Book categories

Fundamental College Composition

A Grammar and Style Guide (2nd Edition)

by William P. DeFeo

2023

This second edition of Fundamental College Composition: A Grammar and Style Guide (FCC: AGSG), contains nine new chapters designed to further assist college students in their journey to become clear and precise writers of English. College classrooms--even college level English courses themselves--often overlook the teaching of fundamental writing. Consequently, students may acquire content knowledge, but often lack the language skills necessary to either demonstrate or apply that knowledge. College-level study exposes students to ideas that are complex. A cursory study of grammar and the rules of basic language arts give students the tools they need to express complex ideas clearly and persuasively. FCC: AGSG provides systematic lessons that progressively build the students' underst...

The Mumbo Jumbo Fix

A Survival Guide for Effective Doctor-Patient-Nurse Communication

by Michael J. Grace, JD, CPHRM

2021

The Mumbo Jumbo Fix: A Survival Guide for Effective Doctor-Patient-Nurse Communication tackles the vital subject of healthcare miscommunication which is a leading cause of patient harm. It is the first book of its kind geared to all three essential participants--doctors, nurses, AND patients. Written by a medical malpractice trial attorney, hospital risk manager, and healthcare educator, its unique holistic approach provides real-world practical solutions in a concise, easy-to-read, and entertaining format. No other book in the field has been written by someone with equivalent "boots on the ground" experience. And the author's original cartoons are sure to bring a smile to every reader's face. The Mumbo Jumbo Fix contains up-to-date content including telemedicine during the national emerg...

The Legacy of the Wisecrack

Stand-up Comedy as the Great American Literary Form

by Eddie Tafoya

2009

Despite the claim of many a Borscht Belt comic that he is a practitioner of "the world's second-oldest professsion," stand-up comedy is a young and distinctly American literary form. It was not until the last decades of the nineteenth century when, enabled by unprecedented prosperity and the right to free expression, that monologists began appearing in American vaudeville halls. Yet even though it has since become an entertainment industry mainstay, stand-up comedy has received precious little scholarly attention. The Legacy of the Wisecrack: Stand-up Comedy as the Great American Literary Form looks at the theory of stand-up comedy, its literary dimensions, and its distinctly American qualities as it provides a detailed history of the forces that shaped it. The study concludes with a...

Guide to Enjoying Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, Franny and Zooey and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters

by John P. Anderson

2017

This non-academic author presents a study of Salinger’s major writings, a study designed to enhance the reader’s enjoyment even in a reread. The study is an analysis of their artistic structure, especially Salinger’s sophisticated use of the narrator’s voice or voices. Catcher comes off as the Hindu Connection, Franny and Zooey as Take Out Zen and Raise High as Kabbalah Reception. The Hindu connection structures what happens to Holden in Catcher, and fast as take out Zen structures what happens to Franny in Franny and Zooey. Principal tenants of Kabbalah influence and structure important aspects of the story Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters, particularly the lack of civil reception of “others” at the wedding reception. These choices were no doubt influenced by Salinger’s experiments wi...

Book 1 of Plato's Republic

A Word by Word Guide to Translation (Vol. 2: Chapters 13-24)

by Drew A. Mannetter

2018

Volume 2 of this new grammatical reader on chapters 13 through 24 of Book 1 of Plato's Republic is the most thorough of available resources, designed for students who have only basic skills as well as those at a more advanced level. The text is complete and not adapted; no difficult passages are excised. The running vocabularies are complete, providing the reader context specific meanings. The text is broken down into sentences, providing a manageable amount of material, and space is provided for translation after each sentence. Every construction and word is discussed in detail and referenced to Smyth's Greek Grammar for further explanation. The details of the text, accents, conjunctions, adverbs, and particles, are not minimized but receive thorough treatment as well. The presentation al...

Essays in World Languages and Cultures

Stereotypes and the Challenges of Representation

by Yves-Antoine Clemmen, Margit Grieb, and Will Lehman (eds.)

2018

This volume consists of 16 papers selected from the 22nd Southeast Conference on Foreign Languages, Literatures and Films held on February 25-27, 2016 on the campus of Stetson University in Celebration, Florida. The shared focus of the essays is to examine how writers, filmmakers and language educators address stereotypes in their representations of diverse cultural paradigms by using, deconstructing or displacing these stereotypes. The fourth section of this publication includes 4 experimental poems by the artist Susanne Eules.

