportunity to teach more than 500 basic American Sign Language (ASL) signs to their infants, toddlers, and young children. Hearing children, deaf children, and children with special needs can benefit from learning the elementary signs chosen for this handy pocket-size book. Young children who can communicate using simple signs become less frustrated and also bond in a special way with their parents. In teaching ASL to parents of toddlers and preschool teachers, author Stacy A. Thompson recognized the need for a book that could be used at home and in the classroom. Her book features fundamental signs of great appeal to young children and concise instructions on how to sign, including the critical importance of facial expression.
Teach Your Tot to Sign anticipates all of the common desires and interests of young children — food, pets, planes, trains, cars, and boats, games, holidays, vegetables, family — in short, nearly everything. Reflecting children’s endless curiosity, the vocabulary chosen ranges from signs for “baby,” “broken,” “clown,” “dinosaur,” “firefighter,” “gentle,” “hot,” “hurt,” “ketchup,” “pacifier,” “rooster,” “sad,” “spaghetti,” “wagon,” “water,” “wet,” to “you’re welcome,” and even “McDonalds.” This lively assortment of signs will help every child convey earlier in their development their thoughts, feelings, and desires to their parents and teachers.
As Shelton shows, many working- and middle-class whites sided with corporate interests in seeing themselves as society's only legitimate, productive members. This alliance increasingly argued that public employees and the urban poor took but did not give. Drawing on a wealth of research ranging from school board meetings to TV news reports, Shelton puts readers in the middle of fraught, intense strikes in Newark, St. Louis, and three other cities where these debates and shifting attitudes played out. He also demonstrates how the labor actions contributed to the growing public perception of unions as irrelevant or even detrimental to American prosperity. Foes of the labor movement, meanwhile, tapped into cultural and economic fears to undermine not just teacher unionism but the whole of liberalism.
Examining teachers' unions and public education from the bottom up, Lyons shows how the CTU and its members sought rigorous reforms. A combination of political action, public relations campaigns, and community alliances helped the CTU to achieve better salaries and benefits, increased school budgets, reformed curricula, and greater equality for women within the public education system. But its agenda was also constrained by internal divisions over race and gender and by ongoing external disputes with the school administration, politicians, and business and civic organizations.
Detailed and informed by rich interviews, Teachers and Reform: Chicago Public Education, 1929-1970 tells the story of how committed union members effected changes to public education and to local politics that still benefit Chicago teachers, students, and the city today.
The Teacher’s Attention is a fresh take on relationships in schools. Looking beyond our obsession with raising test scores, this book recognizes that education is a key partner in raising children. Garrett Delavan contends that allowing students, educators and parents to navigate a smaller number of relationships—a concept he calls "relationship load"—provides many benefits, including a better chance at achieving equal access to a good education for all children.
Delavan shows how class size, school size, and longer-term student-teacher relationships are all equally critical components for educating our children ethically and successfully. After examining these proposed reforms in detail, Delavan also considers counterarguments and provides a detailed projection of costs and savings, putting to rest the assumption that smaller classes and smaller schools are necessarily more expensive. Finally, the book discusses possible steps toward implementation, showing how the author's proposed reforms are remarkably practical.
John Dewey was one of the most prominent philosophers and educational thinkers of the twentieth century, and his influence on modern education continues today. In Teachers, Leaders, and Schools: Essays by John Dewey, educators Douglas J. Simpson and Sam F. Stack Jr. have gathered some of Dewey’s most user-friendly and insightful essays concerning education with the purpose of aiding potential and practicing teachers, administrators, and policy makers to prepare students for participation in democratic society.
Selected largely, but not exclusively, for their accessibility, relevance, and breadth of information, these articles are grouped into five parts—The Classroom Teacher, The School Curriculum, The Educational Leader, The Ideal School, and The Democratic Society. Each part includes an introductory essay that connects Dewey’s thoughts not only to each other but also to current educational concerns. The sections build on one another, revealing Dewey’s educational theories and interests and illustrating how his thoughts remain relevant today.
This teacher's manual was written to accompany the textbook Norsk, nordemenn og Norge, published by the University of Wisconsin Press (text ISBN 0-299-08690-9)
Teaching about race and racism can be a difficult business. Students and instructors alike often struggle with strong emotions, and many people have robust preexisting beliefs about race. At the same time, this is a moment that demands a clear understanding of racism. It is important for students to learn how we got here and how racism is more than just individual acts of meanness. Students also need to understand that colorblindness is not an effective anti-racism strategy.
In this book, Cyndi Kernahan argues that you can be honest and unflinching in your teaching about racism while also providing a compassionate learning environment that allows for mistakes and avoids shaming students. She provides evidence for how learning works with respect to race and racism along with practical teaching strategies rooted in that evidence to help instructors feel more confident. She also differentiates between how white students and students of color are likely to experience the classroom, helping instructors provide a more effective learning experience for all students.
"This provocative and timely book challenges Americans to rethink what it means to take democracy and religious freedom seriously in public education. Emile Lester takes the reader beyond culture war conflicts rooted in religious divisions and offers bold, new solutions for addressing our differences with fairness and robust toleration. Instead of battlegrounds, he argues, public schools can and should be places that include all voices in ways that prepare citizens to engage one another with civility and respect. Teaching about Religions is essential reading for all who care about the future of public schools---and the health of American democracy."
--- Charles C. Haynes, Senior Scholar, Freedom Forum First Amendment Center
"More than simply a synthesis of existing scholarship, [this book is] an original contribution to the field. [The] major themes are timely, and this book might well contribute to public discussion of important issues in our culture wars."
