Interest in language play and linguistic creativity has increased in recent years, and the topic has been taken up from a variety of perspectives. In this book, disparate approaches to the topic are brought together, demonstrating that a number of phenomena whose similarities might not have been immediately recognized, have an academic home under the umbrella of language play and linguistic creativity. The contributions to this collection illustrate the variety of questions that can be asked regarding the social, cognitive, emotional, political, and cultural mechanisms and significance of innovative linguistic practices and point to new directions of inquiry. Furthermore, the work exemplifies a variety of ways in which this research can be carried out, as well as the range of contexts in which it might be investigated, including second language classrooms, online settings, and workplaces. Taken together, the chapters serve to illustrate the range of work that we will be accepting in the Language Play and Creativity series; viewed individually, each makes a unique contribution to some aspect of our understanding of creative language use.

This collection of papers brings together a diverse range of conceptualisations of the self in the domain of second language acquisition and foreign language learning. The volume attempts to unite a fragmented field and provides a thorough overview of the ways in which the self can be conceptualised in SLA contexts.

While teachers value children's play, they often do not know how to guide that play to make it more educational. This volume reflects current research in the child development and early childhood education fields.

This volume brings together studies, research syntheses, and critical commentaries that examine play-literacy relationships from cognitive, ecological, and cultural perspectives. The cognitive view focuses on mental processes that appear to link play and literacy activities; the ecological stance examines opportunities to engage in literacy-related play in specific environments; and the social-cultural position stresses the interface between the literacy and play cultures of home, community, and the school. Examining play from these diverse perspectives provides a multidimensional view that deepens understanding and opens up new avenues for research and educational practice. Each set of chapters is followed by a critical review by a distinguished play scholar. These commentaries' focus is to hold research on play and literacy up to scrutiny in terms of scientific significance, methodology, and utility for practice. A Foreword by Margaret Meek situates these studies in the context of current trends in literacy learning and instruction. Earlier studies on the role of play in early literacy acquisition provided considerable information about the types of reading and writing activities that children engage in during play and how this literacy play is affected by variables such as props, peers, and adults. However, they did not deal extensively, as this book does, with the functional significance of play in the literacy development of individual children. This volume pushes the study of play and literacy into new areas. It is indispensable reading for researchers and graduate students in the fields of early childhood education and early literacy development.

Annotation This book provides a comprehensive introduction to the study of intergroup communication. Chapters apply Social Identity Theory and related perspectives to communication phenomena. Contributions from international scholars describe communication processes across cultures, gender and sexuality, disability, linguistic, and age groups. The important role that intergroup processes play in interpersonal, small group, organizational and mass communication is explicated, along with the implications for communication using new technology. The book will be invaluable for scholars in the areas of communication and intergroup social psychology, and is suited for upper division undergraduate and introductory graduate courses in those areas.

Concepts such as dependability/generalization and inferences are dealt with implicitly or explicitly in any research undertaken in applied linguistics. This volume provides a well-balanced and cross-disciplinary perspective on how researchers conceptualize inferences about learner acquisition and performances as well as dependability and generalizability of findings. The book is a collection of chapters by prominent researchers in applied linguistics, working in diverse domains such as vocabulary, syntax, discourse analysis, SLA, and language testing. The goal of the book is to bring attention to these issues, which underpin much of applied linguistics research and to highlight what is considered good practice so as to buttress confidence in the research claims made. The book represents current thinking on fundamental research concepts in applied linguistics and can be used as a textbook in courses on research methodology in applied linguistics. The book is also an excellent source of in-depth analysis of research conceptualization for applied linguistics researchers and graduate students.

The aim of the present volume is to provide a present-day take on variation in terminology by looking forward and examining what leading scholars in the field are working on and where they are taking research in the field today. This reader is built around three themes arranged according to complementary points of view to stimulate thought on the subject of variation as it is approached today. The first theme, "The social dimension of variation", includes three contributions dealing with variation across different categories of speakers. This reflects not only the expert/layperson dichotomy but also other more original polarities as the emotional dimension and the issue of diastratic variation across LSPs. The second part of this reader puts forward different tools and methods to identify, describe and manage term variation. The third theme of this reader questions semantics of term variation through the topics of concept saturation, multidimensionality and metaphor. Variation, through this picture of current studies, proves to be the touchstone for the understanding of the major issues of terminology research today. The included papers draw on research in terminology carried out in different language communities - Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian and Dutch in particular - thereby opening up a window on much of the research carried out in these cultural areas.

This edited collection provides a state-of-the art overview of research on willingness to communicate (WTC) in a second and foreign language. In particular, it includes innovative studies seeking to demonstrate the ways in which WTC can be examined within the framework of complex dynamic systems, how the construct is related to self-assessment, reticence and extroversion, and what is signifies in the case of immigrants. Another group of papers is related to the role of technology in fostering WTC in different contexts. The volume also comprises papers that touch on methodological issues in the study of WTC such as experience case sampling, the network approach or the integration of the macro- and micro-perspective. The book will be of values to researchers interested in the study of WTC but will also provide inspiration for students, teachers and materials writers.

The Routledge Handbook of Language and Humor presents the first ever comprehensive, in-depth treatment of all the sub-fields of the linguistics of humor, broadly conceived as the intersection of the study of language and humor. The reader will find a thorough historical, terminological, and theoretical introduction to the field, as well as detailed treatments of the various approaches to language and humor. Deliberately comprehensive and wide-ranging, the handbook includes chapter-long treatments on the traditional topics covered by language and humor (e.g., teasing, laughter, irony, psycholinguistics, discourse analysis, the major linguistic theories of humor, translation) but also cutting-edge treatments of internet humor, cognitive linguistics, relevance theoretic, and corpus-assisted models of language and humor. Some chapters, such as the variationist sociolinguistcs, stylistics, and politeness are the first-ever syntheses of that particular subfield. Clusters of related chapters, such as conversation analysis, discourse analysis and corpus-assisted analysis allow multiple perspectives on complex trans-disciplinary phenomena. This handbook is an indispensable reference work for all researchers interested in the interplay of language and humor, within linguistics, broadly conceived, but also in neighboring disciplines such as literary studies, psychology, sociology, anthropology, etc. The authors are among the most distinguished scholars in their fields.

Trade schools, universities, and programs for international students have begun to experiment with Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) as a viable pedagogy for instruction, as the pedagogy of CLIL increasingly gains recognition as a practical form of language and content education in Europe and beyond, and its application in instructional settings becomes more diverse. Corresponding with CLIL’s growth, this book focuses on foreign language use during peer interactions in a new CLIL setting. It particularly concentrates on how to conduct research when the focus is on learner interactions. The theoretical background, research methods, and research instruments are explained in a brief and understandable manner. This book is intended for those interested in CLIL and peer interactions and includes a framework and ideas for investigating new CLIL contexts in a practical manner allowing undergraduate and graduate students to conduct their own research in these settings.