This paper generally lends support to the arguments advanced by Awonusi (1989, 1990, 2004) and others in favour of an endornormative as opposed to an exonormative standard for English pronunciation in Nigeria. They include the fact that the existing, exonormative standard, British Received Pronunciation (RP), has undergone and is still undergoing changes in its homeland, and is not homogeneous. The heightened social mobility of today’s world perhaps works against the demarcation and homogenization of language varieties, and this is all the more true of the varieties or lects that have been proposed for Nigerian English when these are related, more or less explicitly, to educational attainment. Major attention is given in the paper to a schema of basilect, mesolect, and acrolect presented by Ugorji (2010), with a focus on his account of vowels and his presentation of a mechanism derived from optimality theory for evaluating vowels in contention. The basilect and the mesolect are found to be so close to each other that they might be combined. There would then be just two varieties. In contrast, the acrolect is close to British RP, albeit with many variants due to the conflict of two standardising forces, i.e. British RP and the basilect-mesolect. The vowel system of an officially adopted endonormative standard – ‘Nigerian RP’ – would mainly be the same as that of British RP, but the optimality mechanism could be employed to give preference to some of the Nigerian variants for inclusion in it.

George Orwell set out ‘to make political writing into an art’, and to a wide extent this aim shaped the future of English literature – his descriptions of authoritarian regimes helped to form a new vocabulary that is fundamental to understanding totalitarianism. While 1984 and Animal Farm are amongst the most popular classic novels in the English language, this new series of Orwell’s essays seeks to bring a wider selection of his writing on politics and literature to a new readership. In Politics and the English Language, the second in the Orwell’s Essays series, Orwell takes aim at the language used in politics, which, he says, ‘is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind’. In an age where the language used in politics is constantly under the microscope, Orwell’s Politics and the English Language is just as relevant today, and gives the reader a vital understanding of the tactics at play. 'A writer who can – and must – be rediscovered with every age.' — Irish Times

This book brings together an interdisciplinary group of academic researchers in order to examine how and to what extent the challenge of language revitalisation should be reassessed and reconceptualised to take account of our fast-changing social context. The period of four decades between 1980 and 2020 that straddled the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first is widely regarded as one that witnessed a series of fundamental social, economic and political transformations. Many societies have become increasingly individualistic, mobile and diverse in terms of ethnicity and identity; their economies have become increasingly interconnected; and their governance structures have become increasingly complex, incorporating a growing number of different levels and actors. In addition, rapid advancements with regard to automated, digital and communication technology have had a far-reaching impact on how people interact with each other and participate in society. The chapters in this book aim to advance an agenda of key questions that should concern those working in the field of language revitalisation over the coming years, and the volume will be of interest to students, scholars and policy-makers in related areas including sociolinguistics, education, sociology, geography, political science, law, economics, Celtic studies, and communication technology.

Rapidly growing cognitive technologies (such as word processors, web browsers, cell phones, and personal data assistants) aid learning, memory, and problem solving, and contribute to every part of modern life from interviewing crime witnesses to learning a foreign language to calling one's mother. This collection of essays on cognitive technology examines the interaction between the human mind and the tools people create to enhance it, studying which technologies assist cognition the most and what features are most effective. It also considers the point at which the technological enhancement of human ability begins to restrict that very ability, such as the risk of some cognitive technologies impairing cognition or creating disadvantages for individuals or groups. This collection of 11 essays discusses the most recent psychological research in cognitive technology, showcasing the paradigms and theories that have driven the development of new cognitive technologies. It explores the impact of technology on cognitive psychology, the classroom, and social interaction and group problem solving. Topics covered include the distracting characteristics of new technologies (such as the effects of cell phone use on driving ability and of distracting advertisements on problem solving), the study of mass media through assessing memories for media experiences, the media's role in advancing gender and racial prejudices, and the misuse of cognitive technology through identity theft and cyberterrorism. Each essay concludes with a bibliography.

Designed to spark educators to reflect on the nature of human thinking and the academic goals of education, this collection of essays -- by scholars from widely disparate orientations and disciplines -- explores and explains the human cognitive capacities that transcend computation and substantially affect our judgment and action. Asks the critical questions -- Is there more to thinking than information processing?, What more is there?, and What difference does it make to education? Addresses numerous critical issues -- from educational standards, to the environmental/social and moral dimensions, to the role of the senses in human development. Demonstrates how to identify new intelligences and identifies both Naturalist and Existential Intelligences. Explores the question of how science may address questions of spirituality. Introduces and provides unique insight into cultural educational issues. Considers different educational levels to demonstrate the practical meanings of the various theoretical positions. For prospective and practicing educational professionals.

