Bücher veröffentlicht von Multilingual Matters

This book traces a history of bilingual education in the US, unveiling the role of politics in policy development and implementation. It introduces readers to past systemic supports for creation of diverse bilingual educational programs and situates particular instances and phases of expansion and decline within related sociopolitical backdrops.

This book questions assumptions about the nature of language and how language is conceptualized. Looking at diverse contexts from sign languages in Indonesia to literacy practices in Brazil, from hip-hop in the US to education in Bosnia and Herzegovina, this book forcefully argues that a critique of common linguistic and metalinguistic suppositions is not only a conceptual but also a sociopolitical necessity. Just as many notions of language are highly suspect, so too are many related concepts premised on a notion of discrete languages, such as language rights, mother tongues, multilingualism, or code-switching. Definitions of language in language policies, education and assessment have material and often harmful consequences for people. Unless we actively engage with the history of invention of languages in order to radically change and reconstitute the ways in which languages are taught and conceptualized, language studies will not be able to improve the social welfare of language users.

Here creative writers who are also university teachers monitor their contribution to this popular discipline in essays that indicate how far it has come in the USA, the UK and Australia. Chapters range across all three areas of its subtitle - practice, research and pedagogy - charting creative writing's evolution as a site of knowledge.

This book explores issues of inter/intra-social agency and identity construction. It features studies in such diverse fields as interpreting, audiovisual translation and the translation of political discourse and literary texts. It demonstrates that translation is an act of negotiating fault lines between 'us' and cultural or political 'others'.

This text looks at how computers are being used in primary classrooms and how they could be used better. Its three sections focus upon: how do we investigate learning through talk around computers? What affects the quality of group work around computers? What can teachers do to improve this?

It is now widely recognised that learning a language should not just involve linguistic competence but also intercultural competence. It is also clear that intercultural competence can be developed through related subjects such as geography, history, mother tongue teaching. This book takes this as a given and provides practical help for teachers who wish to help their learners acquire intercultural competence in the ordinary classroom. It contains descriptions of lessons and materials from a wide range of classrooms in several countries and for beginners to advanced learners.

This book offers a comprehensive investigation into advanced students' knowledge of vocabulary in their L1 and L2. This cross-sectional study examines the qualitative and quantitative aspects of students' vocabulary knowledge in subfields such as suffixation, idioms and proverbs, multi-word verbs, polysemous words and inferencing skills.

This book examines the various ways in which age affects the process and the product of foreign language learning in a school setting. It presents studies that cover a wide range of topics, from phonetics to learning strategies. It will be of interest to students and researchers working in SLA research, language planning and language teaching.

This book explores bilingual community education, specifically the educational spaces shaped and organized by American ethnolinguistic communities for their children in the multilingual city of New York. Employing a rich variety of case studies which highlight the importance of the ethnolinguistic community in bilingual education, this collection examines the various structures that these communities use to educate their children as bilingual Americans. In doing so, it highlights the efforts and activism of these communities and what bilingual community education really means in today's globalized world. The volume offers new understandings of heritage language education, bilingual education, and speech communities for bilingual Americans in the 21st century.

SLA literature tends to focus predominantly on what motivates language learners, but what demotivates them has not been widely discussed. This book, focusing exclusively on demotivation, will help readers to understand motivational issues from a different perspective. The aims of the work are threefold: to present the current developments of demotivation research in the field of SLA and bridge motivational theory/research and demotivation research; to promote the understanding of possible causes of demotivation; and to expand the focus of demotivation research through a reflection on current motivation theory/research and a discussion of methodological issues. The research presented in this book is situated in Japanese English-teaching contexts and will serve as a foundation for anyone wishing to better understand the causes of demotivation in SLA and to explore the topic in their own contexts.

This book addresses the ways in which languages education around the world has changed in recent years to recognise and reflect the increasing phenomenon of societal multilingualism. It examines the implications for research, theory, policy and practice.

This book includes the work of specialists working in various educational contexts to create comprehensive coverage of current bilingual initiatives. Themes covered include issues in language use in classrooms; participant perspectives on bilingual education experiences; and the language needs of bi-/multilingual students in monolingual schools.

