Action Research: A Pathway to Action, knowledge and Learning (Qualitative Research Methods Series)
This book has been prepared to assist people who are undertaking, supervising or examining action research. It describes the origin of the action research method; explores the layers and strands of work that are involved; offers a practical guide to uncovering the issues which arise from the method; reviews the status of this method relative to other research methodologies; explores the notion of subjectivity; describes other ways to strengthen the extent...
Interlanguage Pragmatic Development: The Study Abroad Context
Gila Schauer's study of interlanguage pragmatic development in English is situated in the context of studying abroad. It is the first book-length study of a common occurrence worldwide, but one that has not received the focus it deserves. Schauer examines the interlanguagepragmatic development of German learners of English at a British University over the course of a year. The focus is not only on the learners' productivepragmatic development, but also on their pragmatic awareness, which is compared with their grammatical awareness.
The book provides a theoretical and empirical evaluation of a field that has been the focus of generative theories on language acquisition: the acquisition of finiteness and related properties such as root infinitives, verb movement and null subjects. It contains a critical empirical assessment of the various hypotheses, lists the implications for linguistic theory and provides alternative analyses.
As a subject of universal appeal, spatial demonstratives have been studied extensively from a variety of disciplines. What marks the present study as distinct is that it is an English-Chinese comparative study set in a cognitive-linguistic framework and that the methodology features a parallel corpora-based, discourse analysis approach. The framework illuminates the nature of the demonstratives’ basic and extended meaning and use, the connections between them, and the mechanisms that govern and constrain their trends of extension.
