Socially Situated Effects Of Social And Cultural Context On Language Processing And Learning

There are many reasons to be curious about the way people learn, and the past several decades have seen an explosion of research that has important implications for individual learning, schooling, workforce training, and policy. In 2000, How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School: Expanded Edition was published and its influence has been wide and deep. The report summarized insights on the nature of learning in school-aged children; described principles for the design of effective learning environments; and provided examples of how that could be implemented in the classroom. Since then, researchers have continued to investigate the nature of learning and have generated new findings related to the neurological processes involved in learning, individual and cultural variability related to learning, and educational technologies. In addition to expanding scientific understanding of the mechanisms of learning and how the brain adapts throughout the lifespan, there have been important discoveries about influences on learning, particularly sociocultural factors and the structure of learning environments. How People Learn II: Learners, Contexts, and Cultures provides a much-needed update incorporating insights gained from this research over the past decade. The book expands on the foundation laid out in the 2000 report and takes an in-depth look at the constellation of influences that affect individual learning. How People Learn II will become an indispensable resource to understand learning throughout the lifespan for educators of students and adults.

This book focuses on the dynamic nature of EAP (English for academic purposes) learners’ beliefs about language learning in their shift from an EFL (English as a foreign language) environment to an EMI (English as the medium of instruction) setting in mainland China. It adopts a mixed method paradigm, whose quantitative part aims to capture the general dynamic feature of the selected student population, while its qualitative part attempts to unveil the process of change in beliefs about language learning among the sample. It is hypothesized that the change in their beliefs about language learning is the result of the interplay between the learners’ agency and the mediation of the contextual realities at the institutional and social levels.

The Fifth Edition of the Handbook of Research on Teachingis an essential resource for students and scholars dedicated to the study of teaching and learning. This volume offers a vast array of topics ranging from the history of teaching to technological and literacy issues. In each authoritative chapter, the authors summarize the state of the field while providing conceptual overviews of critical topics related to research on teaching. Each of the volume's 23 chapters is a canonical piece that will serve as a reference tool for the field. The Handbook provides readers with an unaparalleled view of the current state of research on teaching across its multiple facets and related fields.

Language Learning provides an introduction to language development that differs from existing books in that it traces language and cognitive development (together with the associated debates) from babyhood, through the school years of middle childhood and adolescence, into adulthood and the world of work. Increasingly, the global trend is towards learning to speak, read and write more than one language. Language Learning is a comprehensive book that includes descriptions and discussions of learning more than one language sequentially and simulataneously. The only book to look at language with a lifelong perspective, it is ideal as an introductory student text. Each chapter contains ideas and suggestions for students to follow-up and begin their own small scale investigations into language development.

The relationship between language and psychology is one that has been studied for centuries. Influencing one another, these two fields uncover how the human mind's processes are interrelated. Psycholinguistics and Cognition in Language Processing is a critical scholarly resource that examines the mystery of language and the obscurity of psychology using innovative studies. Featuring coverage on a broad range of topics, such as language acquisition, emotional aspects in foreign language learning, and speech learning model, this book is geared towards linguists, academicians, practitioners, and researchers, seeking current research on the cognitive and emotional synthetisation of multilingualism.

It is widely understood that the socio-historical contexts of languages have a direct bearing on their structures and on the types of stance that communities take in relation to them. Within the discipline of linguistics these socio-historical contexts and their impacts on communities' use and understanding of language are generally referred to as sociolinguistic factors. Meanwhile within descriptive linguistics the structure of language remains core. This is evidenced in the shape of university course design, structures of textbooks, and in how linguistic knowledge is recorded. In this paper we seek to map the relationship of the socio-historical context of linguistics to the languages that we study and in doing so, shift the focus so that the socio-historical context becomes central. Through this process the shape of the languages themselves is altered.We present a case study that compares linguistic and community perspectives on language boundaries in Milne Bay Provence, Papua New Guinea, and explore the processes through which the languages are created as objects and then become emblematic of culture and identity. We discuss the strong links that communities make between language, place and spirituality and consider the opportunities that these perspectives hold for language descriptions. Finally we consider how we, as linguists, can hold multiple perspectives on language and create culturally safe partnerships with communities that result in materials consistent with speakers' goals for their language.

Addressing a wide range of issues in applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, and multilingualism, this volume focuses on language users, the ‘people.’ Making creative connections between existing scholarship in language policy and contemporary theory and research in other social sciences, authors from around the world offer new critical perspectives for analyzing language phenomena and language theories, suggesting new meeting points among language users and language policy makers, norms, and traditions in diverse cultural, geographical, and historical contexts. Identifying and expanding on previously neglected aspects of language studies, the book is inspired by the work of Elana Shohamy, whose critical view and innovative work on a broad spectrum of key topics in applied linguistics has influenced many scholars in the field to think “out of the box” and to reconsider some basic commonly held understandings, specifically with regard to the impact of language and languaging on individual language users rather than on the masses.