Validity is an ominous word. The Oxford English Dictionary assigns it several meanings, deriving from Latin origins of 'powerful, effective': 'possessing legal authority or force', 'technically perfect or efficacious', as well as 'sound and to the point; against which no objections can fairly be brought'. These senses are all relevant to current uses of the term validity in language testing. But as the chapters in the present volume make clear, various practices, modes of argumentation, sources of information, and complex conceptual issues exist for establishing the validity of language testing instruments, procedures, and their uses in educational settings. Moreover, many valuable analytic approaches and theoretical considerations have only recently been explored, applying innovative measurement techniques, corresponding to the complex nature of language proficiency itself, and accounting for the diverse purposes for which languages are learned as well as settings in which languages are used.
The Focus Dictionary translates words into and from five fifferent languages. Use the mouse to change translation direction. The languages are: English, French, German, Italian and Spanish.
This book is the result of a joint project on lexical and semantic typology which gathered together field linguists, semanticists, cognitivists, typologists, and an NLP specialist. These cross-linguistic studies concern semantic shifts at large, both synchronic and diachronic: the outcome of polysemy, heterosemy, or semantic change at the lexical level. The first part presents a comprehensive state of the art of a domain typologists have long been reluctant to deal with. Part two focuses on theoretical and methodological approaches: cognition, construction grammar, graph theory, semantic maps, and data bases. These studies deal with universals and variation across languages ...
This is the most comprehensive survey ever published of auxiliary verb constructions, as in 'he could have been going to drink it' and 'she does eat cheese'. Drawing on a database of over 800 languages Dr Anderson examines their morphosyntactic forms and semantic roles. He investigates and explains the historical changes leading to the cross-linguistic diversity of inflectional patterns, and he presents his results within a new typological framework. The book's impressive range includes data on variation within and across languages and language families. In addition to examining languages in Africa, Europe, and Asia the author presents analyses of languages in Australasia and the Pacific and in North, South, and Meso-America. In doing so he reveals much that is new about the language families of the world and makes an important contribution to the understanding of their nature and evolution. His book will interest scholars and researchers in language typology, historical and comparative linguistics, syntax, and morphology.
The adoption of the comprehensive school as the norm in secondary education in this country resulted in the opening up of the curriculum to a wide spectrum of abilities. In modern languages, for generations the preserve of selective schools, teachers had to find ways of making their subject accessible to middle and low ability learners, validating their teaching by use of graded objectives and the end-of-course Certificate of Secondary Education. For many pupils, however, foreign languages held little appeal and were jettisoned with alacrity at the option stage. These disenchanted learners would say in later life, if they thought about it at all, that they were just 'no good at languages', or that languages were 'boring' or 'useless' or 'too difficult'.
