BiblioVault - Books about Language and languages

Peer Response in Second Language Writing Classrooms

Jun Liu and Jette G. Hansen

University of Michigan Press, 2002

Peer response in which students work together to provide feedback on one another's writing in both written and oral formats through active engagement with each other's progress over multiple drafts, has been discussed in L2 writing literature since the early 1980s. While peer response activities have now become a common feature of L2 writing instruction, much of the research in peer response studies presents conflicting data. There is a need for a comprehensive survey of it in an effort to help teachers sort out what may or may not be useful to them in the classroom. Peer Response in Second Language Writing Classrooms was written to fill that void.

Peer Response in Second Language Writing Classrooms will provide teachers with practical guidelines for making peer response effective in the classroom and will offer a theoretical grounding on the purposes and importance of peer review, or feedback, as it relates to current writing instruction pedagogy.

[more]

Peer Response in Second Language Writing Classrooms, Second Edition

Jun Liu and Jette G. Hansen Edwards

University of Michigan Press, 2018

Since the publication of the first edition in 2002, there have been two major developments in L2 writing and peer response teaching and research. The first is the increased interest in CALL and computer-mediated communication (CMC) for L2 pedagogy; the second is the accessibility and viability of research on L2 peer response from all over the world. Both developments are thoroughly addressed in this new edition.

Now that classes are as likely to be online as held in physical classrooms and now that a new generation of digital natives can routinely read and respond to what others write via laptops, tablets, and phones, peer response as pedagogical practice is not just more easily implemented, but it is more likely to feel natural to L2 learners.

The Second Edition is a highly accessible guide to how the world is using peer response and serves as a motivator and facilitator for those who want to try it for the first time or want to increase the effectiveness of the activities—whether via CMC or not. The volume includes 11 forms useful in training students to provide good peer feedback, including a final checklist to ensure teachers have taken all the necessary steps to achieve a successful peer feedback activity.

[more]

Perspectives on Fluency

Heidi Riggenbach

University of Michigan Press, 2000

Because there have been few attempts to specify precisely what fluency is, Heidi Riggenbach has culled an impressive list of linguistic scholars and researchers representing the disciplines of psycholinguistics, socio-linguistics, and speech communication, for example, to write original papers for Perspectives on Fluency. This volume offers a historical overview of fluency and, in seeking to better define the term, focuses on both native speaker and nonnative speaker fluency.
Section 1, What Is Fluency? presents papers that all describe fluency, but in different ways.
The articles in Section 2, Essential Components of Fluency, consider features or components that contribute to impressions of fluency.
Section 3, Cognitive Processes Underlying Fluency, is devoted to an exploration of the psycholinguistic factors underlying fluency.
Three studies are presented in Section 4, Empirical Studies on Nonnative Fluency, and they exemplify the range of approaches to characterizing learners as fluent or nonfluent in their target language.
One objective of Perspectives on Fluency is to provide a starting point for language researchers interested in exploring the concept of fluency, a foundation that, until the arrival of this volume, did not exist. The book can be useful to those approaching fluency from a language assessment perspective, and those interested in the relationship of fluency to oral proficiency.

[more]

Philosophical Arguments

Charles Taylor

Harvard University Press, 1995

“Among the leading philosophers of our time, Charles Taylor stands out for the sheer breadth of his interests and influence…Illuminating and rewarding.” —David Miller, Times Literary Supplement

Charles Taylor is one of the most important English-language philosophers at work today; he is also unique in the philosophical community in applying his ideas on language and epistemology to social theory and political problems. In this book Taylor brings together some of his best essays, including “Overcoming Epistemology,” “The Validity of Transcendental Argument,” “Irreducibly Social Goods,” and “The Politics of Recognition.” As usual, his arguments are trenchant, straddling the length and breadth of contemporary philosophy and public discourse.

The strongest theme running through the book is Taylor’s critique of disengagement, instrumental reason, and atomism: that individual instances of knowledge, judgment, discourse, or action cannot be intelligible in abstraction from the outside world. By developing his arguments about the importance of “engaged agency,” Taylor simultaneously addresses themes in philosophical debate and in a broader discourse of political theory and cultural studies. The thirteen essays in this collection reflect most of the concerns with which he has been involved throughout his career—language, ideas of the self, political participation, the nature of modernity. His intellectual range is extraordinary, as is his ability to clarify what is at stake in difficult philosophical disputes. Taylor’s analyses of liberal democracy, welfare economics, and multiculturalism have real political significance, and his voice is distinctive and wise.

[more]

Philosophy of Language

Vilém Flusser

University of Minnesota Press, 2016

In 1963 Vilém Flusser presented a series of lectures at the Brazilian Institute of Philosophy (IBF) in São Paulo concerning the philosophy of language. The resulting ten essays would eventually be published in 1965 in the annual magazine of the Brazilian Institute of Technology and Aeronautics (ITA), and published here for the first time in book form.

