This book situates witchcraft drama within its cultural and intellectual context, highlighting the centrality of scepticism and belief in witchcraft to the genre. It is argued that these categories are most fruitfully understood not as static and mutually exclusive positions within the debate around witchcraft, but as rhetorical tools used within it. In drama, too, scepticism and belief are vit…
do you speak English? Most people ask this question when they want to know whether you can communicate in this language. By doing it they evince the widespread tendency to equate our ability to speak with our overall communicative competence. Paradoxically, for most EFL and ESL learners, speaking is the most challenging skill and the last they get to develop to the full. Latin American students…
The study focuses on the investigation of the process during which raters of EFL written performance make their decisions. It consists of a pilot and a main study, each of which concentrates on assessment of writing. The rationale is to detect the decision-making processes that raters follow, which can be used for training raters, and with which the reliability of rating can be improved. The pi…
This monograph analyzes an innovative approach to teaching English for Specific Purposes (ESP) in tertiary education. This "constructivist blended learning approach" is based on students "constructing" for themselves their own knowledge and professional communication skills in English by making extensive use of Internet sites in English, combining traditional in-class learning with in- and out-…
An important new resource for WPA preparation courses. In Going Public, Rose and Weiser moderate a discussion of the role of the writing program vis-a-vis the engagement movement, the service learning movement, and the current interest in public discourse/civic rhetoric among scholars of rhetoric and composition. While there have been a number of publications describing service-learning and com…
Why is it that some ways of using English are considered "good" and others are considered "bad"? Why are certain forms of language termed elegant, eloquent or refined, whereas others are deemed uneducated, coarse, or inappropriate? Making Sense of "Bad English" is an accessible introduction to attitudes and ideologies towards the use of English in different settings around the world. Outlining …
Collected for the first time in a single volume, these essays and articles by Naoki Fukui form an outline of some of the most significant and formative contributions to syntactic theory. Focusing particularly on the typological differences between Eng/type language and Japanese/type languages, Fukui examines the abstract parameters that both link and divide them. Linguistic universals are consi…
Eighteenth-century English is often associated with normative grammar. But to what extent did prescriptivism impact ongoing processes of linguistic change? The authors of this volume examine a variety of linguistic changes in a corpus of personal correspondence, including the auxiliary do, verbal -sand the progressive aspect, and they conclude that direct normative influence on them must have b…