Continuum Publishing Group
100 ideas for teaching languages.
Now an MP for Llanelli, Wales, Griffith taught languages at comprehensive schools for 19 years. She offers experienced and new language educators and trainees an array of activities to add fun and creativity to the language classroom. The material is organized into sections on ideas to use with many topics, presenting or revising vocabulary, great games, active listening, creative writing, using ICT, and activities for the more advanced pupil. No subject index. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Advanced language learning; the contribution of Halliday and Vygotsky.
To truly communicate language learners must attain a high level of mastery, a prospect not always supported in traditional language acquisition. In this series of 12 articles contributors discuss how the precepts of Halliday and Vygotsky have guided researchers and educators seeking to bring students to a level of mastery, with topics including the idea of educating for advanced foreign language capacities, generalized collective dialog, redefining language proficiency as containing a strong cultural element, pedagogy including collaboration at advanced levels of proficiency, using grammar as a tool in advanced learning of Japanese, the grammar of exposition, using grammatical metaphors, creating textual worlds with context themes, dialog construction, using a modular approach, and bringing intermediate learners to the advanced level through corpus and register analysis. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Agency and consciousness in discourse; self-other dynamics as a complex system. (reprint, 2004)
This is a paperbound reprint of a 2004 book. Continuing the discussion he began in his 2004 Brain, Mind, and the Signifying Boyd, Thibault (linguistics and media communication, Agder U. College, Norway) explores how agency and consciousness are created and enacted in and through transactions between self and other. Such transactions are the central notion in the development of an adequate explanation of both agency and consciousness, he argues, and it is necessary to reconnect body-brain processes and interactions to the social and discursive practices that directly act upon and affect our body-brain systems in meaning-making activity. A central theme is how new emergent levels of organization come into existence between already existing scalar levels at the same time that existing levels are reorganized by the emergence of the new levels. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
The Bourbons; the history of a dynasty.
Beginning with Louis I (1279-1342), the first duke of Bourbon in a genealogy of this famous royal family, Shennan (emeritus, history, Lancaster U.) chronicles the dynasty through its violent dethroning in the French Revolution. He also traces its continuing influence in Europe through a brief reinstatement after Napoleon's exile, and in the person of the present king of Spain. Illustrations include reproductions of paintings of Madame Pompadour, Louis XV's mistress, and Marie Antoinette, Louis XVI's ill-fated queen. Distributed in North America by Continuum. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Brain, mind, and the signifying body; an ecosocial semiotic theory. (reprint, 2004)
This is a paperbound reprint of a 2004 book. Thibault (English linguistics, U. of Venice) responds to the urgent need he sees for a materialist ecosocial semiotics that is able to reconnect body-brain processes and interactions both to the social and cultural practices that directly act upon human bodies, and to the ways in which body and brain processes directly participate in and are a constitutively inseparable part of people's meaning-making activity. There has been much discussion in the past few years of the role of the body and the brain in social meaning-making practices, he admits, but contends that those discussions have not moved beyond models of textual representation based on discourse and language. He finds in the ecosocial semiotics of Jay Lemke the different orientation that is called for. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
British fiction today.
The critical essays collected here discuss themes in the fiction, all published since 1990, of 16 British authors. Tew (English, Brunel U., UK) and Mengham (modern English literature, U. of Cambridge) edit contributions sharing the themes of modern lives and contemporary living, distortions and dreams, states of identity, and histories. Each theme receives a brief introduction which is followed by specific discussions of topics including: Alan Hollinghurst and homosexual identity, Jenny Diski's millennial imagination, the ethical otherworld in Ian McEwan's fiction, and Sara Waters and the Victorians. Other authors considered include Ben Okri, Jeanette Winterson, Toby Litt, Jonathan Coe, and Martin Amis. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Corpus linguistics and world Englishes; an analysis of Xhosa English.
Although English is now a global language, thanks to business and technology but also to colonialism, one cannot say there is a standard English due to local variances and vocabularies. This is particularly true in South Africa, with its many languages, applications and perceptions about English. As her case study, de Klerk (English language and linguistics, Rhodes U.) chose the Xhosa people, who use Black South African English (BSAE), a variant which has not been the focus of much study. She has collected a corpus of the English spoken by only the Xhosa speakers, all of whom are long-term residents of the Eastern Cape province. These half million transcribed words from 317 speakers serve well as she describes their context and use, corpus studies and sociolinguistic insights, corpus studies and linguistic description, and the future of the Xhosa English. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Discourse analysis; an introduction.
Paltridge's (TESOL, U. of Sydney) textbook provides an introductory overview for undergraduate and postgraduate students encountering discourse analysis for the first time. Featuring examples from films, television, newspapers, the classroom and everyday life, the text examines discourse as it pertains to society, to pragmatics, to genre, and to conversation; discourse grammar; corpus approaches to discourse analysis; critical discourse analysis; and planning and carrying out a discourse analysis project. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
The Druids.
In contrast to the usual academic approach treating Druids only in the context of ancient history, Hutton (history, U. of Bristol, England) analyzes how this mysterious pagan group associated with Stonehenge was viewed in eras from the Roman to the present. In an account intended to be accessible to nonspecialists, he traces the motives behind several countries' appropriation of Druid ancestry. The only thing remotely "racy" about the book, as the publisher promotes it, is a movie still from The Viking Queen. Distributed in North America by Palgrave Macmillan. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
The early Wittgenstein on religion.
