This volume presents a selection of essays discussing recent developments in genre theory. It furthermore reflects the current research of members of the Swiss Association of North American Studies.

Absent Rebels: Criticism and Network Power in 21st Century Dystopian Fiction focuses on the relationship between literary dystopia, network power and neoliberalism, explaining why rebellion against a dystopian system is absent in so many contemporary dystopian novels. Also, this book helps readers understand modern power mechanisms and shows ways how to overcome them in our own daily lives.

An increasing number of multilingual students, often with a migration background, are attending elementary schools in Germany these days. Also on the rise is the number of schools offering a bilingual program, where content subjects such as science and mathematics are taught in a foreign language. This book explores minority and majority language students' German and English reading and writing skills in elementary schools which offer either regular English-as-subject lessons or bilingual programs with varying degrees of English intensity. The focus is on effects of foreign language input intensity with respect to students' language background, gender, cognitive abilities, and socio-economic background. This book also provides recommendations for English reading and writing activities in the elementary school classroom.

Side-Stepping Normativity: Selected Short Stories by Sylvia Townsend Warner discusses Sylvia Townsend Warner's highly innovative narrative style, which does not conform to conventional modernist or postmodernist standards, and explores how Warner's short stories shift to off-centre positions. Side-Stepping Normativity further outlines the way in which Warner constantly challenges the categories we apply to classify our surroundings and analyses how Warner succeeds in creating queer, that is, non-heteronormative as well strange and peculiar stories without explicitly opposing the so-called norms of her time. In this, Side-Stepping Normativity joins a vibrant conversation in queer studies which revolves around the question how critics can approach literary texts from a non-antagonistic position. Rather than focussing on the role of the critic, however, this thesis shows that Warner's texts have long achieved what queer theorists seek to achieve on an analytical level.

Approaching collocations from a usage-based perspective, this study investigates how the development of collocational proficiency in first and second language attainment could be explained. Against the background of recent approaches in cognitive linguistics such as construction grammar and Complex Adaptive Systems it argues that collocations should not be regarded as idiosyncratic phraseological items, which, depending on their degree of fixedness and semantic opaqueness, can be classified along a gradient of idiomaticity. Thus, this study regards collocations as dynamic linguistic phenomena, which could be seen as subject to constant change rather than more or less static combinations with an additional level of syntagmatic and paradigmatic restrictions. Furthermore it explores how creative changes and alternations of collocations can be used to learn more about a speakers cognitive processing of these phraseological phenomena and how this process might be influenced by language external factors such as age, education or context.

The ongoing digitalization of social environments and personal lifeworlds has made it crucial to pinpoint the possibilities of digital teaching and learning also in the context of English language education. This book offers university students, trainee teachers, in-service teachers and teacher educators an in-depth exploration of the intricate relationship between English language education and digital teaching and learning. Located at the intersection of research, theory and teaching practice, it thoroughly legitimizes the use of digital media in English language education and provides concrete scenarios for their competence-oriented and task-based classroom use.