Bøker utgitt av Peter Lang AG, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften

In China, a widespread learning practice for foreign languages are reading, reciting and memorising texts. This book investigates this practice against a background of Confucian heritage learning and western attitudes towards memorising, particularly audio-lingual approaches to language teaching and later largely negative attitudes. The author conceptually examines a number of issues central to the understanding of the practice of text memorisation in the Chinese educational context. Furthermore, there is an empirical inquiry into Chinese learners/teachers' practices and perceptions of the inclusion of text memorisation in foreign language learning and teaching. Drawing on heuristics yielded by both theoretical and empirical findings, this study promotes a 'different-rather-than-deficit' perspective in understanding Chinese learners and their learning practice by way of challenging the uncritical assumptions about the negative impact of a Confucian philosophy of education. More importantly, the topic and theme discussed in this book are timely and relevant to some long and widely debated issues in foreign language teaching and learning within China and internationally.

Explains how and why grammatical gender disappeared from English through a detailed analysis of unhistorical gender assignment within the noun phrase in "Layamon's Brut".

This volume offers an analysis of colonial literature in the late Victorian age with a specific focus on the works of Henry Rider Haggard (1865-1925) and Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894). Starting from the investigation of the nineteenth century as a period of great historical complexity, it places colonial narratives in a wide panorama of social and cultural developments, illustrating the role played by both adventure romances and imperial novels on the ideological and epistemic fabric of this age. By considering late nineteenth-century writing in the context of a multifarious background, the book sheds light on the intellectual discourses that emerged from the culture of imperialism. It also investigates the textual devices through which topical ideas were fictionalized, both in works included in the field of adventure literature and, at a more extended degree, in the whole novel genre. Far from the limits imposed by chronological classification, the stories selected for analysis are introduced in a common conceptual space that contributes to the articulation of a rich literary territory, where crucial themes such as the complications of racial rapports, the ethical failure of the imperial experience, the developments in individual and national identity are explored.

What are adverbial clauses in Chinese? Do they all have subjects as their counterparts do in English? How do the semantic domains of adverbial clauses interact with the distribution of subjects? How do Chinese corpora help us explore these intriguing questions? The aim of this study is to demonstrate the usefulness of corpus linguistics as a methodology in grammar studies. A problem-oriented tagging approach has been used to enable the exploration of adverbial clauses in the corpus and to identify eleven semantically based classes of adverbial clauses. While it is a well-known fact that Chinese adverbial clauses (CACs) are overtly marked by a subordinating conjunction, their subjects can be left unexpressed and recovered in the prior discourse. By analysing naturally occurring spoken and written samples from various corpora, the author examines this intriguing phenomenon of overt and non-overt subjects in adverbial clauses.

Anthropologies, interculturalite et enseignement-apprentissage des langues Anthropology, Interculturality and Language Learning-Teaching

This book paints a picture of poor older people's life-worlds in Beijing, China. Instead of viewing them as pitiful recipients of vulnerabilities and deprivations, this book sheds light on how poor older people exert their active agency to live through their life difficulties - i.e. how they negotiate resources within and outside of family to pursue the kind of lives they have reason to value. Based on a prolonged period of ethnographic fieldwork in Beijing, the researcher highlights the experiences, perspectives, and strategies of these people developed in the context of their economic hardships against the background of massive social reform and demographic ageing in China.

Masculinity is one of the key issues at stake in contemporary writing and gender studies. In their novels, Michael Chabon and Tom Wolfe both consistently make masculinity a prominent thematic and ideological concern. This study is the first full length scholarly work to take their work and their treatment of masculinity as its focus. How do these American authors critique the representation of masculinity within popular culture in Wonder Boys, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and Summerland, A Man in Full and The Bonfire of the Vanities? How do popular images of masculinity function for individual men and the way they experience their masculinities? A Dangerous Fiction investigates the ways in which Chabon and Wolfe strip masculinity of any illusion of an essential nature and expose it as something highly culturally dependent and explains how these novels suggest to understand masculinity in the contemporary world.

Current Perspectives in Second Language Vocabulary Research

Challenging Heterosexism from the Other Point of View

The Dynamic Systems Theory perspective offers new lenses to probe into long-term foreign language development. This book reports on findings of a longitudinal multiple-case study on the vocabulary development of eight university-level Chinese learners of English. Framed within the Dynamic Systems framework, the study assumes a holistic perspective towards vocabulary knowledge and aims to project a comprehensive picture of vocabulary development in a typical foreign language learning setting such as the Chinese context. To this end, a wide array of quantitative measurements and qualitative methods was employed. In-depth examination was given to both psycholinguistic and sociocultural processes involved in the complex and dynamic development of vocabulary knowledge. Efforts were also made to establish meaningful links between the learners' cognitive, mental, pedagogical and social contexts. Although the focus is on vocabulary development, what is discussed in the book is applicable to a wide range of topics in foreign language learning and development.

