Rethinking Language Use in Digital Africa

Rethinking Language Use in Digital Africa
Author: Leketi Makalela
Publisher: Multilingual Matters
Total Pages: 186
Release: 2021-06-23
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1800412320

This book challenges the view that digital communication in Africa is limited and relatively unsophisticated and questions the assumption that digital communication has a damaging effect on indigenous African languages. The book applies the principles of Digital African Multilingualism (DAM) in which there are no rigid boundaries between languages. The book charts a way forward for African languages where greater attention is paid to what speakers do with the languages rather than what the languages look like, and offers several models for language policy and planning based on horizontal and user-based multilingualism. The chapters demonstrate how digital communication is being used to form and sustain communication in many kinds of online groups, including for political activism and creating poetry, and offer a paradigm of language merging online that provides a practical blueprint for the decolonization of African languages through digital platforms.

Rethinking Languages Education

Rethinking Languages Education
Author: Ruth Arber
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2020-11-26
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1351608681

Rethinking Languages Education assembles innovative research from experts in the fields of sociocultural theory, applied linguistics and education. The contributors interrogate innovative and recent thinking and broach controversies about the theoretical and practical considerations that underpin the implementation of effective Languages pedagogy in twenty-first-century classrooms. Crucially, Rethinking Languages Education explores established understandings about language, culture and education to provide a more comprehensive and flexible understanding of Languages education that responds to local classrooms impacted by global and transnational change, and the politics of language, culture and identity. Rethinking Languages Education focuses on questions about ways that we can develop farsighted and successful Languages education for diverse students in globalised contexts. The response to these questions is multi-layered, and takes into account the complex interactions between policy, curriculum and practice, as well as their contention and implementation. In doing so, this book addresses and integrates innovative perspectives of contemporary theory and pedagogy for Languages, TESOL and EAL/D education. It includes diverse discussions around practice, and addresses issues of the dominance of prestige Languages programs for ‘minority’ and ‘heritage’ languages, as well as discussing controversies about the current provision of English and Languages programs around the world.

Rethinking the Education of Multilingual Learners

Rethinking the Education of Multilingual Learners
Author: Jim Cummins
Publisher: Multilingual Matters
Total Pages: 603
Release: 2021-09-06
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1800413602

Over the past 40 years, Jim Cummins has proposed a number of highly influential theoretical concepts, including the threshold and interdependence hypotheses and the distinction between conversational fluency and academic language proficiency. In this book, he provides a personal account of how these ideas developed and he examines the credibility of critiques they have generated, using the criteria of empirical adequacy, logical coherence, and consequential validity. These criteria of theoretical legitimacy are also applied to the evaluation of two different versions of translanguaging theory – Unitary Translanguaging Theory and Crosslinguistic Translanguaging Theory – in a way that significantly clarifies this controversial concept.

Rethinking Language and Gender Research

Rethinking Language and Gender Research
Author: Victoria Bergvall
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 316
Release: 2014-06-11
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1317889797

Rethinking Language and Gender Research is the first book focusing on language and gender to explicitly challenge the dichotomy of female and male use of language. It represents a turning point in language and gender studies, addressing the political and social consequences of popular beliefs about women's language and men's language and proposing new ways of looking at language and gender. The essays take a fresh approach to the study of subjects such as language and sex and the use of language to produce and maintain power and prestige. Topics explored in this text include sex and the brain; the language of a rape hearing; teenage language; radio talk show exchanges; discourse strategies of African American women; political implications for language and gender studies; the relationship between sex and gender and the construction of identity through language. A useful introductory chapter sets the articles in context, explaining the relationships that exist between them, and full cross-referencing between articles and an extensive index allow for easy access to information. The interdisciplinary approach of the text, the wide-range of methodologies presented, and the comprehensive review of the current literature will make this book invaluable reading for all upper-level undergraduate students, postgraduate students and researchers in the fields of linguistics, sociolinguistics, gender and cultural studies.

Language Policy and Language Planning

Language Policy and Language Planning
Author: Sue Wright
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 388
Release: 2016-04-08
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1137576472

This revised second edition is a comprehensive overview of why we speak the languages that we do. It covers language learning imposed by political and economic agendas as well as language choices entered into willingly for reasons of social mobility, economic advantage and group identity.

Rethinking Bilingual Education

Rethinking Bilingual Education
Author: Elizabeth Barbian
Publisher:
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2017
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9781937730734

In this collection of articles, teachers bring students' home languages into their classrooms-from powerful bilingual social justice curriculum to strategies for honoring students' languages in schools that do not have bilingual programs. Bilingual educators and advocates share how they work to keep equity at the center and build solidarity between diverse communities. Teachers and students speak to the tragedy of languages loss, but also about inspiring work to defend and expand bilingual programs. Book jacket.

Rethinking Language Policy

Rethinking Language Policy
Author: Bernard Spolsky
Publisher:
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2023-02-28
Genre:
ISBN: 9781474485470

Drawing on four decades of research, Bernard Spolsky presents an updated theory of language policy that starts with the individual speaker instead of the nation. In this book, he surveys the language practices, beliefs, and planning efforts of individuals, families, public and private institutions, local and national activists, advocates and managers, and nations. He examines the diversity of linguistic repertoires and the multiplicity of forces, linguistic and non-linguistic, which account for language shift and maintenance. By starting with the individual speaker and moving through the various levels and domains, Spolsky shows the many different policies with which a national government must compete and illustrates why national policy is so difficult. A definitive guide to the field, this is essential reading for policy makers, stakeholders, researchers, and students of language policy.