Exemplifying what it advocates, this book is an innovative attempt to retrieve the essay form from its degenerate condition in academic writing. Its purpose is to create pedagogical space in which the inner struggle of ‘lived experience’ can articulate itself in the first person. Working through essays, the modern, ‘post-secular’ self can guide, understand, and express its own transformation. This is not merely a book about writing methods: it has a sharp existential edge. Beginning by defining key terms such as ‘self-transformation’, Kwak sketches the contemporary debates between Jürgen Habermas and Charles Taylor on the status of religious language in the public domain, and its relationship to secular language. This allows her to contextualize her book’s central questions: how can philosophical practice reduce the experiential rift between knowledge and wisdom? How can the essay form be developed so that it facilitates, as praxis, pedagogical self-transformation? Kwak develops her answers by working through ideas of George Lukács and Stanley Cavell, of Hans Blumenberg and Søren Kierkegaard, whose work is much less familiar in this context than it deserves to be. Kwak’s work provides templates for new forms of educational writing, new approaches to teaching educators, and new ways of writing methodology for educational researchers. Yet the importance of her ideas extends far beyond teaching academies to classroom teachers, curriculum developers – and to anyone engaged in the quest to lead a reflective life of one’s own.

This title was first published in 2002: Religion and Social Transformations examines the reciprocal relationship between religion, modernity and social change. The book focuses on the world's three major missionary religions - Buddhism, Christianity and Islam. It explores how these three traditions are responding to some of the most challenging issues associated with globalization, including the role of religion in the fall of Communism; the tension between religion and feminism; the compatibility of religion and human rights; and whether ancient religions can accommodate new challenges such as environmentalism. The five textbooks and Reader that make up the Religion Today Open University/Ashgate series are: From Sacred Text to Internet; Religion and Social Transformations; Perspectives on Civil Religion; Global Religious Movements in Regional Context; Belief Beyond Boundaries; Religion Today: A Reader

What is the nature of the social sciences? What kinds of knowledge can they—and should they—hope to create? Are objective viewpoints possible and can universal laws be discovered? Questions like these have been asked with increasing urgency in recent years, as some philosophers and researchers have perceived a "crisis" in the social sciences. Metatheory in Social Science offers many provocative arguments and analyses of basic conceptual frameworks for the study of human behavior. These are offered primarily by practicing researchers and are related to problems in disciplines as diverse as sociology, psychology, psychiatry, anthropology, and philosophy of science. While various points of view are expressed in these nineteen essays, they have in common several themes, including the comparison of social and natural science, the role of knowledge in meeting the demands of society and its pressing problems, and the nature and role of subjectivity in science. Some authors hold that subjectivity cannot be studied scientifically; others argue that it can and must be if progress in knowledge is to be made. The essays demonstrate the philosophical pluralism they discuss and give a wide range of alternative positions on the future of the social and behavioral sciences in a postpositivist intellectual world.

This lively and controversial collection of essays sets out to theorize and practice a ‘materialist-feminist’ criticism of literature and culture. Such a criticism is based on the view that the material conditions in which men and women live are central to an understanding of culture and society. It emphasises the relation of gender to other categories of analysis, such as class and race, and considers the connection between ideology and cultural practice, and the ways in which all relations of power change with changing social and economic conditions. By presenting a wide range of work by major feminist scholars, this anthology in effect defines as well as illustrates the materialist-feminist tendency in current literary criticism. The essays in the first part of the book examine race, ideology, and the literary canon and explore the ways in which other critical discourse, such as those of deconstruction and French feminism, might be useful to a feminist and materialist criticism. The second part of the book contains examples of such criticism in practice, with studies of individual works, writers and ideas. An introduction by the editors situates the collected essays in relation both to one another and to a shared materialist/feminist project. Feminist Criticism and Social Change demonstrates the important contribution of materialist-feminist criticism to our understanding of literature and society, and fulfils a crucial need among those concerned with gender and its relation to criticism.