This book explores language teacher beliefs in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) reading instruction in the context of Chinese university English instructors. Since the 1990s, there has been a renewed interest on teacher beliefs in the domain of language teacher cognition. However, most studies in this area aim at investigating the relationship…

This book offers a comprehensive introduction to the latest research on learning and instruction with computer games. Unlike other books on the topic, which emphasize game development or best practices, Handbook of Game-Based Learning is based on empirical findings and grounded in psychological and learning sciences theory. The contributors, all…

This book provides a wide-ranging and in-depth theoretical perspective on dialogue in teaching. It explores the philosophy of dialogism as a social theory of language and explains its importance in teaching and learning. Departing from the more traditional teacher-led mode of teacher-student communication, the dialogic approach is more egalitarian…

The essays in this volume are divided into four sections: (1) "Ethnic Diversity and National Language," (2) "Bilingualism: Its Causes and Consequences," (3) "Models and Methods," and (4) "Language Spread: A New Direction," The first part deals with the social conditions that influence acquisition of a second…

A study of the discourse of Ga'dang, a Philippine language, focuses on normative discourse and persuasion, especially the ways in which the former is used to accomplish the latter. The first five chapters outline the theoretical framework of the study, placing normative and persuasive discourse in a philosophical context and relating them to the…

This volume is a cross-disciplinary analysis of the modern Olympic Games based on research in the social sciences and humanities. The focus is academic and scholarly, and the volume includes original theoretical and empirical research on various aspects of the Olympic Games and the Olympic Movement. This volume attempts to: (1) investigate the…

This interpretive case study of a teacher aims to provide an account of the difficulties and rewards of putting innovative teaching into practice. Detailed descriptions of classroom life are used to explore one teacher's attempts to make technology-enhanced, open-ended inquiry a successful mode of teaching science in the secondary school…

This book addresses the need for anthropologists to produce in-depth ethnographies of children's play. In examining the subject from a cross-cultural perspective, the book argues that understanding the way children transform their environment to create make-believe is enhanced by viewing their creations as oral poetry. The result is a richly…

An analysis of Aleut personal names is presented, derived from census data obtained during a 1790-1792 scientific expedition to the Aleutian Islands. The census contained about 1,500 different Aleut male names from 66 villages, listed alphabetically and interpreted here. Some identifiable female names are also included. The work also provides…

This book examines how boarding schools have influenced their societal contexts. It shows that the view of boarding schools as agencies stabilizing or conserving social status and cultural traditions is not always valid. On the contrary, boarding schools may be educationally integrative and socially innovative, breaking up social structures by…

This book presents five case studies on the development of post-secondary engineering education in Canada, Japan, Venezuela, Pakistan, and Scotland. An introduction to the case studies take a long, historical and sociological look at the development of technical education and in particular reviews the industrial revolution and education, and the…

This book focuses on what it feels like and what it means to spend substantial portions of one's everyday life in the chat rooms, support groups, and virtual communities of cyberspace. Interviewing heavy users online, and becoming one herself, the author creates and ethnographic site for inquiring into the meanings of life online, a place where…

The purpose of this study was to develop, validate, and describe indicators of educational disadvantage to be used in Australia to identify schools and students most in need of assistance from the Disadvantaged Schools Program. Initially, a detailed review was prepared of the resource allocation responses which have been made in Australia to the…

This book examines the nature of persistent poverty in two impoverished towns in the coalfields of Appalachia and the Mississippi Delta and a contrasting social milieu in a prosperous but remote rural mill town in northern New England. Drawing on 350 in-depth interviews and census data, the book analyzes the dynamics of poverty, politics, and…

This ethnographic case study examines the language socialization experiences of Hari, a Punjabi-speaking English language learner integrated into a mainstream kindergarten classroom in an urban area of British Columbia, Canada. The book begins by discussing theory and literature (e.g., mainstream second language acquisition research, language as…