---Warren Nord, University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill
"Arriving in the wake of a bitter battle over the place of Islam in America and in the midst of calls for greater understanding and civility, Emile Lester's new book is a timely contribution to the debate about the best ways to teach about religion in our nation's public schools. A pioneering researcher in this field, Lester offers thoughtful critiques of existing proposals as well as fresh ideas. His recommendations reflect painstaking efforts to understand the concerns of groups (most notably, conservative Christians) to which he does not belong, and a firm grasp of the difference between fostering understanding of other faiths and pressing for acceptance of them. Lester's prescriptions, always informed and fair-minded and sometimes provocative, should drive the debate forward in productive ways."
---Melissa Rogers, Director, Center for Religion and Public Affairs at Wake Forest University School of Divinity and Nonresident Senior Fellow, The Brookings Institution
Frequent news stories about the debates waged between secularists and religious conservatives have convinced most Americans that public schools must choose between promoting respect for religious minorities and respecting the interests of conservative Christians. As a result, public schools fail to teach students about the meaning and value of protecting religious liberty and consequently perpetuate mistrust across the cultural divide, further empower extremists, and obscure the fact that most Americans of all religious backgrounds share a commitment to basic democratic principles.
In response, the public schools in the religiously diverse and divided community of Modesto, California, have introduced a widely acclaimed required world religions course. Drawing on groundbreaking research on the creation of and response to the Modesto course as well as on political philosophy, Emile Lester advocates a civic approach to teaching about religion in public schools that at once emphasizes respect for all views about religion and provides a special recognition of conservative Christian beliefs.
Using debate to develop advanced competency in a second language is a method that is finding increased interest among instructors and students alike, whether in synchronous online teaching or the individual classroom. Through debate, students learn how to make hypotheses, support their conclusions with evidence, and deploy the rhetoric of persuasion in the target language. Though this method provides an exciting pedagogy for moving students from the advanced to the superior level, there is a paucity of materials available for instructors who wish to plan a curriculum focused on debate. Teaching Advanced Language Skills through Global Debate: Theory and Practice provides teachers with both the theoretical underpinnings for using debate in the foreign language classroom as well as practical advice for developing reading, listening, writing, and speaking skills through debate. It discusses task-based language learning and helps instructors design debate-related tasks for the classroom.
Teaching Advanced Language Skills through Global Debate will be useful for any instructor working at the advanced level, and particularly for those training future language instructors. One of the new digital short publications available through Georgetown University Press, it is an ideal complement to the press’s new titles on mastering languages through global debate.
Georgetown Digital Shorts—longer than an article, shorter than a book—deliver timely works of peer-reviewed scholarship in a fast-paced, agile environment. They present new ideas and original texts that are easily and widely available to students, scholars, libraries, and general readers.
Many faculty and graduate students from other countries expect language difficulties when they teach, but are unprepared for other surprises: different cultures make different assumptions about the academic background of college students, how students learn, the appropriate roles of teachers and students, and even the fundamental purpose of a college education.
The third edition of Teaching American Students explains the expectations of undergraduates at American colleges and universities and offers practical strategies for teaching, including how to give clear presentations, how to teach interactively, and how to communicate effectively. Also included are illustrative examples as well as advice from international faculty and teaching assistants. Appendices offer concrete suggestions on topics from planning the first day of class to grading papers and problem sets.
Ever since Socrates, teaching has been a difficult and even dangerous profession. Why is good teaching such hard work?
In this provocative, witty, and sometimes rueful book, David K. Cohen writes about the predicaments that teachers face. Like therapists, social workers, and pastors, teachers embark on a mission of human improvement. They aim to deepen knowledge, broaden understanding, sharpen skills, and change behavior. One predicament is that no matter how great their expertise, teachers depend on the cooperation and intelligence of their students, yet there is much that students do not know. To teach responsibly, teachers must cultivate a kind of mental double vision: distancing themselves from their own knowledge to understand students’ thinking, yet using their knowledge to guide their teaching. Another predicament is that although attention to students’ thinking improves the chances of learning, it also increases the uncertainty and complexity of the job.
The circumstances in which teachers and students work make a difference. Teachers and students are better able to manage these predicaments if they have resources—common curricula, intelligent assessments, and teacher education tied to both—that support responsible teaching. Yet for most of U.S. history those resources have been in short supply, and many current accountability policies are little help. With a keen eye for the moment-to-moment challenges, Cohen explores what “responsible teaching” can be, the kind of mind reading it seems to demand, and the complex social resources it requires.
This guide clearly and succinctly presents the basic tenets of teaching foreign languages specifically for Arabic teachers. Consolidating findings from second language acquisition (SLA) research and applied linguistics, it covers designing curricula, theory and methods, goals, testing, and research, and intersperses practical information with background literature in order to help teachers improve their teaching of Arabic as a foreign language (TAFL).
Karin C. Ryding, a well-regarded scholar of Arabic linguistics and former president of the American Association of Teachers of Arabic, frames the discussion with SLA literature and suggests practical and effective ways of helping students learn. Ryding discusses issues at the core of Arabic teaching effectiveness and the achievement of communicative competence, such as the teaching of pronunciation, speaking, reading, listening, and writing; teaching mixed-level classes; creative classroom organization; corrective feedback; and use of activities and exercises, with plenty of examples from Arabic and tips for teachers. She also covers materials development and proficiency testing, providing study questions and recommended readings for each chapter.
This guide, which can be used as a textbook, is the first of its kind aimed specifically at TAFL, and should be of interest to Arabic instructors-in-training, academics, graduate students, linguists, department chairs, language coordinators, and teacher trainers. It also serves as a resource for teachers of other less commonly taught languages (LCTLs), who struggle with similar issues.
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