Understanding Rhetoric

A Guide to Critical Reading and Argumentation

by Eamon M. Cunningham

2019

Understanding Rhetoric: A Guide to Critical Reading and Argumentation is a composition textbook that outlines three essential skills – rhetoric, argument, and source-based writing – geared towards newcomers and advanced students alike. Though comprehensive in its coverage, the book’s focus is a simple one: how to move beyond a "gut reaction" while reading to an articulation of what is effective and what is not, while explicitly answering the most important question of "Why?" This text gets at this central concern in two fundamental ways.First, the text teaches composition as a cumulative process, coaching you how to question, challenge, and expand on not just the readings you hold in your hands, but also how to interrogate the internal processes of writing and thinking. The book's blend of...

Research Methodology for Master Students of Literature

Overcoming the Lure to Plagiarize with Strategies to Avoid

by Fouad Mami

2019

This text presupposes that in many cases plagiarism results from poor training and a confused perception of what is involved in research. The textbook is addressed to non-native English-speaking students and their instructors, principally those seeking degrees in literature. Through a close examination of what initially seems to be the self-evident 'facts' of research--those presumed simple steps in the multilayered research process that are usually glossed over in research methodology courses--students will become less confused about what the research practically involves and more empowered to work on their first serious research project with confidence and clarity.REVIEWS & PRAISEThis textbook offers a diagnosis of the disease of illicit borrowings undermining the Master’s students’ rese...

Tourism Writing

A New Literary Genre Unveiling the History, Mystery, and Economy of Places and Events

by Mary S. Palmer

2018

In this era of advanced technology keeping students' attention often becomes difficult. Teachers need to find new ways to create interest. In writing classes, choosing a topic that involves students is a priority. A new genre, Tourism Writing, is an innovative and effective means of teaching students composition. It can fill this need.Tourism Writing focuses on a particular place or event, provides photos and information on nearby points of interest, and directly invites visitors. This book provides an understanding of how Tourism Writing benefits people in all areas of life. This transfers to classroom assignments when students are asked to write a poem in this genre and they are given lists of possible topics, but they also have the option to choose their own place or event. It becomes a...

In Between

Cultures and Languages in Transition

by Margit Grieb, Yves-Antoine Clemmen, and Will Lehman

2019

The essays in this anthology probe and comment on the "space/time/issue between" in aesthetic or linguistic productions in a variety of cultures. For over three decades the Southeast Conference on Foreign Languages, Literatures, and Film (SCFLLF), which convenes biennially, has been and continues to be a showcase for scholarship in the Humanities with a special emphasis on non-English language area studies. In 2018, at the 23rd SCFLLF, fifty-three national and international scholars presented their research on linguistics, literature, film, culture, and language pedagogy. The essays we selected to showcase all probe and comment on the “space/time/issue between” in aesthetic or linguistic productions in a variety of cultures. We have organized these contributions in three parts entitled: Pa...

Departure from the Darkness and the Cold

The Hope of Renewal for the Soul of Medicine in Patient Care

by Lawrence J. Hergott, M.D.

2020

In the midst of the cold and dark in the current practice of medicine there is a glimmer of hope called the soul of medicine - comprehensive, compassionate, patient-clinician interactions focused solely on the needs of the patient - that can warm and enlighten both patients and clinicians. This book consists of essays and poems describing patient-clinician interactions exhibiting the soul of medicine. Though coming from different viewpoints, both the general public and medical personnel can be enlightened from what they read. The general public has the opportunity to witness the lifting of the veil that shades the lives of clinicians and their loved ones - and from that observation, to occasionally understand why patients are treated as they are. For medical practitioners, what is read off...

The Cross, the Plow and the Skyline

Science Fiction and Fantasy and the Ecological Imagination (Revised and Expanded 2nd Edition)

by Ernest J. Yanarella

2022

The apocalyptic, pastoral, and urban traditions have fundamentally shaped Western history and influenced American religion, culture, and politics. This book argues that these traditions have not only been decisive in giving form and substance to classic and modern American literature, but have been appropriated by contemporary science fiction. As a loosely connected set of cultural narratives, the Cross, the Plow, and the Skyline have through the medium of science fiction and fantasy provided a bold vista on the future grounded in an emergent ecological imagination. In the expanded second edition of the original 2001 publication, the author argues that a significant shift has taken place in contemporary Anglo-American science fiction and fantasy (SF/F) from twentieth-century SF/F critic...

The Fall of Literary Theory

A 21st Century Return to Deconstruction and Poststructuralism, with Applications

by Liana Vrajitoru Andreasen

2017

The book revives literary theory, which was popular at the end of the 20th century, with the purpose of showing how useful it is in the current century in opening the minds of students to the dangers of claiming to have a fixed identity. The book shows that in Western cultures identity is a construct that always sees individuals as lacking something (being fallen) that can be retrieved or gained at the expense of an Other, an adversary seen as standing in the way of identity fulfillment. The book shows the history of "fallenness" through an analysis of Melville's Billy Budd, Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. It also shows ways to heal identity through an analysis of Toni Morrison's Beloved and Rudolfo Anaya's Tortuga. REVIEWS and WORDS OF PRAISE Effects of ...

