Get the conversation started—at your book club, writer’s group, or any friendly get-together—with these 100 reading-themed questions. Some invoke books that are tied to memories (name your favorite childhood picture book); others prompt you to choose ideal reading material for a hypothetical situation (if you were stranded on a desert island, what book would you want with you?). Some of them aim to get people comparing their favorite (and not-so-favorite) characters or authors, and others engage in popular debates among readers (name a movie adaptation you liked and defend your choice). Created to give readers of all persuasions an excuse to talk about books, ideas, and life itself, this collection from the largest independent community for book lovers in North America is a delight for any bibliophile. Reading is a solitary experience—but being a reader is a shared experience, and that shared experience is what Lit Chat is all about.

This is a complete overview of the XMPP instant messaging protocol that gives developers the tools they need to build applications for real-time communication.

Although cognitive processes are fundamental in shaping the language that we speak, they are often overlooked in language teaching and learning. This groundbreaking book addresses how to use key cognitive linguistic (CL) concepts to analyze the Chinese language and to advance L2 Chinese teaching and learning. It presents an overview of the most prominent CL research published in both Chinese and English and explores how it applies to L1 and L2 Chinese studies. Including sample lesson plans and classroom activities, it demonstrates to language teachers how to use CL-based approaches to explain and teach a wide range of linguistic phenomena to their students. Researchers will also gain new insights from the summaries of recent advances and contrastive analyses between English and Chinese. Covering up-to-date research, yet written in a clear and engaging style, it will foster a new understanding of teaching and learning Chinese.

Clearly organized and beautifully written, Interpreting Literature With Children is a remarkable book that stands on the edge of two textbook genres: the survey of literature text and the literary criticism text. Neither approach, however, says enough about how children respond to literature in everyday classroom situations. That is the mission of this book. It begins by providing a solid foundation in both approaches and then examines multiple ways of developing children's literary interpretation through talk, through culture, class, and gender, as well as through creative modes of expression, including writing, the visual arts, and drama. The result is a balanced resource for teachers who want to deepen their understanding of literature and literary engagement. Because of its modest length and price and its ongoing focus on how to increase student engagement with literature, either pre-service or practicing teachers can use this text in children's literature, language arts, or literacy and language courses.

¿Qué pasa, gringo? Whether at a cantina in Mexico or a discothèque in Spain, you better know how to shoot the s#*!. Luckily for you, Talk Dirty: Spanish dishes all the dirty sayings in a variety of dialects. Packed with plenty of four-letter words, habañero-hot insults, and wicked expressions, this book will have you speaking like a true hombre. The Spanish-to-English translations will help you learn all the latest foreign slang, such as: De puta madre: of the prostitute mother Spanish Phrase:¡Mi tío tiende un coche de puta madre! Translation: My uncle has a fantastic car! Literal Translation: My uncle has a car of a prostitute mother! Talk Dirty: Spanish--all you need for a sharper tongue and set of cojones.

Successful speaking and understanding requires mechanisms for reliably encoding structured linguistic representations in memory and for effectively accessing information in those representations later. Studying the time-course of real-time linguistic dependency formation provides a valuable tool for uncovering the cognitive and neural basis of these mechanisms. This volume draws together multiple perspectives on encoding and navigating structured linguistic representations, to highlight important empirical insights, and to identify key priorities for new research in this area.