This book is dedicated to the notion of languaging, which has recently gained recognition across many disciplines. From philosophy to linguistics, the foundations of the concept rest on the assumption that language is a way of knowing, making personal sense of the world, becoming conscious of oneself, and a means of creating one's identity. The very notion of languaging is still a fresh and unexplored concept in applied linguistics and deserves careful scrutiny. For this reason, the volume is ...

Second Language Educational Experiences for Adult Learners explains the latest research on adult learning and then applies that work to specifically address second language learning. In the foundational chapters, this book introduces some of the differences between language learning for adults. In the second half of the volume, the authors move to consider educational design in chapters on curriculum, materials, assessment, and technology. This is an essential book for researchers and students interested in the science of language learning or anyone looking to better understand the science of adult education.

This volume brings together studies dealing with second language learning in contexts that provide intensive exposure to the target language. In doing so, it highlights the role of intensive exposure as a critical distinctive characteristic in the comparison of learning processes and outcomes from different learning contexts: naturalistic and foreign language instruction, stay abroad and at home, and extensive and intensive instruction programmes. The different chapters represent a wide range of learning contexts and types of learning, as well as different approaches that yield much needed evidence on the role of context of acquisition in second language learning.

A new approach to the idea of grace. The author isolates certain common themes consistently present in the traditional language of grace and reinterprets them in terms of the concept of liberation.

This book is a timely comparison of the divergent worlds of policy implementation and policy ambition, the messy, often contradictory here-and-now reality of languages in schools and the sharp-edged, shiny, future-oriented representation of languages in policy. Two deep rooted tendencies in Australian political and social life, multiculturalism and Asian regionalism, are represented as key phases in the country’s experimentation with language education planning. Presenting data from a five year ethnographic study combined with a 40 year span of policy analysis, this volume is a rare book length treatment of the chasm between imagined policy and its experienced delivery, and will provide insights that policymakers around the world can draw on.

This book brings together the voices of teacher educators working in different national and educational settings. It Covers themes such as change in teacher education practices, the influences of context on practice, and of interculturality, to provide rich insights into the processes and effects of second language teacher education.

The concept of "funds of knowledge" is based on a simple premise: people are competent and have knowledge, and their life experiences have given them that knowledge. The claim in this book is that first-hand research experiences with families allow one to document this competence and knowledge, and that such engagement provides many possibilities for positive pedagogical actions. Drawing from both Vygotskian and neo-sociocultural perspectives in designing a methodology that views the everyday practices of language and action as constructing knowledge, the funds of knowledge approach facilitates a systematic and powerful way to represent communities in terms of the resources they possess and how to harness them for classroom teaching. This book accomplishes three objectives: It gives readers the basic methodology and techniques followed in the contributors' funds of knowledge research; it extends the boundaries of what these researchers have done; and it explores the applications to classroom practice that can result from teachers knowing the communities in which they work. In a time when national educational discourses focus on system reform and wholesale replicability across school sites, this book offers a counter-perspective stating that instruction must be linked to students' lives, and that details of effective pedagogy should be linked to local histories and community contexts. This approach should not be confused with parent participation programs, although that is often a fortuitous consequence of the work described. It is also not an attempt to teach parents "how to do school" although that could certainly be an outcome if the parents so desired. Instead, the funds of knowledge approach attempts to accomplish something that may be even more challenging: to alter the perceptions of working-class or poor communities by viewing their households primarily in terms of their strengths and resources, their defining pedagogical characteristics. Funds of Knowledge: Theorizing Practices in Households, Communities, and Classrooms is a critically important volume for all teachers and teachers-to-be, and for researchers and graduate students of language, culture, and education.