An up-to-date review of the relevant literature on assessing speaking.

This book takes teachers and language testers through the research on the assessment of speaking.

In three carefully researched volumes, this ground-breaking study examines the gift of tongues through 2,000 years of church history. Starting in the present and working back in time, these volumes consider (1) the modern redefinition of "tongues" as a private prayer language; (2) the church's perennial understanding of "tongues" as ordinary human languages; and (3) the Corinthian "tongues," which, in light of Jewish liturgical tradition, turn out to have been a foreign liturgical language (Hebrew or Aramaic) requiring bilingual interpreters. In the first volume, the authors establish that modern glossolalia, far from being a supernatural gift enjoyed by certain believers since the time of Pentecost and undergoing a resurgence in modern times, has no precedent in church life prior to the nineteenth century. They discuss why German theologians, responding to the Irvingite revival, coined the term "glossolalia" in the 1830s; why Pentecostals between 1906-8 quietly began redefining "tongues" to mean a heavenly language unintelligible to human beings but pleasing to God, instead of foreign languages useful for evangelism; why Protestant cessationists believed miraculous tongues had ceased; and why interpolated idioms like "unknown tongues" in Protestant Bibles were aimed originally at Rome's use of Latin.

In three carefully researched volumes, this ground-breaking study examines the gift of tongues through two thousand years of church history. Starting in the present and working back in time, these volumes consider (1) the modern redefinition of “tongues” as a private prayer language; (2) the church’s perennial understanding of “tongues” as ordinary human languages; and (3) the Corinthian “tongues,” which, in light of Jewish liturgical tradition, turn out to have been a Semitic liturgical language requiring bilingual interpreters. This second volume tracks the perception and practice of tongues back through the first eighteen hundred years of church history, demonstrating that “tongue-speaking” was always active but puzzlingly different from today’s glossolalia. From Pope Benedict XIV’s detailed treatise in the 1700s, it works back through long-forgotten scholastic and patristic debates to the earliest Christian writers such as Irenaeus. No other resource on the subject approaches the depth and scope of the present volume.

Adaptive hypermedia listening software enables materials writers to combine and deliver a wide range of digital elements on the same digital computer platform more efficiently. Such a combination and delivery provides a multidimensional, multi-sensory digital environment in which rich, efficient, instant, comprehensible, optimum, and meaningful input and feedback can be presented effectively and efficiently. Moreover, language learners’ attention can be drawn to forms and meanings in input. Such aspects correspond with different theories and hypotheses of language learning and teaching. This presents users/learners with an environment that is easy to use, tension-free, and optimal during self-study. However, to be able to design and develop cost effective and professional adaptive hypermedia listening software, there are certain scientific educational findings and implications that need to be implemented at every single stage. To have access to such vital findings is not so easy, and research must address this area. Design Solutions for Adaptive Hypermedia Listening Software explores how to design and create technically and pedagogically sound and efficient interactive adaptive hypermedia listening software for language learners in any language. The chapters will cover learner strategy tools, the effectiveness of this technology, best practices in adaptive hypermedia listening software, and the benefits and challenges of this technology for language learning. It is ideal for companies, institutions, teachers, policymakers, academicians, researchers, advanced-level students, technology developers, and decision-making pertinent government officials interested in designing and developing multimedia listening environments for language learners.

Language is a fundamental tool for shaping identity and community, including the expression (or repression) of sexual desire. Speaking in Queer Tongues investigates the tensions and adaptations that occur when processes of globalization bring one system of gay or lesbian language into contact with another. Western constructions of gay culture are now circulating widely beyond the boundaries of Western nations due to influences as diverse as Internet communication, global dissemination of entertainment and other media, increased travel and tourism, migration, displacement, and transnational citizenship. The authority claimed by these constructions, and by the linguistic codes embedded in them, is causing them to have a profound impact on public and private expressions of homosexuality in locations as diverse as sub-Saharan Africa, New Zealand, Indonesia and Israel. Examining a wide range of global cultures, Speaking in Queer Tongues presents essays on topics that include old versus new sexual vocabularies, the rhetoric of gay-oriented magazines and news media, verbal and nonverbalized sexual imagery in poetry and popular culture, and the linguistic consequences of the globalized gay rights movement.

This book investigates various aspects of speaking in a foreign language. It is unique in considering this key skill from both psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic perspectives, and in focusing entirely on instructed foreign language contexts. The book demonstrates how theory and research can be translated into classroom practice.

This book presents a perspective on genre based on what it is that leads users of a language to recognise a communicative event as an instance of a particular genre. Key notions in this perspective are those of prototype, inheritance, and intertextuality; that is, the extent to which a text is typical of the particular genre, the qualities or properties that are inherited from other instances of the communicative event, and the ways in which a text is influenced by other texts of a similar kind. The texts which form the basis of this discussion are drawn from experimental research reporting in English. Contents: 1. Introduction 2. Approaches to genre 3. Genre and frames 4. A sample analysis: Writing up research 5. Summary and conclusions.

The characteristics, nature, and content of the language used in the public sphere of various Western and non-Western societies are examined in this collection of essays. They also analyze the functions language plays in the polity and the link between culture, political culture, and the language that politicians and the public use in their symbolic interaction. This work details and examines the characteristics, nature, and content of the language used in the public sphere of various Western and non-Western societies; the functions language plays in the polity; and the link between culture, political culture, and the language that politicians and other elites, as well as the public, use in their symbolic interaction. The essays describe and analyze the topic of political language from different perspectives—political science, psychology, philosophy, sociology, gender studies, economics, religious, public administration, mass communication, and linguistics. Essays examine the discourse of political press reports and TV interviews, political orations and election propaganda, legalistic, political-philosophic, and religious treatises. Throughout it provides an overview of the state of the art of political language, utilizing various research methods and disciplines.