Second Language Practice

This book is primarily intended for second, foreign and modern language teachers. It contains a series of short articles in order to provide teachers with theoretically supported classroom strategies for increasing communicative competence at different levels of skill development. Articles highlight the role of comprehensible input at the outset as well as strategies and target more context-specific strategies. The themes include early student comprehension and response, context-based comprehension and interaction, meaning-based communication and problem-solving, group work and the cooperative approach, and refining literacy skills. A final component evaluation is included.

Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free

The three Great Premises of Idiot America:

· Any theory is valid if it sells books, soaks up ratings, or otherwise moves units

· Anything can be true if someone says it loudly enough

· Fact is that which enough people believe. Truth is determined by how fervently they believe it

Emerging Technologies for the Classroom: A Learning Sciences Perspective

This book provides contemporary examples of the ways in which educators can use digital technologies to create effective learning environments that support improved learning and instruction. These examples are guided by multiple conceptual and methodological traditions evolving from the learning sciences and instructional technology communities as well as other communities doing important work on learning technologies.

Europe: The Struggle for Supremacy, from 1453 to the Present

If there is a fundamental truth of geopolitics, it is this: whoever controls the core of Europe can control the entire continent, and whoever controls all of Europe can dominate the world. Over the past five centuries, a rotating cast of kings and conquerors, presidents and dictators have set their sights on the European heartland, desperate to seize this pivotal area or at least prevent it from falling into the wrong hands.

The Signature of All Things

Elizabeth Gilbert returns to fiction, inserting her inimitable voice into an enthralling story of love, adventure and discovery.
Exquisitely researched and told at a galloping pace, it soars across the globe. Along the way, the story is peopled with unforgettable characters. But most memorable of all, it is the story of Alma Whittaker, who—born in the Age of Enlightenment, but living well into the Industrial Revolution—bears witness to that extraordinary moment in human history when all the old assumptions about science, religion, commerce, and class were exploding into dangerous new ideas.