Embodied Fantasies: From Awe to Artifice is a compilation of twenty-one essays on the subject of fantasy as it relates to art history, philosophy and the visual arts.

Contains contributions that approach the genres of employee, CEO and organizational communication from different angles. In this title, the contributers analyze how the author's position in the company influences the construction of these genres, what content and linguistic style characterize them.

Aims to understand the core of Calvin's Theodicy and to demonstrate that one of the important reasons that prompted Calvin to preach for almost 2 years 159 Sermons on the "Book of Job" was to vindicate God's justice by demonstrating the meaningfulness of God's activity in human life.

Explores what the field of business communication has accomplished so far and where it is heading. In this book, the contributions deal with a wide spectrum of business settings, including leadership and management situations, gatekeeping encounters in a variety of organizations and through a range of media and cultures, and more.

The constitutionalisation of the European Union has been a major goal of European politics from the late 1980s onwards. This book focuses on fundamental rights protection, the implementation of the Charter of Fundamental Rights, and legal conflicts between the European Court of Justice and national constitutional courts.

By mapping the contour of Thornton Wilder's major plays and novels, this book offers a fresh reading of his deceptively unfashionable art of allegorical narrative, and aims to reaffirm Malcolm Cowley's perspicacious judgment: Wilder is) one of the toughest and most complicated minds in contemporary America. After a review of the history and scholarship of allegory, the author chronologically traces Wilder's extensive, complex and resilient engagement with allegory, a genre employed not only for literary manifestation but for philosophical inquiry. Moving expertly from Wilder's early religious playlets through his Pulitzerwinning fictions and plays to his largely obscure late writings, this study reveals that allegory and Wilder studies are two mutually illuminating topics. What distinguishes Wilder from other modern allegorists is not only his self-reflexive shuttling between the novel and the drama, but his tenacious persistence on pressing for the sublime universality of our mundane experiences in a postsacral world. Overturning the common characterization of Wilder as a preachy voice of Puritan religiosity, this book argues for the centrality of ambiguity that produces nuanced meanings in Wilder's allegorical narratives.

The volume explores Creativity and Innovation in Language Education linked with issues such as cultures and language use, language teaching, business settings, technology. It reflects on strategies for achieving language competences, while underlining the belief that creativity is a skill to identify and stimulate for the benefit of the entire society.

Discourse and Identity in the Professions

Not many cardinals get to be declared saints, and even rarer is one who is known for his controversial ideas and interpretation of doctrinal faith both within and outside the church. John Henry Newman (1801-1890), however, beatified by Pope Benedict XVI in September 2010, was no ordinary churchman. Raised an Anglican and a leading member of the Oxford Movement in his younger days, he converted to Catholicism and, through prolific writing and polemics, established an intellectual and spiritual influence far beyond the placid, pastoral domain of the papacy. This book seeks to settle the historical question of Newman as anti-liberal or liberal, and to shed theological light on his liberal spirit and anti-liberal discourse, in order to provide fresh insights into the issue of religious pluralism. In particular, the author examines Newman's perception of the danger of the liberal spirit of his time and his possession of another kind of liberal spirit that made him so original, bold and prophetic.

Non-state actors are of fundamental importance in the prevention and combating of corruption within asset recovery processes. Their roles and responsibilities were considered during a meeting hosted by the Basel Institute on Governance and the International Anti-Corruption Academy in 2010. This book contains essays presented at the meeting.

This monograph investigates final vowel elision in spoken Italian. Specifically, the book sheds light on the functioning and the constraining factors of final vowel elision in sequences of vowel-final determiners followed by vowel-initial nouns and in sequences of vowel-final proclitics followed by vowel-initial lexical verbs. The analysis is based on real language, that is on corpus and elicited data as well as on their pooled results. The quantitative data are analyzed statistically in order to identify the factors which constrain final vowel elision (i.e. function word class, the morphological category of number realized by the final elidable vowel, and speech style). The representation of final vowel elision in determiners and proclitics proposed in this monograph relies on four theoretical constructs and on their interaction, i.e pre-compiled phrasal allomorphy, dominant allomorphs, lexically encoded selectional preferences among allomorphs, and prosodic rules.

