There are many reasons to be curious about the way people learn, and the past several decades have seen an explosion of research that has important implications for individual learning, schooling, workforce training, and policy. In 2000, How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School: Expanded Edition was published and its influence has been wide and deep. The report summarized insights on the nature of learning in school-aged children; described principles for the design of effective learning environments; and provided examples of how that could be implemented in the classroom. Since then, researchers have continued to investigate the nature of learning and have generated new findings related to the neurological processes involved in learning, individual and cultural variability related to learning, and educational technologies. In addition to expanding scientific understanding of the mechanisms of learning and how the brain adapts throughout the lifespan, there have been important discoveries about influences on learning, particularly sociocultural factors and the structure of learning environments. How People Learn II: Learners, Contexts, and Cultures provides a much-needed update incorporating insights gained from this research over the past decade. The book expands on the foundation laid out in the 2000 report and takes an in-depth look at the constellation of influences that affect individual learning. How People Learn II will become an indispensable resource to understand learning throughout the lifespan for educators of students and adults.

Addressing a wide range of issues in applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, and multilingualism, this volume focuses on language users, the ‘people.’ Making creative connections between existing scholarship in language policy and contemporary theory and research in other social sciences, authors from around the world offer new critical perspectives for analyzing language phenomena and language theories, suggesting new meeting points among language users and language policy makers, norms, and traditions in diverse cultural, geographical, and historical contexts. Identifying and expanding on previously neglected aspects of language studies, the book is inspired by the work of Elana Shohamy, whose critical view and innovative work on a broad spectrum of key topics in applied linguistics has influenced many scholars in the field to think “out of the box” and to reconsider some basic commonly held understandings, specifically with regard to the impact of language and languaging on individual language users rather than on the masses.

Bringing together state-of-the-art chapters written by leading scholars, this volume provides a comprehensive reference on theory and research of corrective feedback. It will be a key resource for researchers, graduate students, teachers and teacher educators who are interested in the role of feedback in second language teaching and learning.

This collection of research in on-line communication for second language learning inlcudes use of electronic mail, real-time writing and the World Wide Web. It analyses the theories underlying computer-assisted learning.

Embodied conversational agents (ECA) and speech-based human–machine interfaces can together represent more advanced and more natural human–machine interaction. Fusion of both topics is a challenging agenda in research and production spheres. The important goal of human–machine interfaces is to provide content or functionality in the form of a dialog resembling face-to-face conversations. All natural interfaces strive to exploit and use different communication strategies that provide additional meaning to the content, whether they are human–machine interfaces for controlling an application or different ECA-based human–machine interfaces directly simulating face-to-face conversation. Coverbal Synchrony in Human-Machine Interaction presents state-of-the-art concepts of advanced environment-independent multimodal human–machine interfaces that can be used in different contexts, ranging from simple multimodal web-browsers (for example, multimodal content reader) to more complex multimodal human–machine interfaces for ambient intelligent environments (such as supportive environments for elderly and agent-guided household environments). They can also be used in different computing environments—from pervasive computing to desktop environments. Within these concepts, the contributors discuss several communication strategies, used to provide different aspects of human–machine interaction.

This book represents a major statement of the current research being conducted on the learning of second languages from a sociocultural perspective. The book is divided into a theoretical and an empirical part. Specific topics covered include: learning and teaching languages in the zone of proximal development; L1 mediation in the acquisition of L2 grammar; sociocultural theory as a theory of second language learning; gestural mediation in a second language; and constructing a self through a second language.

Scholars throughout the world have come together again in a second book to share their most successful teaching practices and concerns in the areas of cross-cultural studies and international education. Many disciplines are represented and diverse subjects are discussed: science literacy and worldview perspective; second-language acquisition, student mobility, and international universities; teacher professional development and government programs for disadvantaged children; zoos, industrial paintings, and dress designs as cultural artifacts. Presentations on these topics are the result of papers given at the annual meeting of the Worldwide Forum on Education and Culture, founded 10 years ago in Rome, Italy. The organization regularly attracts some 100 scholars and practitioners in the fields of education, literacy, language learning, communication and (inter-)cultural studies from all five continents to its annual congress in Rome. These conferences, as well as this up-to-date compilation of multi-disciplinary academic papers, are meant to highlight the growing need for culturally sensitive education that draws on the strengths of both traditional teaching methods and technology-rich forms of instruction, as well as a host of national and international programs designed to empower teachers and students alike. Engaged educators, whose research and/or critical discourse in classrooms all over the world has given rise to the present volume, thus hope to share with a wider audience how they impart knowledge, foster skills, and nurture qualities in the next generation of global citizens that will enable them to negotiate their personal and professional lives in our modern world. Even though communities may no longer be characterized by physical distances as barriers to communicative interchanges, perceived and real rifts between different cultures are nevertheless coming alarmingly close to preventing meaningful communication from bringing about true understanding at the individual and societal levels. The ontogenesis of the Worldwide Forum on Education and Culture is seen here clearly in the perspectives and presentations of diverse academics who are dedicated to teaching and learning toward the greater goal, as Matthew Arnold said in Literature and Science, of “knowing ourselves and the world.”

Visually Situated Language Comprehension has been compiled as a state-of the-art introduction to real-time language processing in visually-situated contexts. It covers the history of this emergent field, explains key methodological developments and discusses the insights these methods have enabled into how language processing interacts with our knowledge and perception of the immediate environment. Scientists interested in how language users integrate what they know with their perception of objects and events will find the book a rewarding read. The book further covers lexical, sentence, and discourse level processes, as well as active visual context effects in both non-interactive and interactive tasks and thus present a well-balanced view of the field. It is aimed at experienced researchers and students alike in the hopes of attracting new talent to the field. Thanks to its in-depth methodological introduction and broad coverage it constitutes an excellent course book.

In this important theoretical treatist, Jean Lave, anthropologist, and Etienne Wenger, computer scientist, push forward the notion of situated learning - that learning is fundamentally a social process. The authors maintain that learning viewed as situated activity has as its central defining characteristic a process they call legitimate peripheral participation (LPP). Learners participate in communities of practitioners, moving toward full participation in the sociocultural practices of a community. LPP provides a way to speak about crucial relations between newcomers and old-timers and about their activities, identities, artefacts, knowledge and practice. The communities discussed in the book are midwives, tailors, quartermasters, butchers, and recovering alcoholics, however, the process by which participants in those communities learn can be generalised to other social groups.