This study investigated tertiary second language learners’ attitudes toward storytelling as a classroom activity. Instruction and practice in storytelling were given to 26 international undergraduates for ten weeks. Questionnaires were administered before and after the treatment to assess learners’ interest in storytelling and beliefs about its effectiveness as a learning task. The results of the pre-treatment questionnaire showed that while participants’ interest in storytelling was very low, their expectations of its effectiveness were relatively high. Asian or low proficient participants indicated higher interest than Europeans or high proficient learners. The results of the post-treatment questionnaire showed that participants’ attitudes changed only slightly. The results suggest that initial interest and expectations might play an important role in maximizing the effectiveness of storytelling for adult second language learners.

Excerpt: The ways in which language and linguistics figure in women’s science fiction reference communication both within human societies and among humans and other societies.

Excerpt: Laadan is a language that was designed to express women’s perceptions.

Excerpt: Suzette Haden Elgin is an American author who has published numerous science fiction novels, short stories, and poems.

Excerpt: James W. Gair and W.S. Karunatilaka’s Literary Sinhala, published at Cornell University in 1974, remains the best textbook for non-native speakers who want to learn literary Sinhala, which is quite distinct from the colloquial language. Given that very few institutions outside Sri Lanka offer Sinhala instruction, many persons seeking a reading knowledge of the language use this textbook on their own. Literary Sinhala, however, was produced with the assumption that the user would have access to an instructor, and does not include English translations of the Sinhala reading passages. This publication, commissioned and published by the American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies 40 years after the appearance of Literary Sinhala, provides these translations. The intention is to make the textbook more helpful, especially for those using it without an instructor.

Excerpt: This timely book presents a comparative empirical study of politeness phenomena in the English requests of native speakers and of speakers whose first language is Korean.

Excerpt: This account of an empirical study of elicited requests of Chinese learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) addresses the relative paucity of research on second language learners’ communicative competence and thereby contributes to the understanding of cross-cultural pragmatics and interlanguage pragmatics (ILP).

Excerpt: Yanan Song and Stephen Andrews address the topic of teachers’ use of the first language (L1) in the classroom by describing a case study of four tertiary-level teachers in China who share an L1 with their students.

Excerpt: This collection of recent generative, mainly minimalist, studies on the acquisition of functional categories in French focuses on data from first language (L1), second language (L2), and bilingual acquisition and from specific language impairment (SLI).

This is a Sri-Lankan-oriented guide for college professors in teaching the Indian epic Ramayana, specifically featuring Sita, her poetic and historic connections to Sri Lanka, and teaching the Ramayana with a concentration on feminist/gender topics.