In this book, Stroik and Putnam take on Turing's challenge. They argue that the narrow syntax – the lexicon, the Numeration, and the computational system – must reside, for reasons of conceptual necessity, within the performance systems.
EDITOR Georgeta Raţă TITLE: Language Education Today SUBTITLE: Between Theory and Practice PUBLISHER: Cambridge Scholars Publishing YEAR: 2010
Laura Loder Buechel, Elementary School Foreign Language Departments, Zurich and Schaffhausen Universities of Teacher Education
SUMMARY
''Language Education Today'' is a collection of essays geared towards modern foreign language teachers and students. The essays are applicable to most levels of teaching and age-groups and they cover a wide range of topics - from philosophical underpinnings of what a mother-tongue is to concrete classroom activities. This book is broken down into three main chapters; ''Language Education'', ''English Language Teaching and Learning'' and ''Linguistic Issues''.
Chapter one, ''Language Education'', begins with definitions of and interactions between first language and multilingualism. In ''Code-Switching and Code-Mixing in Bilingual Interaction: Turkish-Kurdish Bilingual Students in Classroom Interaction'', Sabine Çabuk analyzes in-school code-switching and code-mixing of Turkish-Kurdish elementary school students. In ''Langue(s) Maternelle(s)'', Dragana Drobnjak provides possible definitions of mother tongues while showing that it is possible to have several and describing situations of mother-tongue attrition.
Chapter one continues with two articles on contact linguistics. In ''Names of Slavic Origin in Banat Toponymy'', Diana-Andreea Boc-Sînmărghiţan lists Romanian toponyms of Slavic origin, gives an overview of the history of the region and the etymology of these words. In a similar manner, Mirela-Zamilia Danciu and Alecsandra-Maria Balint point out ''The German Influence on the Romanian Speeches from Western Romania'' through lists of words broken down categorically.
The section entitled ''L1 vs. L2'' contains two articles. The first one, by Naghmana Ali, ''Exploring One's Identity in Second Language Education Courses'', is a reflective description of student-centered projects which can aid in identity development. Sandra Stefanović's article, ''Error Analysis and Language Transfer'' describes and counts language-transfer and overgeneralization errors made by Serbian high school students in English.
The final section of this chapter contains one article in the field of contrastive studies by Biljana Ivanovska and Violeta Dimova called ''Similarities and Differences in the Meaning of Linguistic Units in Contemporary German and Macedonian''. This article provides an overview of the lexical similarities and differences between family-member lexical units in the two languages.
Chapter 2, ''English Language Teaching and Learning'' starts with a section on EFL (English as a Foreign Language). In ''An Insight into Serbian EFL Learners' Difficulties with Spelling at Tertiary Level: A Pilot Study'', Jelena Danilović analyzes what good spellers do differently from poor ones and suggests strategies for teachers to help their learners improve. In ''Teaching EFL for Ruthenians in Vojvodina (Serbia)'', Mihajlo Fejsa illustrates the problems of English language teaching at the public elementary school level and makes suggestions for improvement on the policy level.
The second part of Chapter 2, ''ESP'' (English for Specific Purposes), begins with Alina-Andreea Dragoescu's article on ''Contrastive Corpora of Business English Compounds and Derivatives of the Words 'Market' and 'Marketing','' where the English and Romanian uses and definitions of these two words are provided and adaptations in the Romanian language of these loanwords are discussed. In a similar manner, the following article, ''The Scientific Language of Informational Technology: A Semantic Approach'' by Astrid-Simone Groszler explain how ''IT words are either translated or absorbed into Romanian'' (p. 131), but mainly absorbed when an exact Romanian equivalent exists. Scott Hollifield, Ioan Petroman and Cornelia Petroman then contribute their research in ''Hotel Terminology: An Etymological Approach''. They provide the etymology of native, loan and borrowed words related to the word 'hotel' in English and find that most of these words stem from Old French and are compound words. The final article, ''Metaphors in Business Media Discourse'' by Andreea Varga analyzes and categorizes metaphors used in business that do not contain references to the usual language of the subject through critical discourse analysis and finds how these uses can change a reader's, especially a non-native English reader's, conceptualization of the topic.
