New Approaches To English Linguistics

This book aims at providing a cross-section of current developments in English linguistics, by tracing recent approaches to corpus linguistics and statistical methodology, by introducing new inter- and multidisciplinary refinements to empirical methodology, and by documenting the on-going emphasis shift within the discipline of English linguistics from the study of dominant language varieties to that of post-colonial, minority, non-standardised, learner and L2 varieties. Among the key focus areas that define research in the field of English linguistics today, this selection concentrates on four: corpus linguistics, English as a global language, cognitive linguistics, and second language acquisition. Most of the articles in this volume concentrate on at least two of these areas and at the same time bring in their own suggestions towards building bridges within and across sub-disciples of linguistics and beyond.

The fourth volume in the series Language Competence and Language Awareness in Europe features contributions from various philologies in the young but rapidly growing research area of linguistic variability. It focuses on sociolinguistic studies of language use as social practice and variability of authentic language use.

This book examines the importance of English language teaching in China, but also the need for this teaching to be modernised in order for China to better join the world economy. The current trend within English teaching in China is for 'communicative competence' - that is, being able to communicate with linguistic, pragmatic, discourse and strategic competence. This volume argues that such a theoretical framework of communicative competence needs to be expanded to address both global needs and local contexts, if English language teaching in China is to be successful. The contributors to this volume examine every aspect of language teaching and suggest new ways in which communication and grammar can be balanced. The chapters include coverage of: * the importance of English in a global world * the theoretical framework of communicative competence * the role of grammar in learning English * assessing and evaluating communicative competence * the starting age of learning English * teaching language skills in the post-methods era * using multimedia in teaching and testing * online learning and self-learning * teacher training through empowerment. With its balance of theory and practice, and internationally renowned contributors, this guide to new approaches, perspectives and standards in language teaching will be essential reading for academics interested in applied linguistics and second language acquisition, and English language teaching professionals.

Uniquely organized in terms of theoretical approaches, this is an advanced textbook on the study of English historical linguistics.

A critical look at language policies, how they are implemented and the hidden agendas which often lie behind them, drawing on examples from the US and UK and showing what the consequences are for the people involved.

The practice of comparing languages has a long tradition characterized by a cyclic pattern of interest. Its meeting with corpus linguistics in the 1990s has led to a new sub-discipline of corpus-based contrastive studies. The present volume tackles two main challenges that had not yet been fully addressed in the literature, namely an empirical assessment of the nature of the data commonly used in cross-linguistic studies (e.g. translation data versus comparable data), and the development of advanced methods and statistical techniques suitably adapted to contrastive research settings. The papers collected in this volume endeavour to find out what (new) types of data are most useful for what kind of contrastive questions, and which advanced statistical techniques are most suited to deal with the multidimensionality of contrastive research questions. Answers to these questions are provided through the contrastive analysis of various language pairs or groups, and a wide variety of phenomena situated at almost all linguistic levels. In sum, this book provides an update on new methodological and theoretical insights in empirical contrastive linguistics and will stimulate further research within this field.

In addition to the approaches and methods covered in the first edition, this edition includes new chapters, such as whole language, multiple intelligences, neurolinguistic programming, competency-based language teaching, co-operative language learning, content-based instruction, task-based language teaching, and The Post-Methods Era.