What did early twentieth century New Zealanders make of Jesus, and what do their understandings tell us? This study provides the first historical analysis of New Zealand images of Jesus. Using a diverse range of churchly and secular sources it examines key themes and representations. These images provide insights into the character of New Zealand religion and its place in the nation's history and culture - from dimensions of childhood and gender through to debates about social reform. They also highlight broader dynamics of social and religious change. Crucially, this work traces the rise of a new kind of Jesus-centred religiosity that reflected wider cultural shifts. The form was particularly evident among Protestant Christians, who embraced Jesus in their efforts to modernise Christianity and extend its influence within the community. The author shows that this development was a response to change that profoundly reoriented Protestant Christianity.

Diese Festschrift ist ein lebendiges Zeugnis fuer die grosse Wirkung, die Dorothea Baumann als Musikpraktikerin und Musikwissenschaftlerin entfaltet hat.

What is prisoners' radio? Who is involved in creating these types of programs and what influence do they have on discourses of law and order? Internationally, radio that operates for, or by, prisoners exists almost exclusively within the community radio context. Little has been documented about the genre so far. Raising the Civil Dead seeks to address this lack of information. It examines prisoners' radio as citizens' media, connecting directly to notions of civic responsibility. It focuses on the ways in which people produce media and how these activities transform those individuals. The research is the result of four in-depth case studies conducted in two countries, complemented by an international inventory of prisoners' radio programs and stations.

Given the consolidated position of English as the international language for communication in business and management, this book depicts a scenario in which to analyse and compare interactions between eastern/western European users of English, as well as Asian/European/North American speakers.

Investigates different elements which have direct implications for translations but are not the actual text. In this book, these features are usually presented in a particular format - written, oral, digital, audio-visual or musical.

Education of international students is central to the aims, orientation and financial viability of many universities. However, the way that culture impacts on the experiences of international students remains largely unexplored. This may be due to two factors: first, much of the previous research treats the entire international cohort as a homogeneous group without investigating the diversity of cultural backgrounds and; second, the research methods used to investigate student 'experiences' in universities are dominated by quantitative surveys that leave little room for exploring personal perspectives and new issues. This book higlights the cultural issues that emerge in the experiences of international students. The authors explore the Australian international tertiary education sector and focus on one cultural group. Through a culturally-sensitive theoretical framework, the experiences of students from the Indian subcontinent are given voice. The resulting personal accounts provide a platform upon which more appropriate policy, marketing, pedagogy and future research can develop to provide tertiary systems that are more responsive to the needs of students.

Axiomatic Functionalism: Theory and Application

This book aims to explore the life of Yi Won-young, an outstanding Confucian scholar from Andong, in South Korea. Andong is known as the home of Neo-Confucianism, as in this region Western Christianity took root amidst the impeccable and ritualistic Confucian society without much conflict and confrontation. This study deals with the most turbulent times of 20th century Korean history and investigates the formation of the Andong biblical Christianity. Was the confluence of availability and accessibility of the Bible and Bible study and the method of Confucian canon reading relevant for the formation of Andong biblical Christianity? This is one of the questions the author tries to answer in the book. Further, the author vividly portrays Yi's struggle to interact with the community and the occupying Japanese authority, analyzes the development of his eschatological interpretation and the issues of Shinto worship and its consequences, church division and sterility of human minds after trauma of deprivation. The book offers an overview of Korean Neo-Confucianism and the early Presbyterian Church of Korea during the Japanese occupation and post Korean War. For Western readers new references were added by the translator.

This book is an investigation of contemporary Spanish fiction, specifically a group of fictional texts (written and film) that appeared in Spain in the first decade of this century (2001- 2010). The author focuses on textual analysis and studies how chaos and coincidence appear in these narratives and shape them. The texts analyzed are Soldados de Salamina (2001) by Javier Cercas, Tu rostro manana (2002-2007) by Javier Marias, La catedral del mar (2006) by Ildefonso Falcones, Volver (2006) directed by Pedro Almodovar, Instrucciones para salvar el mundo (2008) by Rosa Montero and El asedio (2010) by Arturo Perez-Reverte, with reference to other texts by these authors also included. Though very different storytellers, these authors share an interest in chaos as a theme and as a narrative device. This work shows that the recurrence in their stories of the theme of chaos indicates a move away from postmodern apathy to a growing sense of empowerment, both for characters and for their readers.