Newly arrived Chinese immigrant students face the hardest imaginable situation in the classroom: most often, this is the only place where they can listen to and practice English, having little if any opportunity to do so at home. The burden is then on the teacher to further these students' English education and at the same time create a classroom environment that appreciates and respects their culture and language. Danling Fu has experienced these difficulties firsthand as a teacher, as a student, and as a parent. In An Island of English, she brings together her extensive research in New York's Chinatown, where she worked as a literacy consultant at the Dr. Sun Yat Sen Middle School, her personal story as an immigrant, and the stories of her son as an immigrant student. She extends her findings to other immigrant populations and applies her keen research talents to devise practical recommendations for educators and policymakers.

From the author of "The Cheese and the Worms" comes a quartet of luminous explorations into English literature, from Sir Thomas More to Robert Louis Stevenson. 14 illustrations.

Before New York Times bestselling author Bill Bryson wrote The Road to Little Dribbling, he took this delightfully irreverent jaunt around the unparalleled floating nation of Great Britain, which has produced zebra crossings, Shakespeare, Twiggie Winkie’s Farm, and places with names like Farleigh Wallop and Titsey.

While shipwrecked on the island of Pala, Will Farnaby, a disenchanted journalist, discovers a utopian society that has flourished for the past 120 years. Although he at first disregards the possibility of an ideal society, as Farnaby spends time with the people of Pala his ideas about humanity change. HarperPerennial Classics brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperPerennial Classics collection to build your digital library.

This book is part of the Island Alphabet Books series, which features languages and childrens' artwork from the U.S.-affiliated Pacific. Each hardcover book contains the complete alphabet for the language, four or five examples for each letter, and a word list with English translations. The series was co-published with Pacific Resources for Education and Learning, a non-profit corporation that works collaboratively with school systems to enhance education across the Pacific.

“The essential public good that Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair and now Cameron sell is not power stations, or trains, or hospitals. It’s the public itself. it’s us.” In a little over a generation the bones and sinews of the British economy – rail, energy, water, postal services, municipal housing – have been sold to remote, unaccountable private owners, often from overseas. In a series of brilliant portraits the award-winning novelist and journalist James Meek shows how Britain’s common wealth became private, and the impact it has had on us all: from the growing shortage of housing to spiralling energy bills. Meek explores the human stories behind the incremental privatization of the nation over the last three decades. He shows how, as our national assets are sold, ordinary citizens are handed over to private tax-gatherers, and the greatest burden of taxes shifts to the poorest. In the end, it is not only public enterprises that have become private property, but we ourselves. Urgent, powerfully written and deeply moving, this is a passionate anatomy of the state of the nation: of what we have lost and what losing it cost us – the rent we must pay to exist on this private island.

Think of England, and anger hardly springs to mind as its primary national characteristic. Yet in The Angry Island, A. A. Gill argues that, in fact, it is plain old fury that is the wellspring for England's accomplishments. The default setting of England is anger. The English are naturally, congenitally, collectively and singularly livid much of the time. They're incensed, incandescent, splenetic, prickly, touchy, and fractious. They can be mildly annoyed, really annoyed and, most scarily, not remotely annoyed. They sit apart on their half of a damply disappointing little island, nursing and picking at their irritations. The English itch inside their own skins. They feel foreign in their own country and run naked through their own heads. Perhaps aware that they're living on top of a keg of fulminating fury, the English have, throughout their history, come up with hundreds of ingenious and bizarre ways to diffuse anger or transform it into something benign. Good manners and queues, cul-de-sacs and garden sheds, and almost every game ever invented from tennis to bridge. They've built things, discovered stuff, made puddings, written hymns and novels, and for people who don't like to talk much, they have come up with the most minutely nuanced and replete language ever spoken -- just so there'll be no misunderstandings. The Angry Island by turns attacks and praises the English, bringing up numerous points of debate for Anglophiles and anyone who wonders about the origins of national identity. This book hunts down the causes and the results of being the Angry Island.