Acquiring a Scientific Vocabulary

A Short Course for Building Lexical Literacy for Advancing AP and College Students

by Anthony M. Belmont

2019

A short course specifically designed for high school AP science students and college freshmen or sophomores in any science courses to provide an understanding of how scientific terminology is composed and to give students a "ballpark" knowledge of terms they see for the first time.It is extremely important that students be able recognize and use words in their specialized fields correctly. A basic knowledge of Latin and Greek prefixes, roots, and suffixes will enhance the student's ability to read and understand technically focused writing in books, scholarly journals, magazines, and other media. They can benefit from mastering the building blocks of scientific and technical terminology to strengthen their vocabulary and enhance their reading comprehension. High School students taking AP c...

Frontiers of Language and Teaching

Proceedings of the 2010 International Online Language Conference (IOLC 2010)

by Azadeh Shafaei

2010

This collection is comprised of papers submitted to the 3rd International Online Language Conference (IOLC) held in September 2010. IOLC 2010 was a two-day conference which aimed to provide a forum for academics, practitioners, experts and students to debate current international issues and challenges in the broad area of language learning and teaching. This annual world-renowned conference takes place over the internet, allowing participants to save accommodation and flight expenses and at the same time helping to save our planet by reducing CO₂ emissions.

All submitted papers went through a double blind review process before a decision was made. This was to ensure the quality level of the conference is kept high.

Frontiers of Language and Teaching, Vol. 2

Proceedings of the 2011 International Online Language Conference (IOLC 2011)

by Azadeh Shafaei (editor)

2012

This collection covers papers submitted to the 4th International Online Language Conference (IOLC) held in September 2011. IOLC 2011 was a two-day conference which aimed to provide a forum for academics, practitioners, experts and students to debate current international issues and challenges in the broad area of language learning and teaching.

Classifiers in Kam-Tai Languages

A Cognitive and Cultural Perspective

by Tian-Qiao Lu

2012

This monograph describes and analyzes the syntax of classifiers and cultural taxonomy in more than 20 major languages in southern China and Southeast Asia. It provides comprehensive and in-depth data for professional linguists and rudimental knowledge for postgraduate or undergraduate majors or minors engaged in linguistics. Readers will learn how nouns are categorized in syntax and what cultural factors are involved in such a classification process. This is the first book on Kam-Tai classifiers from both syntactic and sociocultural aspects.

Genres and Genre Theory in Transition

Specialized Discourses across Media and Modes

by Giuliana Garzone & Cornelia Ilie (eds.)

2014

This volume collects a series of studies focusing on the evolution of text genres in corporate and professional communication. Genre change is explored in various contexts under the pressure of the increasing importance of new media and the profound social changes that have occurred in the last few decades. Theoretical issues are also raised and discussed, highlighting the need to reconsider the repertoire of conventions traditionally identified in each specific genre, and to reassess and update the analytical tools used to investigate them about three decades after the emergence of genre analysis.

Work and Labor in World Languages, Literatures, and Film

Selected Proceedings of the 24th Southeast Conference on Languages, Literatures, and Film

by Will Lehman, Margit Grieb, and Yves-Antoine Clemmen (editors)

2021

The essays in this anthology represent a cross-section of current scholarship examining the complex interplay between work, in its broadest theoretical conceptualization, and the world cultures in and through which this labor is performed. Although aimed primarily at an academic audience, the included essays, written in English, Spanish, and French, are also accessible to the curious layperson interested in looking at literature, theater, cinema, and philosophy through the lens of world languages and cultures. For more than thirty years, the Southeast Conference for Languages, Literatures and Film (SCFLLF) has been a premier platform for the discussion and dissemination of the latest scholarship in the Humanities, with emphasis on non-English area studies. The current volume showcases some...

Lakeview Arkansas

The Unknown Paradise

by Emmanuel E. Egar

2019

Lakeview is a beautiful town that is both unique and even peculiar. Unique because the town has no name. And yet, it has a name that it draws from the lake. Peculiar because of that funny synergy that unites the town and the lake. Without this curious synergy, the town would not exist. Yet without it, the lake would not exist. How do we separate the lake from the town or the town from the lake without inflicting mutual damage to both? This reminds us of that beauty from W.B. Yeats: How can we know the dancer from the dance?