The third section, ''Language Teaching and Assessing Methods'' begins with ''The Effects of Teaching Communication Strategies to Thai Learners of English'' by Tiwaporn Kongsom. This study evaluated engineering students' attitudes towards several explicitly-taught communicative strategies including hesitation devices, and indicates the usefulness of such explicit strategy instruction. ''Class Activities Aimed at Enhancing Oral Production in CLIL-Based Lessons'' by Marcella Menegale provides some guidelines for encouraging speaking through content and task-based foreign language lessons. ''A Study on the Picture-Word Inductive Model [PWIM] of Teaching and its Effects on the Vocabulary Acquisition of Year 1 Malaysian Students'' by Ambigapathy Pandian, Bee Choo Lee and Debbita Ai Lin Tan provides an overview of the PWIM model, the issues of English language teaching in Malaysia and a future study which will evaluate the effectiveness of this model. In ''Vocabulary via the Newspaper'', Ambigapathy Pandian, Debbita Ai Lin Tan and Bee Choo Lee point out another study to be carried out in Malaysia which will look at the effectiveness of explicit vocabulary training through newspaper-related exercises as compared to traditional approaches to vocabulary teaching. The next paper, ''Classroom Management and Cooperative Learning'' by Jasna Vujčić and Anica Perković, analyzes the use of cooperative learning settings in vocational schools and provides advantages of such settings. This section ends with ''Try to Review with Games'', also by Jasna Vujčić and Anica Perković, which provides reasons for using games and includes descriptions of two games.
The final section of Chapter 2, ''Language Teacher Profile'' applies theories of teacher effectiveness and training to specific language situations. The first article, ''The Responsibility of the Teacher Teaching Medical English'' by Violeta Dimova and Biljana Ivanovska applies general concepts of effective teaching onto the ESP teachers in the medical field. ''A Profile of the Language Teacher: Between Ideal and Reality'' by Maria Palicica and Codruţa Gavrilă shows characteristics of a good teacher through undergraduate student evaluations.
Chapter 3, ''Linguistic Issues'' begins with Constantin Chevereşan's article: ''Some Word Histories in the Semantic Field of Education''. This article shows the value of a focus on etymology in teaching through looking at categories of semantic change and giving examples of the history of the uses of the words 'academy', 'school' and 'symposium'. Snežana Gudurić's article ''Le Français Actuel et Comment l'enseigner. Quelques Remarques sur la Prononciation et l'orthographe du Français d'aujourd'hui'' looks at the discrepancy between spoken and written French and the history of this development as well as the difficulty in making compromises in the teaching of French as to what is acceptable or not. In Virginia-Elvira-Jenea Masichevici's article ''Verbs of Animal Communication in Contemporary French: An Etymological Approach'', there is a list of animal sounds in French according to some categories of verb-endings and root. In ''Some Implications of the Complexity of the English Modal Verbs System for Serbian English Language Learners'', Jelena Prtljaga looks at distinct differences between modal verb use and structures in English and Serbian which can facilitate both English and Serbian language teaching. The book ends with ''Plesiosauria Nomenclature: Another 'Lingua Franca''' by the editor, Georgeta Raţă. In this article, the author shows that indeed, the naming of dinosaurs followed a certain pattern so as to make classification simpler.
EVALUATION
''Language Education Today: Between Theory and Practice'' has its merits in that it provides articles stemming from countries that have been often under-represented in English-based applied linguistics literature. The explicit focus of the book is language teachers, but individual articles in this book would appeal to a wide range of experts and non-experts; for example, a person simply curious about language might be interested in the essays on etymology; a politician looking to make a policy decision might be interested in ''Teaching EFL for Ruthenians in Vojvodina''; a Serbian or English teacher looking to be proactive might be interested in Stefanović's or Prtljaga's articles. The breadth of topics and the range of countries and languages represented makes this book relevant for many a public. Furthermore, it is a good sign when articles leave the reader wanting to know more, such as in the articles about forthcoming studies in Malaysia.