Rethinking Language, Mind, and Meaning

Rethinking Language, Mind, and Meaning
Author: Scott Soames
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 253
Release: 2015-05-26
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0691160457

In this book, Scott Soames argues that the revolution in the study of language and mind that has taken place since the late nineteenth century must be rethought. The central insight in the reigning tradition is that propositions are representational. To know the meaning of a sentence or the content of a belief requires knowing which things it represents as being which ways, and therefore knowing what the world must be like if it is to conform to how the sentence or belief represents it. These are truth conditions of the sentence or belief. But meanings and representational contents are not truth conditions, and there is more to propositions than representational content. In addition to imposing conditions the world must satisfy if it is to be true, a proposition may also impose conditions on minds that entertain it. The study of mind and language cannot advance further without a conception of propositions that allows them to have contents of both of these sorts. Soames provides it. He does so by arguing that propositions are repeatable, purely representational cognitive acts or operations that represent the world as being a certain way, while requiring minds that perform them to satisfy certain cognitive conditions. Because they have these two types of content—one facing the world and one facing the mind—pairs of propositions can be representationally identical but cognitively distinct. Using this breakthrough, Soames offers new solutions to several of the most perplexing problems in the philosophy of language and mind.

Rethinking Languages in Contact

Rethinking Languages in Contact
Author: Anna-Laura Lepschy
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 253
Release: 2017-12-02
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1351195492

"Taking as its theme the interaction between Italian and other languages, and marking the 50th anniversary of the publication of Weinreich's seminal Languages in Contact, this volume provides an up-to-date survey of the role of linguistic and cultural interaction in the process of language change. The range of contributions covers: theoretical issues; different forms of language contact in Medieval and Renaissance Italy; dialect transition and diversity in the North and South of Italy; lexical and morphological borrowings; register and syntactic loans in the Romance area; old and new contact varieties of Italian in the Mediterranean, including Malta and North Africa; and, finally, Italian under pressure from English in EU institutions. The volume is published in memory of Joseph Cremona (1922-2003), and includes a bibliography of his work. Anna Laura Lepschy is Visiting Professor at the Universities of Reading and Toronto, and Emeritus Professor at University College London. Arturo Tosi is Professor of Italian at Royal Holloway, University of London. With the contributions: Peter Matthews - On Re-reading Weinreich's Languages in Contact; Nigel Vincent; Languages in Contact in Medieval Italy; Brian Richardson - Latin and Italian in Contact in Some Renaissance Grammars; Cecilia Robustelli - Latin and Vernacular in Contact in the Sixteenth Century: The Latin Model of Giambullari's Grammar; and, Mair Parry - Markedness, Salience and Language Change: Exploring an Italo-Romance Transition Area. It also includes: John Green - The North-South Axis of Romance: Contact Reinforcing Typology? Martin Maiden - Accommodating Synonymy: How Some Italo-Romance Verbs React to Lexical and Morphological Borrowing; Chris Pountain - Syntactical Borrowing as a Function of Register; Adam Ledgeway - The Dual Complementizer System in Southern Italy: Spirito Greco, Materia Romanza? Rosanna Sornicola - Dialectology and History: The Problem of the Adriatic-Tyrrhenian Dialect Corridor; Alberto Varvaro - The Maghreb Papers in Italian Discovered by Joe Cremona; Joseph Brincat - Languages and Varieties in Use in Malta Today: Maltese, English, Italian, Maltese English and Maltaliano; and, Arturo Tosi - Languages in Contact with and without Speaker Interaction."

Rethinking TESOL in Diverse Global Settings

Rethinking TESOL in Diverse Global Settings
Author: Tim Marr
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2019-02-07
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 1350033472

Shortlisted for the BAAL Book Prize 2020 What do TESOL teachers actually teach? What do they know about language, about English and the ways it is used in the world? How do they view themselves and their work, and how are they viewed by others? How is TESOL perceived as a profession and as a discipline? How can teachers make the most of the available resources? Can global English really deliver what it seems to promise? These are some of the questions explored in Rethinking TESOL in Diverse Global Settings, a book which examines what we mean when we talk about English language teaching and what we understand the job of an English language teacher to be. Covering diverse teaching environments, from China to Latin America and the Middle East, and from elementary school to university, the authors take a critical look at TESOL by focusing on the actual substance of the subject, language, and attitudes towards it. Through concrete examples from language classrooms, in the form of vignettes and accounts from native speaker and non-native speaker teachers alike, they explore the experiences of teachers worldwide in relation to issues of identity and professionalism, nativeness and non-nativeness, and the pressures of dealing with the expectations with which English has become invested. While recognising the often precarious academic and institutional status of TESOL teachers, the book pulls no punches in challenging those teachers as a whole to become more ambitious in their aims, positioning themselves not as mere skills providers, but language experts, specialists in their subject, members of a legitimate academic discipline. Only then, the authors argue, will TESOL teachers and their work be taken seriously and their expertise recognised.