This book explores how learners personalities influence foreign language learning in Japan. In particular, this volume investigates three main research questions: What are the learning strategies generally employed by Japanese college students? What are the characteristic learning strategies of extroverts and introverts? Do extroversion and introversion have an impact on English listening proficiency? In the analysis carried out in the volume, both quantitative and qualitative research methods have been used. As regards the former, various types of questionnaires have been employed, measuring...

This book seeks to bridge the gap between theory and practice by identifying the main challenges which the implementation of the ECTS (European Credit Transfer System) is posing in language teaching. It reports on the outcomes yielded by prominent European research projects and thematic networks and presents the insights of a prestigious set of scholars, practitioners, and policy-makers from different parts of Europe.
The book is divided into four main parts. The first section examines the coordination of language studies in the European Higher Education Area, from general language...

How teachers and students work together through discourse to construct their understanding of the context they live and work in will influence, in many different ways, the interaction within their classrooms. This book describes an indepth research that used ethnomethodology and conversation analysis to study three different groups of teachers. The study highlights the teachers perspectives concerning heterogeneity in the classroom, using recordings of discussions concerning cultural and linguistic diversity.
Moreover, this research examines the discourse participants choice in the use...

The chapters constituting this volume focus on legal language seen from cross-cultural perspectives, a topic which brings together two areas of research that have burgeoned in recent years, i.e. legal linguistics and intercultural studies, reflecting the rapidly changing, multifaceted world in which legal institutions and cultural/national identities interact. Within the broad thematic leitmotif of this volume, it has been possible to identify two major strands: legal discourse across languages on the one hand, and legal discourse across cultures on the other. Of course, labels of this kind...

This volume presents some of the findings from a project on various aspects of Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR), including conciliation, mediation, and arbitration. To study the discursive practices of ADR today, an international initiative has been undertaken by a group of specialists in discourse analysis, law, and arbitration from more than twenty countries. The chapters in this volume draw on discourse-based data (narrative, documentary and interactional) to investigate the extent to which the integrity of ADR principles is maintained in practice, and to what extent there is an...

This volume presents the latest research of an international group of scholars, engaged in the analysis of academic discourse from a genre-oriented perspective. The area covered by this volume is a central one, as in the last few years important developments in research on academic discourse have not only concerned the more traditional genres, but, as well, generic innovations promoted by the new technologies, employed both in the presentation of research results and in their dissemination to a wider community by means of popularising and teaching activities.
These innovations have not...

Inspired by Frank Palmer s work, this book addresses a set of specific topics pertaining to the description of modality in English and places them in a broader context. A number of more general theoretical and typological matters are also raised, which bear upon the theory of syntax, semantics and pragmatics and their interfaces. The methodology adopted is mostly functional-typological, though some reference is made to various theoretical frameworks, ranging from cognitive linguistics to parametric variation. Modal meanings are seen to extend beyond particular lexical and grammatical...

There is hardly any aspect of verbal communication that has not been investigated using the analytical tools developed by corpus linguists. This is especially true in the case of English, which commands a vast international research community, and corpora are becoming increasingly specialised, as they account for areas of language use shaped by specific sociolectal (register, genre, variety) and speaker (gender, profession, status) variables.
Corpus analysis is driven by a common interest in linguistic evidence, viewed as a source of insights into language phenomena or of lexical,...

Cet ouvrage propose une analyse unifiee de differentes proprietes structurales opposant les constructions ditransitives comme He offered a woman the flowers et He offered the flowers to a woman (alternance dative) ou He loaded a truck with the wood et He loaded the wood onto a truck (alternance locative). En mettant en parallele l anglais et le russe a l egard de la portee relative des quantificateurs et de la modification depictive, l etude s etend a trois autres oppositions observees dans le cas de l alternance locative en russe par rapport a la prefixation...

Dieser Band fuhrt Arbeiten zusammen, die neben der Konzentration auf juristisch-terminologische Fragen das Recht als einen kommunikativen Bereich mit ihm eigenen Einbindungen in unterschiedliche gesellschaftliche Domanen behandeln. Es werden sowohl einzelsprachliche als auch sprachubergreifende Merkmale juristischer Kommunikation untersucht. Dabei werden auch kontrastive Aspekte einbezogen. Von besonderer Relevanz sind Fragen der Ubersetzung normativer Texte, die fur Situationen institutioneller Mehrsprachigkeit wie sie in der Europaischen Union und in der Schweiz, aber auch in Grenzregionen...