Flusser prepared each lecture as a response to the dialogs that followed the preceding lecture, thereby expanding and explicating his philosophy of language in an intense dialogical process. Despite the fact that the other side of the dialogue was not recorded, it becomes clear to the reader that the resulting discussions and polemics generated by the lectures progressively and profoundly changed Flusser’s intended trajectory for the course. This kind of philosophy in fieri was in part the result of a group effort between all of those present, and subsequently synthesized by Flusser in every essay. As a result of this experience, Flusser adopted this dialogic method as an integral part of his future work.

[more]

Phonetic Symbol Guide

Geoffrey K. Pullum and William A. Ladusaw

University of Chicago Press, 1996

Phonetic Symbol Guide is a comprehensive and authoritative encyclopedia of phonetic alphabet symbols, providing a complete survey of the hundreds of characters used by linguists and speech scientists to record the sounds of the world's languages.

This fully revised second edition incorporates the major revisions to the International Phonetic Alphabet made in 1989 and 1993. Also covered are the American tradition of transcription stemming from the anthropological school of Franz Boas; the Bloch/Smith/Trager style of transcription; the symbols used by dialectologists of the English language; usages of specialists such as Slavicists, Indologists, Sinologists, and Africanists; and the transcription proposals found in all major textbooks of phonetics.

With sixty-one new entries, an expanded glossary of phonetic terms, added symbol charts, and a full index, this book will be an indispensable reference guide for students and professionals in linguistics, phonetics, anthropology, philology, modern language study, and speech science.

[more]

Poetic Interaction

Language, Freedom, Reason

John McCumber

University of Chicago Press, 1989

Poetic Interaction presents an original approach to the history of philosophy in order to elaborate a fresh theory that accounts for the place freedom in the Western philosophical tradition. In his thorough analysis of the aesthetic theories of Hegel, Heidegger, and Kant, John McCumber shows that the interactionist perspective recently put forth by Jürgen Habermas was in fact already present in some form in the German Enlightenment and in Heidegger's hermeneutic phenomenology. McCumber's historical placement of the interactionist perspective runs counter to both Habermas's own views and to those of scholars who would locate the origin of these developments in American pragmatism. From the metaphysical approaches of Plato and Aristotle to the interactionist approaches of Habermas and Albrecht Wellmer, McCumber provides an original narrative of the history of philosophy that focuses on the ways that each thinker has formulated the relationships between language, truth, and freedom. Finally, McCumber presents his critical demarcation of various forms of freedom to reveal that the interactionist approach has to be expanded and enlarged to include all that is understood by "poetic interaction." For McCumber, freedom is inherently pluralistic. Poetic Interaction will be invaluable to political philosophers, historians of philosophy, philosophers of language, and scholars of legal criticism.

[more]

Politics, Language, and Thought

The Somali Experience

David D. Laitin

University of Chicago Press, 1977

When the Somali Republic received independence, its parliamentary government decided to adopt three official languages: English, Italian, and Arabic—all languages of foreign contact. Since the vast majority of the nation's citizens spoke a single language, Somali, which then had no written form, this decision made governing exceedingly difficult. Selecting any one language was equally problematic, however, because those who spoke the official language would automatically become the privileged class.

Twelve years after independence, a military government was able to settle the acrimonious controversy by announcing that Somali would be the official language and Latin the basic script. It was hoped that this choice would foster political equality and strengthen the national culture. Politics, Language, and Thought is an exploration of how language and politics interrelate in the Somali Republic. Using both historical and experimental evidence, David D. Laitin demonstrates that the choice of an official language may significantly affect the course of a country's political development.

Part I of Laitin's study is an attempt to explain why the parliamentary government was incapable of reaching agreement on a national script and to assess the social and political consequences of the years of nondecision. Laitin shows how the imposition of nonindigenous languages produced inequalities which eroded the country's natural social basis of democracy.

Part 2 attempts to relate language to political thought and political culture. Analyzing interviews and role-playing sessions among Somali bilingual students, Laitin demonstrates that the impact of certain political concepts is quite different when expressed in different languages. He concludes that the implications of choosing a language are far more complex than previously thought, because to change the language of a people is to change the ways they think and act politically.

[more]

Powerhouse for God

Speech, Chant, and Song in an Appalachian Baptist Church

Jeff Todd Titon

University of Tennessee Press, 2018

The Fellowship Independent Baptist Church near Stanley, Virginia, was a group of fundamental Christian believers broadly representative of southern Appalachian belief and practice. Jeff Todd Titon worked with this Baptist community for more than ten years in his attempt to determine the nature of language in the practice of their religion. He traces specialized vocabulary and its applications through the acts of being saved, praying, preaching, teaching, and in particular singing. Titon argues that religious language is performed and the context of its occurrence is crucial to our understanding and to a holistic view of not only religious practice but of folklife and ethnomusicology. Titon’s monumental study of The Fellowship Independent Baptist Church produced not only the first edition book but also an album and documentary film.
In this second edition of Powerhouse for God, Titon revisits The Fellowship Independent Baptist Church nearly four decades later. Brother John Sherfey, the charismatic preacher steeped in Appalachian tradition has passed away and left his congregation to his son, Donnie, to lead. While Appalachian Virginia has changed markedly over the decades, the town of Stanley and the Fellowship Church have not. Titon relates this rarity in his new Afterword: a church founded on Biblical literalism and untouched by modern progressivism in an area of Appalachia that has seen an evolution in population, industry, and immigration.
Titon’s unforgettable study of folklife, musicology, and Appalachian religion is available for a new generation of scholars to build upon.

