These papers from "The Creating Word" conference at the University of Alberta look directly at the challenges facing English teachers in the 1980s. Eleven notable educators address topics of rhetoric, deconstructionism, transactional analysis, creative writing, reader-response theories, language arts methodology, and computer technology.

The main aim of this book is to connect in a straightforward way the growing body of second language vocabulary research with teacher actions in classrooms. Words are pervasive in our life. The words that we use express and shape our identity. Our vocabulary gives away our social and educational background. It is a major factor in determining what we understand. It opens or closes access to sources of information that will impact our future. Today vocabulary acquisition is considered an integral area of language teaching by linguists, teachers and researchers. They have come to understand the role of lexicon in language learning and communication. Therefore during the past three decades, the field of second language acquisition has seen renewed interest in vocabulary learning. But the scene was different few decades ago. For many years vocabulary was considered unimportant in language teaching. Its neglect in part may be due to specialisation in linguistic research on syntax and phonology. This may have fostered a climate in which vocabulary was considered an unimportant element in the learning of a second or foreign language. This view largely dominated the 1940’s, 1950’s and 1960’s. The period between 1940-60 was an uncertain period for vocabulary as an aspect of language teaching. In this period vocabulary was seen mainly as a problem of selection and gradation for the target learners. It was only in 1970’s that vocabulary was given some place of importance in language teaching but still it was considered less important when compared with syntax and phonology. For years, second language learners have complained about their lack of vocabulary in their new language. During this time, experts in our field did not give much importance to vocabulary. However, since the mid-1990s there has been a renewed interest in research on second language vocabulary issues such as student needs, teaching techniques, learner strategies, incidental learning and vocabulary for specific purpose. Today lexical knowledge is acknowledged to be central to communicative competence and the acquisition and development of second language. This study is probably the first systematic attempt to expand the students’ active vocabulary and to create word-consciousness in the classroom. The aim of the present study is to examine students’ knowledge of vocabulary at the college level and note the problem areas and follow the eclectic method to increase the students’ word power in order to enable them to use more precise words instead of general ones. The students are taught words in lexical sets for quick expansion of vocabulary and they are also made to consider the paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations of words for better understanding of word meanings. Chapter I of this book deals with English as an international language and its position in India today. It also highlights the importance of vocabulary, aspects of vocabulary and the principles of selection and gradation of vocabulary. Chapter II reviews the work already done in the field of vocabulary. Chapter III focuses on the aims and procedure adopted in the present study. It also highlights techniques of teaching new words and expanding vocabulary. Chapter IV presents an analysis of the data collected. The relative difficulty level of different questions in the pre-test and the post-test, the students’ progress in the use of vocabulary and the conclusions of the study are presented in this chapter. I sincerely hope that the present study and the discussions will have an impact on the way teachers and learners view the teaching and learning of vocabulary in a second language.

Since the American Revolution, there has been broad cultural consensus that “the people” are the only legitimate ground of public authority in the United States. For just as long, there has been disagreement over who the people are and how they should be represented or institutionally embodied. In Constituent Moments, Jason Frank explores this dilemma of authorization: the grounding of democratic legitimacy in an elusive notion of the people. Frank argues that the people are not a coherent or sanctioned collective. Instead, the people exist as an effect of successful claims to speak on their behalf; the power to speak in their name can be vindicated only retrospectively. The people, and democratic politics more broadly, emerge from the dynamic tension between popular politics and representation. They spring from what Frank calls “constituent moments,” moments when claims to speak in the people’s name are politically felicitous, even though those making such claims break from established rules and procedures for representing popular voice. Elaborating his theory of constituent moments, Frank focuses on specific historical instances when under-authorized individuals or associations seized the mantle of authority, and, by doing so, changed the inherited rules of authorization and produced new spaces and conditions for political representation. He looks at crowd actions such as parades, riots, and protests; the Democratic-Republican Societies of the 1790s; and the writings of Walt Whitman and Frederick Douglass. Frank demonstrates that the revolutionary establishment of the people is not a solitary event, but rather a series of micropolitical enactments, small dramas of self-authorization that take place in the informal contexts of crowd actions, political oratory, and literature as well as in the more formal settings of constitutional conventions and political associations.

Epic into Novel looks at Henry Fielding's adaptation of classical epic in the context of what he called the 'Trade of . . . authoring'. Fielding was always keen to stress that his novels were modelled on classical literature. Equally, he was fascinated by—and wrote at length about—the fact that they were objects to be consumed. He recognised that he wrote in an age when an author had to consider himself 'as one who keeps a public Ordinary, at which all persons are welcome for their Money.' In describing his work, he alludes both to Homeric epic and to contemporary cookery books. This tension in Fielding's work has gone unexplored, a tension between his commitment to a classical tradition and his immersion in a print culture in which books were consumable commodities. This interest in the place of the ancients in a world of consumerism was inherited from the previous generation of satirists. The 'Scriblerians'—among them Jonathan Swift, John Gay, and Alexander Pope—repeatedly suggest in their work that classical values are at odds with modern tastes and appetites. Fielding, who had idolised these writers as a young man, developed many of their satiric routines in his own writing. But Fielding broke from Swift, Gay, and Pope in creating a version of epic designed to appeal to modern consumers. Henry Power provides new readings of works by Swift, Gay, and Pope, and of Fielding's major novels. He examines Fielding's engagement with various Scriblerian themes—primarily the consumption of literature, but also the professionalisation of scholarship, and the status of the author—and shows ultimately that Fielding broke with the Scriblerians in acknowledging and celebrating the influence of the marketplace on his work.