Many scholars have discussed how Austrian/British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) dealt with religion and theology in his later work, but Lazenby explores the treatment of religion in his early work Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921). He argues that its cryptic preface, its creation-myth opening, and some obscure remarks in the final three pages concern ethics and religion and how they relate to the philosophical logic that is the book's core topic. His study began as a dissertation, but he does not say where or when. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Fredric Jameson; live theory.
Buchanan (critical and cultural theory, Cardiff U., UK) provides an introductory overview of the theoretical corpus of Marxist political and cultural theorist Fredric Jamison, whose best known works include Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), The Political Unconscious (1981), and Marxism and Form (1971). In addition to addressing the above works, Buchanan discusses Jamison's theory of dialectical criticism; his writings on Jean-Paul Sartre, Theodor Adorno, Bertoldt Brecht, and Roland Barthes; and his concepts of cognitive mapping and utopia. An interview conducted by Buchanan with Jamison is included following the exegetical discussion. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Gender; key concepts in philosophy.
Chanter (philosophy, DePaul, U.) looks at the fate of gender in philosophical systems of the 20th and 21st centuries. Her topics include formative moments and concepts in the history of feminism, feminism and Marxism, feminist epistemology, and psychoanalytic and post-structural feminist theory and Deleuzian responses to it. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Gender, language and new literacy.
Linguists provide a multi-lingual and cross-cultural approach to the problem of how gender is lexically and socially categorized in certain electronic word-processing software, using thesauri of Microsoft Word and Microsoft pinyin as examples. More specifically, they describe gender categorization in different languages as it is represented in that language's thesaurus database, then ponder how the categorization is related to the culture and society underlying that language. In addition to Indo-European languages, they look at Hebrew, Hungarian, Turkish, and Chinese. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Hitler's home front; Wurttemberg under the Nazis.
Stephenson (modern German history, U. of Edinburgh, UK) describes life in Württemberg, a town in the southwest region of Germany, during World War II. She relates the experiences of people in this small rural town during Hitler's reign, problems they faced, and their attitudes and responses to the Nazi regime. She begins with the prewar years to describe the socio-economic and political background of the area and the relationship of the Nazi Party and the state there, as well as the application of Nazi racial policy and the association between the churches and the Nazi state before the war. Subsequent chapters describe the impact of the war, labor shortages and foreign workers, damage to the community, and the influx of migrants, evacuees, and refugees that changed the character of the community. Distributed in North America by Palgrave Macmillan. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Husserl's phenomenology; knowledge, objectivity and others.
New readers of Husserl and those who are finding his work tough going will benefit from this insightful treatment of his work on intersubjectivity and empathy and how empathy leads to the attainment of knowledge. Hermberg (philosophy, U. of Wisconsin-Eau Claire) investigates Husserl's introductions to phenomenology in Ideas, Cartesian Meditations and The Crisis of European Sciences and gives a fresh account of Husserl's epistemology and his position in Western philosophical tradition, covering Husserl's project, his evidence and certainty, his work on the road to knowledge, his ides about individualism and objectivity and the transition of ego to other, his notions on "pregiveness" and passivity, his discovery of a possible threat to objective validity, Husserl's building of two relationships of others to knowledge, and the relationships among the texts that led to a decision not made. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
An introduction to conversation analysis.
Liddicoat (languages and cultures education, U. of South Australia) introduces conversation analysis to undergraduates and above in sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, sociology, and applied linguistics. The background and methodology of conversation analysis is summarized in the introduction. The remaining chapters offers examples of and reflection on conversation transcription of the following phenomena: turn- taking in conversation, gaps and overlaps in turn-taking, adjacency pairs and preference organization, expanding sequences, repair, opening and closing conversation, and story-telling. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Japanese linguistics; an introduction.
Yamaguchi's (National University of Singapore) textbook is designed for a course text for undergraduate students who have completed basic Japanese grammar and want to acquire more advanced and systematic knowledge of the Japanese language. No previous linguistic knowledge or training in linguistics is assumed. The textbook utilizes authentic texts that students might encounter in contemporary Japan, and covers aspects of Japanese phonetics and phonology, morphology and lexical semantics, and syntax. A forthcoming companion volume,Japanese Language in Use: An Introduction, will address pragmatics, discourse, culture and conversation. Includes both an English and Japanese index. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Language and literacy; functional approaches.
Teachers and education researchers explore the functional family of approaches to literacy, in particular those stemming from systemic functional linguistics, which indeed was developed in the context of language education. The chapters were commissioned to chart the development of the approach, and to highlight its ongoing evolution around the world and across disciplines. The topics include linguistic modeling of secondary school and the workplace, a case-study of whole-school genre maps in South Australia, and a comparative study of theme in undergraduate essays in geography and history of science. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Language and the law.
Schane (linguistics, U. of Calif.-San Diego) offers an introduction to the interaction between linguistics and the legal process. Each of four chapters pairs a problem in language with a corresponding issue in law — ambiguity and misunderstanding, metaphor and legal fictions, speech acts and hearsay, and promise and contract formation. Each chapter contains four sections: one concerned with the law, the second focusing on language, the third on the analysis, and the fourth dealing with the language-law interface. For legal scholars and language professionals interested in the law-language interface, students and academics first encountering the topic, and general readers with an interest in the law-language connection. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Law; key concepts in philosophy.
Ingram (philosophy, Loyola U., Chicago) examines key concepts in philosophy of law including morality, constitutional law, crime and punishment, equality under the law, private law the limits of economic rationality and the rule of law as ideology. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
