A Critical Examination of Language and Community is the sixth volume of the Readings in Language Studies series published by the International Society for Language Studies, Inc. Edited by Paul Chamness Miller, Brian G. Rubrecht, Erin A. Mikulec, and Cu-Hullan Tsuyoshi McGivern, volume six sustains the society’s mission to organize and disseminate the work of its contributing members through peer-reviewed publications. The book presents international perspectives on language and community through a variety of themes. A resource for scholars and students, A Critical Examination of Language and Community represents the latest scholarship in new and emergent areas of inquiry. Readings in Language Studies, Volume 6: A Critical Examination of Language and Community features international contributions that represent state-of-the-field reviews, multi-disciplinary perspectives, theory-driven syntheses of current scholarship, reports of new empirical research, and critical discussions of major topics centered on the intersection of language and community. Consistent with the mission of ISLS, the collection of 14 chapters in this volume seeks to “bridge arbitrary disciplinary territories and provide a forum for both theoretical and empirical research, from existing and emergent research methodologies, for exploring the relationships among language, power, discourses, and social practices.”

Readings in Language Studies, Volume 6: A Critical Examination of Language and Community features international contributions that represent state-of-the-field reviews, multi-disciplinary perspectives, theory-driven syntheses of current scholarship, reports of new empirical research, and critical discussions focused on language and community.

Many American educators are all too familiar with disengaged students, disenfranchised teachers, sanitized and irrelevant curricula, inadequate support for the neediest schools and students, and the tyranny of standardizing testing. This text invites teachers and would-be teachers unhappy with such conditions to consider becoming critical educators - professionals dedicated to creating schools that genuinely provide equal opportunity for all children. Assuming little or no background in critical theory, chapters address several essential questions to help readers develop the understanding and resolve necessary to become change agents. Why do critical theorists say that education is always political? How do traditional and critical agendas for schools differ? Which agenda benefits whose children? What classroom and policy changes does critical practice require? What risks must change agents accept? Resources point readers toward opportunities to deepen their understanding beyond the limits of these pages.

This year-long instrumental multiple case study examined how four participants, from South Korea, People's Republic of China, and France, conceptualized the notion of race as newly arrived international graduate students and English language learners in the United States. The participants were graduate students who majored in areas not related to language studies at Utopia University, a predominantly White institution of higher education located in the Midwestern part of the United States. In this dissertation, I illustrate how my participants came to experience race in the U.S. as newcomers from abroad through exploring their lives in and outside of the university in their first year in residence. Drawing on Feagin's (2000) systemic racism and white racial frame (2006), and Lave and Wenger's (1991) communities of practice, I examine their socialization into new communities of practice, and the role of race in those processes. Findings showed that racialized Asian newcomers were not apprenticed to White-dominant communities of practice. However, the one white, non-Asian participant was able to gain membership into mainstream communities on and off campus partly because she was racialized as White. Racialized Asian newcomers struggled to start somewhere as peripheral participants in new communities of practice, but membership was often denied or marginalized. This study sheds light on the racialized participants' attempt to find safe spaces where they were able to form some level of friendship, and gain some level of acceptance, with English-speaking interlocutors. Although the study describes their difficulties in doing so, the racialized Asian participants were ultimately able to find safe spaces in their new environments. In this dissertation, I critically examined the theoretical framework of second language socialization used in applied linguistics and showed that second language socialization is possible only after racialized Asian participants could find safe spaces, in which they found possibilities for authentic socialization with English-speaking community members. In such spaces, White gatekeepers were found to play pivotal roles in creating and providing safe spaces. These findings suggest that there needs to be a restructuring of university campuses and a more equitable distribution of rights and responsibilities for newcomers in U.S. campuses.

Bringing together papers written by Norman Fairclough over a 25 year period, Critical Discourse Analysis represents a comprehensive and important contribution to the development of this popular field. The book is divided into seven sections covering the following themes: language in relation to ideology and power discourse in processes of social and cultural change dialectics of discourse, dialectical relations between discourse and other moments of social life methodology of critical discourse analysis research analysis of political discourse discourse in globalisation and ‘transition’ critical language awareness in education The new edition has been extensively revised and enlarged to include a total of twenty two papers. It will be of value to researchers in the subject and should prove essential reading for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students in Linguistics and other areas of social science.

Contributors explore a range of sociolinguistic topics, including language variation, language ideologies, bi/multilingualism, language policy, linguistic landscapes, and multimodality. Each chapter provides a critical overview of the limitations of modernist positivist perspectives, replacing them with novel, up-to-date ways of theorizing and researching. [Publisher]

Communities of Practice in Language Research provides an up-to-date and critical introduction to the community of practice framework and how this can be applied to language research. Critiquing and offering alternative suggestions for the ways in which researchers frame research participants as members of communities of practice, with the goal of inspiring use of the Community of Practice (CofP) model in new areas of research, this book: engages in extended critical analysis of past research as well as questioning recent applications and suggesting limitations incorporates instructive examples from multiple fields, including Sociolinguistics, Linguistic Anthropology, Critical Discourse Studies, Language Teaching & Learning, Literacy Studies, and a trailblazing section on Language & Digital Media brings up-to-date the key questions and concerns around the Communities of Practice model, debunking myths and re-emphasising ongoing challenges. Communities of Practice in Language Research is essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students studying research methods or undertaking research projects in those areas.