The influence of the learner's mother tongue on the use of a second language has long been of interest within applied linguistics. Whilst most studies have focused on the sentence level, contrastive rhetoric has broadened this area of investigation to the levels of discourse and text. This study explores and applies the approach to written English and Shona of Shona native speakers in Zimbabwe. It is both theoretical and practical, highlighting the importance of multi-dimensional andnon-evaluative analytical frameworks, and providing information for second language teachers and learners.
The current trend toward machine-scoring of student work, Ericsson and Haswell argue, has created an emerging issue with implications for higher education across the disciplines, but with particular importance for those in English departments and in administration. The academic community has been silent on the issue—some would say excluded from it—while the commercial entities who develop essay-scoring software have been very active. Machine Scoring of Student Essays is the first volume to seriously consider the educational mechanisms and consequences of this trend, and it offers important discussions from some of the leading scholars in writing assessment. Reading and evaluating student writing is a time-consuming process, yet it is a vital part of both student placement and coursework at post-secondary institutions. In recent years, commercial computer-evaluation programs have been developed to score student essays in both of these contexts. Two-year colleges have been especially drawn to these programs, but four-year institutions are moving to them as well, because of the cost-savings they promise. Unfortunately, to a large extent, the programs have been written, and institutions are installing them, without attention to their instructional validity or adequacy. Since the education software companies are moving so rapidly into what they perceive as a promising new market, a wider discussion of machine-scoring is vital if scholars hope to influence development and/or implementation of the programs being created. What is needed, then, is a critical resource to help teachers and administrators evaluate programs they might be considering, and to more fully envision the instructional consequences of adopting them. And this is the resource that Ericsson and Haswell are providing here.
In this collective volume, we seek to bridge gaps between research and practice in the teaching and learning of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) with a set of strong research-based contributions drawing on a wide range of ESP contexts. It offers new theoretical and pedagogical insights for ESP practitioners and researchers alike, going beyond descriptions of ESP situations and programmes to bring in sound research design and data analysis which are firmly anchored in previous ESP research. The nine papers in this collection cover a variety of ESP domains, from medicine, technical science, and engineering to social sciences and the humanities, in order to encapsulate current trends and new developments in ESP teaching and learning research in Europe.
Visual Research explains the key terms and theories that underlie design research, examining the importance of audience, communication theory, semiotics and semantics. It features a range of case studies which demonstrate how the use of rigorous research methods can form the basis of effective visual communication and design problem solving, eschewing end product analysis for a discussion of the way research feeds into the design process.
This book identifies the many facets of culture that influence second language learners and teachers. The paperback edition identifies the many facets of culture that influence second language learners and teachers. It addresses the impact of culture on learning to interact, speak, construct meaning, and write in a second language, while staying within the sociocultural paradigms specific to a particular language and its speakers. By providing a comprehensive introduction to research from other disciplines on the interaction between language and culture, this volume offers an important contribution to the field of second language acquisition.
This groundbreaking collection re-orders the elitist and colonial elements of language studies by drawing together the multiple perspectives of Black language researchers.
