Language And Linguistics In Context

Taking a sociocultural and educational approach, Language and Linguistics in Context: Readings and Applications for Teachers: *introduces basic linguistic concepts and current perspectives on language acquisition; *considers the role of linguistic change (especially in English) in the politics of language; *acknowledges the role of linguists in current policies involving language; *offers insights into the relationship between the structure of language systems and first- and second-language acquisition; the study of language across culture, class, race, gender, and ethnicity; and between language study and literacy and education; and *provides readers with a basis for understanding current educational debates about bilingual education, non-standard dialects, English only movements, literacy methodologies, and generally the importance to teaching of the study of language. The text is organized into three thematic units – "What is Language and How is It Acquired?"; "How Does Language Change?"; and "What is Literacy?". To achieve both breadth and depth – that is, to provide a “big picture” view of basic linguistics and at the same time make it specific enough for the beginner – a selection of readings, including personal language narratives, is provided to both introduce and clarify linguistic concepts. The readings, by well-known theoretical and applied linguists and researchers from various disciplines, are diverse in level and range of topics and vary in level of linguistic formalism. Pedagogical features: This text is designed for a range of courses in English and language arts, bilingualism, applied linguistics, and ESL courses in teacher education programs. Each unit contains a substantive introduction to the topic, followed by the readings. Each reading concludes with Questions to Think About including one Extending Your Understanding question, and a short list of Terms to Define. Each unit ends with additional Extending Your Understanding and Making Connections activities that engage readers in applying what they have read to teaching and suggested projects and a bibliography of Print and Web Resources. The readings and apparatus are arranged so that the material can be modified to fit many course plans and schemes of presentation. To help individual instructors make the most effective use of the text in specific classes, a set of matrixes is provided suggesting configurations of readings for different types of linguistics and education classes.

Language and Context breaks new ground in our understanding of the relationship between register, genre and context. Leckie-Tarry argues convincingly and engagingly for a functional theory of language which specifies register in terms of contextual and linguistic features, and which suggests a discursive relationship between the two. Moving beyond the limits of much of today's theory, this accessible volume develops a theoretical understanding of the relationship between text, context, langage function and linguistic form. Helen Leckie-Tarry, a specialist in the area of 'register and applied linguistics', died in 1991, aged 49. Although she had finished a large part of this work, her notes and draft chapters have been extensively edited by Professor David Birch. David Birch is currently Professor of Communication and media Studies at Central Queensland University, Australia, and previously taught at Murdoch University, Western Australia, and the National University of Singapore.

Sign Languages: Structures and Contexts provides a succinct summary of major findings in the linguistic study of natural sign languages. Focusing on American Sign Language (ASL), this book: offers a comprehensive introduction to the basic grammatical components of phonology, morphology, and syntax with examples and illustrations; demonstrates how sign languages are acquired by Deaf children with varying degrees of input during early development, including no input where children create a language of their own; discusses the contexts of sign languages, including how different varieties are formed and used, attitudes towards sign languages, and how language planning affects language use; is accompanied by e-resources, which host links to video clips. Offering an engaging and accessible introduction to sign languages, this book is essential reading for students studying this topic for the first time with little or no background in linguistics.

This volume reconsiders the problem of context in language testing and other modes of assessment from the perspective of transdisciplinarity. Transdisciplinary assessment research brings together collaborators who draw on the strengths of their differing backgrounds and expertise in order to address high-stakes complex socially-relevant problems. Traditional treatments of context in language assessment research have generally been informed by individualist cognitive theories within measurement and psychometrics. The additive potential of alternative social theories, including theories of genre, situated learning, distributed cognition, and intercultural communication, has largely been overlooked. In this book, the benefits of socio-theoretical reconsiderations of context are discussed and further exemplified in transdisciplinary research studies that investigate the use of assessment in classroom and workplace settings. The book offers a renewed view of context in arguments for the validity of assessment practices, and will be of interest to assessment researchers, practitioners, and students in applied linguistics, education, educational psychology, language testing, and other related disciplines and fields.

In the humanities and social sciences, context is one of those terms which is frequently used and frequently referred to, but hardly made explicit. This book proposes a model for describing the multifaceted connectedness between language and language use, and between cognitive context, linguistic context, social context and sociocultural context and their underlying principles of well-formedness, grammaticality, acceptability and appropriateness. Combining a range of theoretical frameworks in linguistics, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis and philosophy of language, Fetzer goes beyond the unilateral conception of speech and argues for a dialogue outlook on natural-language communication based on dialogue principles and dialogue categories. The most important ones are cooperation, joint production, micro and macro communicative intentions, micro and macro validity claims, co-suppositions, dialogue-common ground and communicative genre.

Proposing a new methodological approach to documenting languages spoken in multilingual societies, this book retraces the investigation of one unique linguistic space, the Creole varieties referred to as Takitaki in multilingual French Guiana. It illustrates how interactional sociolinguistic, anthropological linguistic, discourse analytical and quantitative sociolinguistic approaches can be integrated with structural approaches to language in order to resolve rarely discussed questions systematically (what are the outlines of the community, who is a rightful speaker, what speech should be documented) that frequently crop up in projects of language documentation in multilingual contexts. The authors argue that comprehensively documenting complex linguistic phenomena requires taking into account the views of all local social actors (native and non native speakers, institutions, linguists, non-speakers etc.), applying a range of complementary data collection and analysis methods and putting issues of ideology, variation, language contact and interaction centre stage. This book will be welcomed by researchers in sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, fieldwork studies, language documentation and language variation and change.

The chapters in this book all address the significance of the relationship between the aims and methods of language teaching and the contexts in which it takes place. Some consider the implications for the ways in which we research language teaching; others present the results of research and development work.

Context is a core notion of linguistic theory. However, while there are numerous attempts at explaining single aspects of the notion of context, these attempts are rather diverse and do not easily converge to a unified theory of context. The present multi-faceted collection of papers reconsiders the notion of context and its challenges for linguistics from different theoretical and empirical angles. Part I offers insights into a wide range of current approaches to context, including theoretical pragmatics, neurolinguistics, clinical pragmatics, interactional linguistics, and psycholinguistics. Part II presents new empirical findings on the role of context from case studies on idioms, unarticulated constituents, argument linking, and numerically-quantified expressions. Bringing together different theoretical frameworks, the volume provides thought-provoking discussions of how the notion of context can be understood, modeled, and implemented in linguistics. It is essential for researchers interested in theoretical and applied linguistics, the semantics/pragmatics interface, and experimental pragmatics.