Learning The Arts Of Linguistic Survival

Telling the stories of the experience of learning and speaking tourist languages, this book takes the reader on a journey through risk, way finding, mistakes, laughter, conversations and the imagination. It provides descriptions of the world of language learning. It examines what happens when tourists learn to speak other languages.

In this ground-breaking contribution to the study of tourism and languages, Alison Phipps examines what happens when tourists learn to speak other languages. From ordering a coffee to following directions she argues for a new perception of the relationship between tourism and languages from one based on the acquisition of basic, functional skills to one which sustains and even strengthens intercultural dialogue. The twelve chapters comprising this book tell stories of the experience of learning and speaking tourist languages. Drawing on a range of disciplines Alison Phipps takes the reader on a journey through risk, way finding, mistakes, laughter, conversations and the imagination. She provides rich descriptions of the world of language learning which has remained invisible to mainstream studies of language education, existing as it does on the margins of educational life. She shows how tourism is shaped by the learning experiences of everyday life. Languages, she argues passionately, fundamentally change the nature of perception, dwelling and relationships to other people and the world. This book will be essential reading for all those interested in tourism studies and in modern languages education. It is a timely study, coming at time of crisis in languages, as English exerts its power as a world language and as a dominant language of tourism. Learning the Arts of Linguistic Survival: Languaging, Tourism, Life will also be of interest to anthropologists, linguists, geographers, sociologists and those studying education.

This book presents a radical turn in Second Language Acquisition research by introducing a conceptual paradigm that challenges rationalist, instrumental and empiricist approaches to language learning theory. It argues for a shift in focus from measuring the effectiveness of language learning processes to humanising the language learning experience. This new paradigm explores the force of affect, the imagination and creativity and their roles in assembling language learners' intimate worlds. 'The personal' is reclaimed and acts as driving force for language learning and the sphere in which learners engage both their minds and bodies in a constant socialization of feelings and emotions. The author provides examples from real language learners using a variety of modern languages to provide insights on the kind of personal worlds that languages compel us to inhabit. This book will be of interest to those working with language learning and language education theory, language teachers, and researchers and students who are interested in issues of identity and intercultural communication in language learning.

The papers in this volume offer a sampling of contemporary efforts to update the portrayal of study abroad in the applied linguistics literature through attention to its social and cultural aspects. The volume illustrates diversification of theory and method, refinement of approaches to social interactive language use, and expansion in the range of populations and languages under scrutiny. Part I offers a topical orientation, outlining the rationale for the project. Part II presents six qualitative case studies adopting sociocultural, activity theoretical, postructuralist, or discourse analytic methodologies. The four chapters in Part III illustrate a variety of approaches and foci in research on the pragmatic capabilities of study abroad participants in relation to second language identities. The volume will be of interest to a broad audience of applied linguistics researchers, language educators, and professionals engaged in the design, oversight, and assessment of study abroad programs.

This edited volume extends current voluntourism theorizing by critically examining the intersections among various forms of work-leisure travel and language learning/teaching. The book’s contributors investigate volunteer tourism and its cognates such as working holidaymaking, international internships, and gap year labor, as discursive fields in which powerful ideas about language(s), their speakers, and pedagogical practices are propagated worldwide. The various authors’ chapters shed light on the hegemony of global English, the social consequences of linguistic commodification and neoliberal rationalities, the ways in which speaker identity positions can alter the exchange value of languages, and how language competencies are tied to power in the labor market, among related topics. This volume will be of interest to readers in Applied Linguistics, Critical Sociolinguistics, Educational and Linguistic Anthropology, Tourism and Leisure Studies, Migration and Mobility Studies, and Language Teaching and Learning.

The book is devoted to the analysis of promotional material of tourist activities on tourism websites, including walking, dining, and visiting natural and cultural heritage sights, as instances of multimodal texts through a case study of Croatian and Scottish tourism websites.

This edited collection provides research-informed guidance on how reflexivity may be practised in applied linguistics research. Specifically, we promote reflexivity as an essential hallmark of quality research and argue that doing reflexivity confers greater transparency, methodological rigour, depth, and trustworthiness to our scholarly inquiries. The collection features perspectives from different sub-fields of applied linguistics, including intercultural communication, language education, and multilingualism, and draws on data from a range of settings, including language cafés, classrooms, workplaces, and migration and displacement contexts. Each chapter follows a unified structure: theoretical background, context of the empirical study used as a backdrop for the chapter, an analysis of how reflexivity played out throughout the study, and conclusions which include takeaway points for other researchers. This approach allows readers to gain a sound understanding of the challenges and affordances of doing reflexivity in concrete examples of applied linguistics research whilst also gaining guidance on how to nurture and report on researcher reflexivity as this unfolds throughout the lifetime of a project. This book will appeal to students and scholars in applied linguistics, particularly those with an interest in research methods in the areas of language education, multilingualism, and intercultural communication.

This book responds to a growing body of work in sociolinguistics and applied linguistics that places an emphasis on situated descriptions of language education practices and illuminates how these descriptions are enmeshed with local, institutional and wider social forces. It engages with new ways of understanding language that expand its meaning by including other semiotic resources and meaning-making practices and bring to the fore its messiness and unpredictability. The chapters illustrate how a translingual and transcultural orientation to language and language pedagogy can provide a point of entry to reimagining what language education might look like under conditions of heightened linguistic and cultural diversity and increased linguistic and social inequalities. The book unites an international group of contributors, presenting state-of-the-art empirical studies drawing on a wide range of local contexts and spaces, from linguistically and culturally heterogeneous mainstream and HE classrooms to complementary (community) school and informal language learning contexts.