This book explores the life and experiences of one of the world's most renowned experts in bilingualism. Francois Grosjean takes the author on an engaging trip through his life as a bicultural bilingual, combining personal accounts and anecdotes with insights from his extensive research, which will appeal to all those interested in bilingualism.
Although Australia prides itself on being multicultural, many Australians have little awareness of what it means to live in two cultures at once, and of how much there is to learn about other cultural perspectives.
URDU: Journey of the Language through People and Culture is a richly illustrated book about the Urdu language, containing a curated selection of over 100 entries, arranged from A to Z. Although eclectic, the minutely researched and thoughtfully selected entries fit together like the tiles of a mosaic to provide a fuller portrait than previously presented of the Urdu language. The book brings the fascinating story of Urdu to a whole new generation of readers, including native speakers, heritage speakers, and anyone interested in South Asian languages. Full of unique and interesting facts about the language, its history, people, and culture, the book will appeal to all Urdu enthusiasts!
This state-of-the-art exploration of language, culture, and identity is orchestrated through prominent scholars’ and teachers’ narratives, each weaving together three elements: a personal account based on one or more memorable or critical incidents that occurred in the course of learning or using a second or foreign language; an interpretation of the incidents highlighting their impact in terms of culture, identity, and language; the connections between the experiences and observations of the author and existing literature on language, culture and identity. What makes this book stand out is the way in which authors meld traditional ‘academic’ approaches to inquiry with their own personalized voices. This opens a window on different ways of viewing and doing research in Applied Linguistics and TESOL. What gives the book its power is the compelling nature of the narratives themselves. Telling stories is a fundamental way of representing and making sense of the human condition. These stories unpack, in an accessible but rigorous fashion, complex socio-cultural constructs of culture, identity, the self and other, and reflexivity, and offer a way into these constructs for teachers, teachers in preparation and neophyte researchers. Contributors from around the world give the book broad and international appeal.
KAT LOMB (1909-2003) was one of the great polyglots of the 20th century. A translator and one of the first simultaneous interpreters in the world, Lomb worked in 16 languages for state and business concerns in her native Hungary. She achieved further fame by writing books on languages, interpreting, and polyglots. Polyglot: How I Learn Languages, first published in 1970, is a collection of anecdotes and reflections on language learning. Because Dr. Lomb learned her languages as an adult, after getting a PhD in chemistry, the methods she used will be of particular interest to adult learners who want to master a foreign language.
This guide to understanding the culture of conversation is by one of America's foremost linguistic anthropologists. In a fascinating journey through the meaning of language--and the relationship of language to culture--Michael Agar sheds new light on the oceans of language, showing how to keep afloat even when faced with something that seems overwhelmingly foreign.
This is an interdisciplinary volume that focuses on the central topic of the representation of events, namely cross-cultural differences in representing time and space, as well as various aspects of the conceptualisation of space and time. It brings together research on space and time from a variety of angles, both theoretical and methodological. Crossing boundaries between and among disciplines such as linguistics, psychology, philosophy, or anthropology forms a creative platform in a bold attempt to reveal the complex interaction of language, culture, and cognition in the context of human communication and interaction. The authors address the nature of spatial and temporal constructs from a number of perspectives, such as cultural specificity in determining time intervals in an Amazonian culture, distinct temporalities in a specific Mongolian hunter community, Russian-specific conceptualisation of temporal relations, Seri and Yucatec frames of spatial reference, memory of events in space and time, and metaphorical meaning stemming from perception and spatial artefacts, to name but a few themes. The topic of space and time in language and culture is also represented, from a different albeit related point of view, in the sister volume Space and Time in Languages and Cultures: Linguistic diversity (HCP 36) which focuses on the language-specific vis-à-vis universal aspects of linguistic representation of spatial and temporal reference.
This book is based on the premise that student sojourners and educators can benefit from a deeper understanding of the language, identity, and cultural factors that impact on the development of intercultural communicative competence and intercultural personhood.