[more]

A Practical Guide to Integrating Technology into Task-Based Language Teaching

Marta González-Lloret

Georgetown University Press, 2015

However exciting new technologies and educational tools may seem, they can become solely for entertainment unless their design, use, and evaluation are guided by principles of education and language development. Task-based Language Teaching (TBLT) provides an excellent approach for teachers who want to realize the potential of technology to engage learners and improve language learning inside and outside the classroom.

This practical guide shows teachers how to successfully incorporate technology into TBLT in the classroom and to develop technology-mediated materials. Whether the goal is to conduct a needs analysis, to develop classroom or homework materials, or to implement a new approach of student assessment, A Practical Guide to Integrating Technology into Task-Based Language Teaching will be a welcome resource for language teachers at all levels.

Designed for use in the classroom as well as for independent study, the book includes reflective questions, activities, and further reading at the end of each chapter. Examples of units in Chinese, Spanish, ESL, and the hospitality industry are provided.

Georgetown Digital Shorts—longer than an article, shorter than a book—deliver timely works of peer-reviewed scholarship for a fast-paced world. They present new ideas and original content that are easily digestable for students, scholars, and general readers.

[more]

The Promise of the Foreign

Nationalism and the Technics of Translation in the Spanish Philippines

Vicente L. Rafael

Duke University Press, 2005

In The Promise of the Foreign, Vicente L. Rafael argues that translation was key to the emergence of Filipino nationalism in the nineteenth century. Acts of translation entailed technics from which issued the promise of nationhood. Such a promise consisted of revising the heterogeneous and violent origins of the nation by mediating one’s encounter with things foreign while preserving their strangeness. Rafael examines the workings of the foreign in the Filipinos’ fascination with Castilian, the language of the Spanish colonizers. In Castilian, Filipino nationalists saw the possibility of arriving at a lingua franca with which to overcome linguistic, regional, and class differences. Yet they were also keenly aware of the social limits and political hazards of this linguistic fantasy.

Through close readings of nationalist newspapers and novels, the vernacular theater, and accounts of the 1896 anticolonial revolution, Rafael traces the deep ambivalence with which elite nationalists and lower-class Filipinos alike regarded Castilian. The widespread belief in the potency of Castilian meant that colonial subjects came in contact with a recurring foreignness within their own language and society. Rafael shows how they sought to tap into this uncanny power, seeing in it both the promise of nationhood and a menace to its realization. Tracing the genesis of this promise and the ramifications of its betrayal, Rafael sheds light on the paradox of nationhood arising from the possibilities and risks of translation. By repeatedly opening borders to the arrival of something other and new, translation compels the nation to host foreign presences to which it invariably finds itself held hostage. While this condition is perhaps common to other nations, Rafael shows how its unfolding in the Philippine colony would come to be claimed by Filipinos, as would the names of the dead and their ghostly emanations.

[more]

Pronouncing and Persevering

Gender and the Discourses of Disputing in an African Islamic Court

Susan F. Hirsch

University of Chicago Press, 1998

The title of Susan Hirsch's study of disputes involving Swahili Muslims in coastal Kenya reflects the image of gender relations most commonly associated with Islamic law. Men need only "pronounce" divorce to resolve marital conflicts, while embattled and embittered wives must persevere by silently enduring marital hardships. But Hirsch's observations of Islamic courts uncover how Muslim women actively use legal processes to transform their domestic lives, achieving victories on some fronts but reinforcing their image as subordinate to men through the speech they produce in court.

Pronouncing and Persevering focuses closely on the language used in disputes, particularly how men and women narrate their claims and how their speech shapes and is shaped by gender hierarchy in postcolonial Swahili society. Based on field research and court testimony, Hirsch's book debunks the conventional view that women are powerless under Islamic law and challenges the dichotomies through which Islam and gender relations are currently understood.

[more]

The Prose of the World

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Northwestern University Press, 1973

The work that Maurice Merleau-Ponty planned to call The Prose of the World, or Introduction to the Prose of the World, was unfinished at the time of his death. The book was to constitute the first section of a two-part work whose aim was to offer, as an extension of his Phenomenology of Perception, a theory of truth. This edition's editor, Claude Lefort, has interpreted and transcribed the surviving typescript, reproducing Merleau-Ponty's own notes and adding documentation and commentary.

[more]