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.

Book Summary: This revised volume brings together the best of the past with suggestions for the future and proves that teachers' imaginations continue to produce an interesting and varied range of ways to learn English within the broad guidelines of communicative language learning. New Ways in Teaching Adults, Revised provides classroom teachers with a range of activities for all stages of the learning process. The many activities included encourage discovery learning, provide practice, and extend students' learning beyond the classroom. Also, various activities allow students to work in pairs, small groups, individually, and with the entire class.

Book Summary: New Ways in Teaching With Humor explores the whole gamut of possibilities for using humor in English language teaching. Find ideas for beginning to advanced students, 5-minute activities to start a class on a humorous note to multiday projects, and silly English puns and jokes to activities for examining controversial social issues. Topics covered include: Humor and Language Development; Wordplay and Puns; Comics and Cartoons; Jokes and Joke Telling; Sitcoms and Movies; Internet Resources and Digital Literacy; and Parody, Satire, and Sarcasm. What all these lessons have in common is that they all use humor to enhance the English learning experience and provide English language learners with the linguistic and cultural knowledge they need to become more proficient users of the language. New Ways in Teaching With Humor not only shows the how of using humor in the English language classroom, but also the why.