The breakdown of chapters and the subcategories make the book difficult to follow. A student looking for – perhaps - studies about Serbian or studies about etymology might be lost due to this, and also because there is no index. Prtljaga's article, as an example, could clearly fit under the chapter about contrastive studies, and many articles could belong to several categories. The distinction in the articles under the subchapters ''first language vs. multilingualism'' or ''L1 vs. L2'' is not clear. It is unclear what the editor intended to show about the categories defined, and the final chapter ''Linguistic Issues'' seems to be simple leftovers.
Though there is quite a bit of interesting research, some of the articles are not overly professionally-written and there is some lack of attention to detail. As one example, in ''Classroom Management and Cooperative Learning'', it is hard to find out which country or language is being referred to. Some articles, ''Contrastive Corpora of Business English Compounds'' among others, though interesting, are simply long lists of definitions, word uses or roots which make the section difficult and tiresome to read -- the analyses or syntheses are cut short or neglected.
There were a few issues with the content of the articles themselves. Though certainly not the case in all articles, in some a lack of citation of recent literature was noted. For example, in ''Error Analysis and Language Transfer'', the most recent work cited was in 2003 and there has been extensive research on this topic under terms such as 'syntactic transfer', 'miscue analysis', 'crosslinguistic influence' and more. Furthermore, in Stefanović's article some language transfer errors might actually be colloquialisms (e.g. ''He did not have NO money with him'', p. 27) which might be acceptable to native speakers, yet is counted as an error in this article. ''Language Education Today'' offers many studies with descriptive statistics, but no use of statistics programs or tests of significance as could perhaps have been done in Danilovic's article on individual factors that influence good spelling.
Thinking about supporting identity in the classroom and understanding what a mother-tongue is can help teachers understand learners. Knowing what errors learners tend to make and what is difficult in a certain language can help teachers be proactive and sympathetic. Knowing where words come from is interesting and can help define correct word use as well as provide insight into the peoples of certain regions. Having snapshots of classroom activities and explicit training activities throughout the world can be motivating for teachers to take up their own action research projects and try new things. Knowing what good teaching is can provide security. However, more scientific and critical insights into modern foreign language education can be found through proceedings from organizations such as the European Second Language Association (Roberts et al. 2010), the European Association of Applied Linguistics (Bardovi-Harlig and Dörnyei 2006) or the Boston University Conference on Language Development (Franich et al. 2010), all of which also provide professional articles stemming from many regions of the world and many sub-domains in the field. Though most articles in ''Language Education Today'' make clear links to the topic in the title, there are quite a few where it is a far stretch to the classroom or implications for teachers, especially when long lists are presented. The compilation of articles in ''Language Education Today: Between Theory and Practice'' unfortunately leaves one wondering what language education today really is.
REFERENCES
Roberts, L., Howard, M., Ó Laoire, M. and Singleton, D. (eds.). 2010. EUROSLA Yearbook: Volume 10. European Second Language Association. http://eurosla.org.
Bardovi-Harlig, K. and Dörnyei, Z. (eds). 2006. http://www.benjamins.com/cgi-bin/t_bookview.cgi?bookid=AILA%2019, Themes in SLA Research: AILA Review, Volume 19. International Association of Applied Linguistics. http://www.aila.info.
Franich, K., Iserman, K., and Keil, L. (eds). 2010. BUCLD 34: Proceedings of the 34th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development. http://www.cascadilla.com/bucld.html or http://www.bu.edu/bucld.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
ABOUT THE REVIEWER:
Laura Loder Büchel, M.Ed. is a full-time teacher trainer at the Zurich and
Schaffhausen Universities of Teacher Education. Her research interests lie
in the field of elementary school foreign language instruction and teacher
effectiveness. She is currently a doctoral student at the University of
Fribourg, Switzerland.
