This vivid collection explores the fascinating connections between language use, language learning, and one's cultural identity. The essays, many of them by well-known writers, represent a diversity of cultures, ages, and nationalities, making the wide range of viewpoints they present both entertaining and instructional. In a time when issues of cultural identity are constantly explored and hotly debated, this volume illuminates the dynamic interaction between the personal, the political, and the theoretical. It is an essential read in a multicultural world.
This timely book uses research on literacy outside of school to challenge how we think about literacy inside of school. Bringing together highly respected literacy researchers, this volume bridges the divide in the literature between formal education and the many informal settings, such as homes, community organizations, and after-school programs, in which literacy learning flourishes. To help link research findings with teaching practices, each chapter includes a response from classroom teachers (K-12) and literacy educators. This book's unique blending of perspectives will have a profound effect on how literacy will be taught in school.
Do statewide assessments really do what they are supposed to do? Through interviews with over three hundred teachers and administrators, Hillocks examines whether state writing tests in Illinois, Kentucky, Oregon, New York, and Texas actually improve students' ability to express their thinking in writing. Ultimately, Hillocks argues that the majority of existing tests actually have a harmful effect on the way students are taught to write. In addition to providing analyses of assessments that do not encourage good writing, The Testing Trap contrasts them to those that do. Concluding with practical procedures for examining and evaluating writing assessments, this book is a provocative and essential read for administrators, teachers, policymakers, parents, and all who care about the education of our children.
The author analyzes the way the girls discuss pleasure in becoming "the eye" of the reader, use film to decode the genres of literature, master forms such as fantasy and Gothic, describe the differences between reading and viewing films, and identify only with animal rather than human characters. Blackford intertwines the vivid voices of her girl respondents with her own story of moving beyond her feminist and multicultural assumptions of how children are shaped by the stories we tell in literature. This breakthrough text presents surprising findings about how girls appreciate literature and what they enjoy about reading.
This book investigates the interplay of language, emotion and gender in a multilingual context and provides rich insights into the complexities of bilingualism and the field of emotion research, as well as the intersection of both. Combining quantitative and qualitative analyses of data, the book examines multilinguals' verbalisation and perception of emotions in their first language and English, their second language (L2). The research looks at crosslinguistic, intercultural and gender-based differences, thereby highlighting the challenges faced by multilinguals in this context and the potential risks of miscommunication and misinterpretation. Results support the call for a change of paradigm towards a holistic approach to multilingualism and emotion research and highlight the similarities and differences in L2 users of English when expressing their emotions in the different languages. The book will appeal to anyone interested in research on emotions in the context of bi-/multilingualism or second language acquisition, as well as those teaching or learning multiple languages.
This volume provides a state-of-the-art overview of the relationship between language and cognition with a focus on bilinguals, bringing together contributions from international leading figures in various disciplines . It is essential reading for researchers and postgraduate students with an interest in language and cognition, or in bilingualism and second languages.
This autoethnographic account of the author’s Japanese as a second language learning trajectory is an important and unique addition to diary studies in SLA and applied linguistics qualitative research circles. In-depth ethnographic details and introspective commentary are skilfully interwoven throughout Simon-Maeda’s narrative of her experiences as an American expatriate who arrived in Japan in 1975 – the starting point of her being and becoming a speaker of Japanese. The book joins the recent surge in postmodernist, interdisciplinary approaches to examining language acquisition, and readers are presented with a highly convincing case for using autoethnography to better understand sociolinguistic complexities that are unamenable to quantification of isolated variables. The comprehensive literature review and wide ranging references provide a valuable source of information for researchers, educators, and graduate students concerned with current issues in SLA/applied linguistics, bi/multilingualism, and Japanese as a second language.
This book analyzes the narratives of urban, North Indian women for the diverse ways in which they construct the impact of their medium of education – Hindi, English, or a combination of both – on varied aspects of their professional and personal lives. It examines how participants reinforce or interrogate firmly entrenched power heirarchies that have long elevated English in India. Adopting a social constructionist perspective, and treating oral narratives as impacted both by local interactional contingencies and by larger social contexts, this book provides an innovative framework for the analysis of narratives told in qualitative research interviews. Stylization, mock languages, similes and metaphors, reported speech, and varied interactional cues are some of the devices used to examine the intersectioanlity of power and identity within participants’ oral narratives.The book will be of interest to scholars and students of narrative analysis, gender and identity studies, postcolonialism, and professional identity constructions of women.