Mathematics classrooms are increasingly multilingual, whether they are found in linguistically diverse societies, urban melting pots or planned bilingual programs. The chapters in this book present and discuss examples of mathematics classroom life from a range of multilingual classroom settings, and use these examples to draw out and discuss key issues for the teaching and learning of mathematics and language. These issues relate to pedagogy, students' learning, curriculum, assessment, policy and aspects of educational theory. The contributions are based on research conducted in mathematics classrooms in Europe, South Asia, North America and Australia. Recurring issues for the learning of mathematics include the relationship between language and mathematics, the relationship between formal and informal mathematical language, and the relationship between students' home languages and the official language of schooling.

This book presents the current state of knowledge in the vibrant and diverse field of vocabulary studies, summarising the latest empirical studies and providing a firm indication of the future of the field. The chapters cover the key themes of theorizing and measuring vocabulary knowledge, formulaic language, and learning and teaching vocabulary.

Third language acquisition is a common phenomenon, which presents some specific characteristics as compared to second language acquisition. This volume adopts a psycholinguistic approach in the study of cross-linguistic influence in third language acquisition and focuses on the role of previously acquired languages and the conditions that determine their influence.

This book explores the importance of cross-linguistic similarity in foreign language learning. While linguists have primarily focussed upon differences between languages, learners strive to make use of any similarities to prior linguistic knowledge they can perceive. The role of positive transfer is emphasized as well as the essential differences between comprehension and production. In comprehension of related languages, cross-linguistic similarities are easily perceived while in comprehension of distant languages they are merely assumed. Production may be based on previous perception of similarities, but frequently similarities are here merely assumed. Initially, effective learning is based on quick establishment of cross-linguistic one-to-one relations between individual items. As learning progresses, the learner learns to modify such oversimplified relations. The book describes the ways in which transfer affects different areas of language, taking account of the differences between learning a language perceived to be similar and a language where few or no cross-linguistic similarities can be established.

This book presents the first comprehensive overview of national laws recognising sign languages, their impacts and the advocacy campaigns which led to their creation. Each chapter is grounded in a collaborative writing approach between deaf and hearing scholars and activists involved in legislative campaigns.

This volume examines the agency of second/foreign language teachers in diverse geographical contexts and in both K-12 and adult education. It offers new understandings and conceptualizations of second/foreign language teacher agency through a variety of types of empirical data. It also demonstrates the use of different methodologies or analytic tools to study the multidimensional, dynamic and complex nature of second/foreign language teacher agency. The chapters draw on a range of theories and approaches to language teacher agency (including ecological theory, positioning theory, complexity theory and actor-network theory) that expand our understanding of the concept, while at the same time presenting various analytic approaches such as discourse studies and narrative inquiry. The chapters also analyze the connection of agency to other relevant topics, such as teacher identity, emotions, positioning and autonomy.

This book addresses several pressing concerns of teachers and researchers who are looking for ways to integrate technology use in and out of their classrooms and assess its usefulness in the learning process. It provides an up-to-date examination of technology-supported pedagogy and language acquisition in a variety of Japanese as a foreign or second language contexts. It equips readers with practical pedagogical information, including methods of implementation and learning assessment, and ideas for how technology can be applied to achieve a wide range of learning objectives. The topics examined include cultural learning, identity construction, speaking, reading, writing, pronunciation, collaborative online learning, digital and 3D virtual reality games, online text analysis, and participation in online communities. In addition, different e-learning configurations such as flipped, online, and distance learning classrooms are explored. Studies examine various current technologies (e.g. blogs, synchronous/asynchronous telecollaboration, corpus analysis software, modern pronunciation tools) and will have both direct and indirect consequences for teaching and learning a second/foreign language with technology across all languages.

Modern languages are taught to young learners at an increasingly early age, yet few studies focus on what is available to children in different contexts and classrooms. This book examines current research on young language learners and provides key insights into how young learners progress.

This volume is the most complete of any published concerning the nine native languages of Quebec: Abenaki, Algonquin, Atikamekw, Cree, Inuktitut, Micmac, Mohawk, Montagnais and Naskapi.