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This book provides insights into the professional and personal lives of local language teachers and foreign language teachers who conduct team-taught lessons together. It does this by using the Japanese context as an illustrative example. It re-explores in this context the professional experiences and personal positionings of Japanese teachers of English (JTEs) and foreign assistant language teachers (ALTs), as well as their team-teaching practices in Japan. This edited book is innovative in that 14 original empirical studies offer a comprehensive overview of the day-to-day professional experiences and realities of these team teachers in Japan, with its focus on their cognitive, ideological,...
Gesturing is such an integral yet unconscious part of communication that we are mostly oblivious to it. But if you observe anyone in conversation, you are likely to see his or her fingers, hands, and arms in some form of spontaneous motion. Why? David McNeill, a pioneer in the ongoing study of the relationship between gesture and language, set about answering this question over twenty-five years ago. In Gesture and Thought he brings together years of this research, arguing that gesturing, an act which has been popularly understood as an accessory to speech, is actually a dialectical component of language. Gesture and Thought expands on McNeill’s acclaimed classic Hand and Mind. While that ...
Brings together studies from language acquisition and developmental psychology. This title addresses topics such as: gesture use in prelinguistic infants with a focus on pointing, the relationship between gestures and lexical development in typically developing and deaf children and even how gesture can help to learn mathematics
Understanding Pragmatics takes an interdisciplinary approach to provide an accessible introduction to linguistic pragmatics. This book discusses how the meaning of utterances can only be understood in relation to overall cultural, social and interpersonal contexts, as well as to culture specific conventions and the speech events in which they are embedded. From a cross-linguistic and cross-cultural perspective, this book: debates the core issues of pragmatics such as speech act theory, conversational implicature, deixis, gesture, interaction strategies, ritual communication, phatic communion, linguistic relativity, ethnography of speaking, ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, languages and social classes, and linguistic ideologies incorporates examples from a broad variety of different languages and cultures takes an innovative and transdisciplinary view of the field showing linguistic pragmatics has its predecessor in other disciplines such as philosophy, psychology, ethology, ethnology, sociology and the political sciences. Written by an experienced teacher and researcher, this introductory textbook is essential reading for all students studying pragmatics.
Each of the 21 chapters in this volume reflects a view of language as a dynamic phenomenon with emergent structure, and in each, gesture is approached as part of language, not an adjunct to it. In this, all of the authors have been influenced by David McNeill's methods for studying natural discourse and by his theory of the human capacity for language. The introductory chapter by Adam Kendon contextualizes McNeill s research paradigm within a history of earlier gesture studies. Chapters in the first section, Language and Cognition, emphasize what McNeill refers to as the intrapersonal plane. Many of the chapters adduce evidence for McNeill's claim that gestures can serve as a window onto the speaker's mind. Chapters in the second section, Environmental Context and Sociality, emphasize the interpersonal plane and exemplify McNeill's focus on how moment-to-moment language use is determined by contextual factors. The final section of the volume, Atypical Minds and Bodies, concerns lessons to be learned from studies of aphasic patients, autistic children, and artificial humans.
Is the relation between gestures and language conventionalized? Is it possible to investigate the backgrounds of the users by means of these gestures? This book offers an in-depth analysis and description of five recurrent gestures used by Hausa speakers from northern Nigeria, examined from a cross-cultural perspective. The method based on studying naturalistic data available online (sermons, interviews and talk shows) can be applied to other languages with no speech corpora. Particular attention is paid to cultural practices and routinized behavior that affect both the form of a gesture and its meaning. Everyday activities, such as greetings and religious rituals, as well as social hierarchy and gender differences are reflected in gestures. The results show that gestures and language reveal the shared cultural background of the speakers and reflect identical cognitive processes.
Human language is not the same as human speech. We use gestures and signs to communicate alongside, or instead of, speaking. Yet gestures and speech are processed in the same areas of the human brain, and the study of how both have evolved is central to research on the origins of human communication. Written by one of the pioneers of the field, this is the first book to explain how speech and gesture evolved together into a system that all humans possess. Nearly all theorizing about the origins of language either ignores gesture, views it as an add-on or supposes that language began in gesture and was later replaced by speech. David McNeill challenges the popular 'gesture-first' theory that language first emerged in a gesture-only form and proposes a groundbreaking theory of the evolution of language which explains how speech and gesture became unified.
Discusses the fundamental features of verbal and nonverbal communication. This book states that the problem of understanding human behaviour in terms of personal traits, and the possibility of an algorithmic implementation that exploits personal traits to identify a person unambiguously, are among the challenges of modern science and technology.
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