The history of "language teaching" is shot through with methods and approaches to language learning - most recently with "communicative language teaching" - but this book demonstrates that a more differentiated and richer understanding of learning a foreign language is both necessary and desirable. Languages and cultures are interlinked and interdependent and their teaching and learning should be too. Learning another language is part of a complex process of learning and understanding other people's ways of life, ways of thinking and socio-economic experience

This book explores how parents make sense of, and respond to, differing cultural influences within their family. Chapters identify the communication strategies employed by the parents as they strive to create affirming relationships between children and their heritages.

If it is bilingualism that transfers information and ideas from culture to culture, it is the translator who systematizes and generalizes this process. The translator serves as a mediator of cultures. In this collection of essays, based on a conference held at the University of Hartford, a group of individuals – professional translators, linguists, and literary scholars – exchange their views on translation and its power to influence literary traditions and to shape cultural and economic identities. The authors explore the implications of their views on the theory and craft of translation, both written and oral, in an era of unsettling globalizing forces.

This book sets the grounds for a new approach exploring cultural mediators as key figures in literary and cultural history. It proposes an innovative conceptual and methodological understanding of the figure of the cultural mediator, defined as a cultural actor active across linguistic, cultural and geographical borders, occupying strategic positions within large networks and being the carrier of cultural transfer. Many studies on translation and cultural mediation privileged the major metropolis of Paris, London, and New York as centres of cultural production and translation. However, other cities and megacities that are not global centres of culture also feature vibrant translation scenes. This book abandons the focus on ‘innovative’ centres and ‘imitative’ peripheries and follows processes of cultural exchange as they develop. Thus, it analyses the role of cultural mediators as customs officers or smugglers (or both in different proportions) in so-called ‘peripheral’ cultures and offers insights into an under-analysed body of actors and institutions promoting intercultural transfer in often multilingual and less studied venues such as Trieste, Tel Aviv, Buenos Aires, Lima, Lahore, or Cape Town.

This book uses examples of classroom interaction to reveal how teachers of languages act as intercultural mediators and the implications of this for practice. The book offers an account of what teachers are thinking, feeling and doing as they enact an intercultural perspective on language teaching and learning.

This book contributes to the growing field of foreign language teaching and testing by shedding light on mediation between languages. Stathopoulou offers an empirically-grounded definition of mediation as a form of translanguaging and offers tools and methods for further research in multilingual testing. The book explores what cross-language mediation entails, what processes and strategies are involved, and the challenges often faced by mediators. As well as stressing the importance of administering tests which favour cross-language mediation practices, the author encourages the implementation of language programmes which promote the mingling-of-languages idea and target the development of language learners’ effective translanguaging practices. Researchers studying translanguaging, multilingualism, multilingual testing and the use of mother tongue in the foreign language classroom will all find this book of interest.

Believing not only that conflict is inevitable in human life but that it is essential and can be quite constructive, Augsburger proposes a shift to an "international" approach in resolving conflict. Augsburger focuses on interpersonal and group conflicts and provides a comparison of conflict patterns within and among various cultures.

As the 21st century gets into stride so does the call for a discipline combining culture and translation. This second edition of Translating Cultures retains its original aim of putting some rigour and coherence into these fashionable words and lays the foundation for such a discipline. This edition has not only been thoroughly revised, but it has also been expanded. In particular, a new chapter has been added which focuses specifically on training translators for translational and intercultural competencies. The core of the book provides a model for teaching culture to translators, interpreters and other mediators. It introduces the reader to current understanding about culture and aims to raise awareness of the fundamental role of culture in constructing, perceiving and translating reality. Culture is perceived throughout as a system for orienting experience, and a basic presupposition is that the organization of experience is not 'reality', but rather a simplified model and a 'distortion' which varies from culture to culture. Each culture acts as a frame within which external signs or 'reality' are interpreted. The approach is interdisciplinary, taking ideas from contemporary translation theory, anthropology, Bateson's logical typing and metamessage theories, Bandler and Grinder's NLP meta-model theory, and Hallidayan functional grammar. Authentic texts and translations are offered to illustrate the various strategies that a cultural mediator can adopt in order to make the different cultural frames he or she is mediating between more explicit.

Approx.394 pages

Information and communication technology is transforming our notion of literacy. In the study of second language learning, there is an acute need to understand how learners collaborate in mediating discourse online. This edited volume offers essays and research studies that lead us to question the borders between speech and writing, to redefine narrative, to speculate on the consequences of many-to-many communication, and to ponder the ethics of researching online interaction. Using diverse technologies (bulletin boards, course management systems, chats, instant messaging, online gaming) and situated in different cultural environments, the studies explore intercultural notions of identity, voice, and collaboration. Although the studies come from varying theoretical perspectives, they point, as a whole, to insights to be gained from an ecological approach to studying how people make discourse online. The volume will especially benefit researchers in the digital arena and instructors who must consider how online interaction affects language learning and use.