Here is an informative introduction to language: its origins in the past, its growth through history, and its present use for communication between peoples. It is at the same time a history of language, a guide to foreign tongues, and a method for learning them. It shows, through basic vocabularies, family resemblances of languages -- Teutonic, Romance, Greek -- helpful tricks of translation, key combinations of roots and phonetic patterns. It presents by common-sense methods the most helpful approach to the mastery of many languages; it condenses vocabulary to a minimum of essential words; it simplifies grammar in an entirely new way; and it teaches a language as it is actually used in everyday life.
Gabrielle Roy is one of the best-known figures of Québec literature, yet she spent much of the first thirty years of her life studying, working, and living in English. For Roy, as a member of Manitoba's francophone minority, bilingualism was a necessary strategy for survival and success. How did this bilingual and bicultural background help shape her work as a writer in French? The implications of her linguistic and cultural identity are explored in chapters looking at education, language, translation, and the representation of Canada's other minorities, from the immigrants in Western Canada to the Inuit of Ungava. What emerges is a new reading of Roy's work. Drawing on archival material, postcolonial theory, and translation studies, Between Languages and Cultures explores the traces and effects of Roy's intimate knowledge of English language and culture, challenging and augmenting the established view that her work is distinctly French-Canadian or Québécois.
This volume seeks to answers such questions as: how is conscious experience translated into discourse? How are foregrounding and backgrounding accomplished? What is the function of features like lexical choice and referential choice? And many more.
The author proves that by beginning with the literacy knowledge students bring from their native language and putting writing at the center of the curriculum, we can help them make a smoother transition to English while we support their academic literacy. With Writing Between Languages, you'll learn to: understand the crucial and helpful role native literacy plays in building written English fluency; assess where English learners--including beginners--are in their development as writers; use code-switching and movement between languages to scaffold transitional writing--no matter whether you know a student's home language; implement instructional strategies to support development in writing and other literacy and language skills in meaningful contexts.
This book examines the linkage between literacy and linguistic diversity, embedding them in their social and cultural contexts. It illustrates that a more complete understanding of literacy among diverse populations and in multicultural societies requires attention to issues of literacy per se as well as to improving an educational process that has relevance beyond members of majority cultures and linguistic groups. The focus of the book is on the social and cultural contexts in which literacy develops and is enacted, with an emphasis on the North American situation. Educators and researchers are discovering that cognitive approaches, while very valuable, are insufficient by themselves to answer important questions about literacy in heterogeneous societies. By considering the implications of family, school, culture, society, and nation for literary processes, the book answers the following questions. In a multi-ethnic context, what does it mean to be literate? What are the processes involved in becoming and being literate in a second language? In what ways is literacy in a second language similar and in what ways is it different from mother-tongue literacy? What factors must be understood to better describe and facilitate literacy acquisition among members of ethnic and linguistic minorities? What are some current approaches that are being used to accomplish this? These are vital questions for researchers and educators in a world that has a large number of immigrants, a variety of multi-ethnic and multi-lingual societies, and an increasing degree of multinational activity. Beyond addressing applied concerns, attending to these questions can provide new insights into basic aspects of literacy.
Until recently, the history of debates about language and thought has been a history of thinking of language in the singular. The purpose of this volume is to reverse this trend and to begin unlocking the mysteries surrounding thinking and speaking in bi- and multilingual speakers. If languages influence the way we think, what happens to those who speak more than one language? And if they do not, how can we explain the difficulties second language learners experience in mapping new words and structures onto real-world referents? The contributors to this volume put forth a novel approach to second language learning, presenting it as a process that involves conceptual development and restructuring, and not simply the mapping of new forms onto pre-existing meanings.
A masterpiece of linguistics scholarship, at once erudite and entertaining, confronts the thorny question of how—and whether—culture shapes language and language, culture Linguistics has long shied away from claiming any link between a language and the culture of its speakers: too much simplistic (even bigoted) chatter about the romance of Italian and the goose-stepping orderliness of German has made serious thinkers wary of the entire subject. But now, acclaimed linguist Guy Deutscher has dared to reopen the issue. Can culture influence language—and vice versa? Can different languages lead their speakers to different thoughts? Could our experience of the world depend on whether our language has a word for "blue"? Challenging the consensus that the fundaments of language are hard-wired in our genes and thus universal, Deutscher argues that the answer to all these questions is—yes. In thrilling fashion, he takes us from Homer to Darwin, from Yale to the Amazon, from how to name the rainbow to why Russian water—a "she"—becomes a "he" once you dip a tea bag into her, demonstrating that language does in fact reflect culture in ways that are anything but trivial. Audacious, delightful, and field-changing, Through the Language Glass is a classic of intellectual discovery.
Translated texts are often either uncritically consumed by readers, teacher, and scholars or seen to represent an ineluctable loss, a diminishing of original texts. Translation, however, is a cultural practice, influenced also by social and political imperatives, which can open more doors than it closes. The essays in this book show how the act of translation, when vigilantly and critically attended to, becomes a means for active interrogation.
The book analyzes the complex relationship between languages in the bilingual mind with a focus on motion event typology and the acquisition of Spanish as a second language (L2). The author starts out by examining L1 patterns which are transferred to less complex L2 systems. The data discussed was elicited by German learners of Spanish. A similar transfer is observed when L1 is typologically and genetically close, as in the case of French and Italian learners of Spanish. Furthermore, the author clarifies the relevance of intra-typological differences within the same linguistic family, including important differences in the lexicalization patterns of Italian with respect to French and Spanish. The findings contribute to our understanding of the field of motion event typology and thinking-for-speaking. The book demonstrates that conceptual transfer is present in different aspects of the motion lexicalization domain. Interestingly, there are some challenging aspects both for speakers whose first language is typologically different and for those whose language is typologically close. The book offers suggestions on how these challenges in the restructuring of meaning in L2 can be addressed in language teaching. Specifically, pedagogical translation and mediation present promising pathways to the strengthening of semantic competences in the L2.