Annals of Language and Learning

Proceedings of the 2009 International Online Language Conference (IOLC 2009)

by Azadeh Shafaei and Mehran Nejati (Eds.)

2010

Annals of Language and Learning is the conference proceedings of the Second International Online Language Conference which was successfully held in July 2009. This event allowed professors, Master's students, Ph.D. students, and academics from around the world to submit papers pertaining to the areas of the conference theme. The conference was organized by International Online Knowledge Service Provider (IOKSP).

The Semiotics of Beckett's Theatre

A Semiotic Study of the Complete Dramatic Works of Samuel Beckett

by Khaled Besbes

2007

Semiotics is an interdisciplinary field of research and Beckett’s theatre is one which engages a large spectrum of subjects and concerns that touch upon multiple aspects of human experience. The Beckettian dramatic text, as shall be demonstrated in this book, is a fertile ground for a semiotic investigation that is orchestrated by the profound insights of C. S. Peirce. As it applies semiotics to Beckett’s theatre, this book seeks to preserve, communicate and throw into relief those ‘universal values’ in the playwright’s works which remain unchallenged despite every change and every revolution in human societies. What this book will hopefully contribute to the general canon of theatrical studies is its study of the Beckettian dramatic text not as a model of the ‘absurd’ tradition, but ...

The Language System of English

by Vulf Plotkin

2006

A description of the English language as a dynamic system in the evolutionary process of radical typological restructuring, which has deeply affected its constituent subsystems - grammatical, lexical and phonic.

The Lunisolar Calendar

A Sociology of Japanese Time

by Jessica Kennett Cork

2011

This study shall explore the social and political significance of the so-called kyureki, the Japanese lunisolar calendar that was abolished by the Meiji government in 1872. This calendar was the principal method of timekeeping in Japan from 604 to 1872, but has received little attention from English speaking scholars. This study argues that the study of the lunisolar calendar is essential to gaining a comprehensive understanding of pre-Meiji society and political history. Chapter 1 uses a detailed analysis of an actual lunisolar calendar coupled with passages from pre-Meiji historical and literary texts to show that the lunisolar calendar reflects the value pre-Meiji society placed on minute seasonal changes, the phases of the moon, and divination controlled by various directional deities...

A Computational Phonology of Russian

by Peter A. Chew

2003

This dissertation provides a coherent, synchronic, broad-coverage, generative phonology of Russian. I test the grammar empirically in a number of ways to determine its goodness of fit to Russian. In taking this approach, I aim to avoid making untested (or even incoherent) generalizations based on only a handful of examples. In most cases, the tests show that there are exceptions to the theory, but at least we know what the exceptions are, a baseline is set against which future theories can be measured, and in most cases the percentage of exceptional cases is reduced to below 5%. The principal theoretical outcomes of the work are as follows. First, I show that all of the p...

Dialogic Oriented Shared Book Reading Practices for Immigrant Children in German Kindergartens

by Maria Teodora Ping

2012

This study aimed at getting an insight to the practices of dialogic oriented shared book reading, as one potential language promotion activity for children with migration backgrounds in German kindergartens. Shared book reading in Germany itself has been one common daily activity in kindergartens, yet it has unfortunately not been so much of a specific research focus to be explored. One of the notable studies to refer to when discussing shared book reading in the German context is the study conducted by Wieler (1997). On the other hand, there are a number of internationally recognized studies in the field of early childhood education which already indicated that book reading influenced the outcome measures in preschool children’s language growth, emergent literacy and reading achievemen...

Transcendent Apriorism

Pure Reason's Quest for the Noumenal

by Mark Robert Burgess

2011

The idea that the solitary thinker, using pure reason, can unlock the deepest mysteries of reality is certainly an exciting one. The rationalist dream began with Parmenides of Elea and became the epistemological foundation for the greatest metaphysical systems ever constructed. This thesis traces the complete historical development of this neglected epistemology and inaugurates a radical new appraisal of its method. The new clarity provides fresh insights into traditional puzzles like the Cartesian Circle and whether Plato had a secret esoteric doctrine. A new positive re-evaluation of a doctrine thought to have been refuted by Kant and the positivists will provide interest for students, philosophers and those interested in the history of ideas.

La Novela de las Transnacionales

Hacia Una Nueva Clasificación

by Jessica Ramos-Harthun

2004

(Complete work in Spanish) This study proposes a new genre: La novela de las transnacionales, which is derived from regrouping several types of novels within the category of the Novela Social of “tendencia antiimperialista”. The key element of this work is to identify the basic characteristics of form and content that allow the definition of this new classification. Acknowledging the fact that there are a great number of novels that address -to varying degrees- the topic of the transnational companies (TNCs), this work is based on three representative novels that comprise the subject as it is developed in an evolutionary manner: El tungsteno (1931) by César Vallejo; Mancha de aceite (1935) by César Uribe Piedrahita; and La trilogía bananera (Viento fuerte 1949; El Pa...

