Alternative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition
Added by: algy | Karma: 431.17 | Only for teachers, Linguistics | 3 April 2012
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Alternative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition
This volume presents six alternative approaches to studying second language acquisition – 'alternative' in the sense that they contrast with and/or complement the cognitivism pervading the field. All six approaches – sociocultural, complexity theory, conversation-analytic, identity, language socialization, and sociocognitive – are described according to the same set of six headings, allowing for direct comparison across approaches.
Bornstein considers herself a gender outlaw because she breaks the laws of nature. A former heterosexual male and now a lesbian woman, Bay Area Reporter writer, and actor who has appeared on talk shows, she has completed the transsexual process, including surgery. As she considers her workplace the theater, about a third of this informative and profoundly humorous autobiographical work is devoted to queer theater, including her play, Hidden: A Gender. REUPLOAD NEEDED
The present book originated as a doctoral dissertation at the University of Zurich .In the present study I shall establish the idiom as a functional element of language. My approach will thus be based on a pragmatic view of language, as I have outlined below. Idioms are seen as a special category of lexical items which are not only determined through their structure, but which also show a specific type of behaviour in lan guage use. By analysing this behaviour I hope to create a pragmatic model for English idioms and thus to provide a basis for a theory of idioms as a phenomenon of natural language.
In Europe and throughout the world, competence in English is spreading at a speed never achieved by any language in human history. This apparently irresistible growing dominance of English is frequently perceived and sometimes indignantly denounced as being grossly unjust. Linguistic Justice for Europe and for the World starts off arguing that the dissemination of competence in a common lingua franca is a process to be welcomed and accelerated, most fundamentally because it provides the struggle for greater justice in Europe and in the world with an essential weapon: a cheap medium of communication and of mobilization.
The Human Semantic Potential: Spatial Language and Constrained Connectionism Drawing on ideas from cognitive linguistics, connectionism, and perception, The Human Semantic Potential describes a connectionist model that learns perceptually grounded semantics for natural language in spatial terms. Languages differ in the ways in which they structure space, and Regier's aim is to have the model perform its learning task for terms from any natural language. The system has so far succeeded in learning spatial terms from English, German, Russian, Japanese, and Mixtec.
