Language And The Joint Creation Of Knowledge

In the World Library of Educationalists series, international experts themselves compile career-long collections of what they judge to be their finest pieces – extracts from books, key articles, salient research findings, major theoretical and practical contributions – so the world can read them in a single manageable volume. Readers will be able to follow the themes and strands and see how their work contributes to the development of the field. Language and the Joint Creation of Knowledge draws on the most prominent writing of Neil Mercer, covering his ground-breaking and critically acclaimed work on the role of talk in education, and on the relationship between spoken language and cognition. The text explores key themes, relating theoretical ideas to research evidence and to practical educational situations that improve children’s lives. Offering students and researchers a clear, accessible and up-to-date account of a sociocultural perspective on the relationship between spoken language and cognition, it explains one of the key themes in Neil Mercer’s work – that humans have uniquely evolved the capacity to think together, or ‘interthink’. Offering a crucial insight into the work of Neil Mercer, this selection showcases why his approach has become the dominant paradigm in educational research, and why it is increasingly influential in the psychology of teaching and learning. This unique collection of published articles and chapters, which represent the key themes and range of his research over the last 40 years, will be of interest to all followers of his work and any reader interested in the role of language in education.

Through analyzing talk which goes on in primary school classrooms and some other locations, this text explains the process of teaching and learning as a social, communicative activity. It contains transcribed episodes of speech between learners and teachers, and learners to learners. The concepts described should be useful for teachers concerned with the quality of education in their classrooms.

Words and Minds takes a lively and accessible look at the evolution of language and how we use language in joint activities.

Introduction to Mass Communication: Media Literacy and Culture is an integrated program that encourages students to be active media consumers and gives them a deeper understanding of the role that the media plays in both shaping and reflecting culture. Through this cultural perspective, students learn that audience members are as much a part of the mass communication process as are the media producers, technologies, and industries. This was the first, and remains the only, university-level program to make media literacy central to its approach, and given recent national and global turmoil, its emphasis on media use and democracy could not be more timely. New for the eighth edition, Connect Mass Communication combines contemporary course content and groundbreaking digital tools to create a unique learning environment. With Connect Mass Communication, the Introduction to Mass Communication: Media Literacy and Culture program integrates an interactive eBook with dynamic online activities and assignments that help students study more efficiently and effectively. A new bank of CNN videos helps students learn the impact of media through a cultural and global lens. LearnSmart, McGraw-Hill’s adaptive learning system, assesses students’ knowledge of course content and maps out personalized study plans for success.

How do children acquire language? How does real life language acquisition differ from results found in controlled environments? And how is modern life challenging established theories? Going far beyond laboratory experiments, the International Handbook of Language Acquisition examines a wide range of topics surrounding language development to shed light on how children acquire language in the real world. The foremost experts in the field cover a variety of issues, from the underlying cognitive processes and role of language input to development of key language dimensions as well as both typical and atypical language development. Horst and Torkildsen balance a theoretical foundation with data acquired from applied settings to offer a truly comprehensive reference book with an international outlook. The International Handbook of Language Acquisition is essential reading for graduate students and researchers in language acquisition across developmental psychology, developmental neuropsychology, linguistics, early childhood education, and communication disorders.

This book conveys the fundamentals of Linked Lexical Knowledge Bases (LLKB) and sheds light on their different aspects from various perspectives, focusing on their construction and use in natural language processing (NLP). It characterizes a wide range of both expert-based and collaboratively constructed lexical knowledge bases. Only basic familiarity with NLP is required and this book has been written for both students and researchers in NLP and related fields who are interested in knowledge-based approaches to language analysis and their applications. Lexical Knowledge Bases (LKBs) are indispensable in many areas of natural language processing, as they encode human knowledge of language in machine readable form, and as such, they are required as a reference when machines attempt to interpret natural language in accordance with human perception. In recent years, numerous research efforts have led to the insight that to make the best use of available knowledge, the orchestrated exploitation of different LKBs is necessary. This allows us to not only extend the range of covered words and senses, but also gives us the opportunity to obtain a richer knowledge representation when a particular meaning of a word is covered in more than one resource. Examples where such an orchestrated usage of LKBs proved beneficial include word sense disambiguation, semantic role labeling, semantic parsing, and text classification. This book presents different kinds of automatic, manual, and collaborative linkings between LKBs. A special chapter is devoted to the linking algorithms employing text-based, graph-based, and joint modeling methods. Following this, it presents a set of higher-level NLP tasks and algorithms, effectively utilizing the knowledge in LLKBs. Among them, you will find advanced methods, e.g., distant supervision, or continuous vector space models of knowledge bases (KB), that have become widely used at the time of this book's writing. Finally, multilingual applications of LLKB's, such as cross-lingual semantic relatedness and computer-aided translation are discussed, as well as tools and interfaces for exploring LLKBs, followed by conclusions and future research directions.