The Publishing History of Aubrey Beardsley's Compositions for Oscar Wilde's Salomé

by Joan Navarre

1998

This study claims that scholars need to examine all twenty-seven English illustrated editions of Wilde's and Beardsley's Salomë to understand whether Beardsley's compositions do, or do not, illustrate Wilde's words. For the last one hundred years scholars have addressed the aesthetic function of Beardsley's compositions (whether or not Beardsley's compositions illustrate Wilde's words), and each scholar sees something different: Beardsley's compositions are "irrelevant" to Wilde's words; Beardsley's compositions are "relevant" to Wilde's words; Beardsley's compositions are both "irrelevant" and "relevant." What is at issue here is that this traditional dance of signification (scholars' interpretations of the aesthetic function of Beardsley's compositions) relies upon an interpretive stra...

The Sound and the Fury in the Garden of Eden

William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and the Garden of Eden Myth

by John P. Anderson

2002

This non-academic author brings the Garden of Eden myth alive as sophisticated poetry and a polemic for women and the consciousness of freedom. The myth is explored line by line using the tools of literary analysis and modern ideas, including Freudian concepts. The analysis shows how its "J" author, thought to be a woman in the royal court of Judah around 1000 BCE, uses the techniques of sound association, puns and other sophisticated means to get her messages across. The analysis probes how after thousands of years this myth still speaks to us about the critical human experiences of sex and death and their bigger brothers freedom and limitation. Then this author shows how Faulkner used concepts from the Garden of Eden in structuring his most stunning and difficult stream of consciou...

Experience-Based Language Acquisition

A Computational Model of Human Language Acquisition

by Brian E. Pangburn

2002

Almost from the very beginning of the digital age, people have sought better ways to communicate with computers. This research investigates how computers might be enabled to understand natural language in a more humanlike way. Based, in part, on cognitive development in infants, we introduce an open computational framework for visual perception and grounded language acquisition called Experience-Based Language Acquisition (EBLA). EBLA can watch a series of short videos and acquire a simple language of nouns and verbs corresponding to the objects and object-object relations in those videos. Upon acquiring this protolanguage, EBLA can perform basic scene analysis to generate descriptions of novel videos.The general architecture of EBLA is comprised of three stages: vision processing, entit...

Diary as Fiction

Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground and Turgenev’s Diary of a Superfluous Man

by Jessica M. Natale

2000

There is a genre of literature in which the work is purposely written within the diary format; this type of writings known as diary fiction. Diary novels traditionally reflect what the authors think real diaries are or are written as a parody of the diary as a negative model. The authors of diary novels choose the diary form because its artistic quality expresses a greater sense of immediacy to the reader than other forms of literature. The diary novel emphasizes the time of writing rather than the time that it is written about, so the diarist usually writes about events of the immediate past - events that occur between one entry and the next - or records his momentary ideas, reflections, or emotions. Turgenev's "Diary of a Superfluous Man" represents the marriage of a memoir and a di...

A Paleographic Guide to Spanish Abbreviations 1500-1700

Una Guía Paleográfica de Abbreviaturas Españolas 1500-1700

by A. Roberta Carlin

2003

A Paleographic Guide to Spanish Abbreviations 1500-1700 is a powerful tool for correctly identifying hundreds of abbreviations found in the hand written documents of the Spanish colonial period. The Guide is concise, easy to use and of a very manageable size. All of the abbreviations were scanned from photo copies of extant Spanish documents written between the years 1500 and 1700 and are presented in their original handwriting. Together with each abbreviation is a printed display of the letters represented, the full spelling of the word or words in early modern Spanish and the current Spanish spelling. Over one thousand abbreviations from a wide variety of sources demonstrate the various handwriting styles of the period. The format of the Guide was planned to assist a variety of u...

Dynamics and Transparency in Vowel Harmony

by Stefan Benus

2010

This dissertation examines the phonological patterning as well as phonetic characteristics of transparent vowels in Hungarian palatal vowel harmony. Traditionally, these vowels are assumed to be excluded from participating in harmony alternations. The experimental data presented in this dissertation run contrary to this assumption. The data show that transparent vowels in Hungarian are articulated differently depending on the harmonic domain in which they occur. Based on this observation, the central claim defended and formalized in this dissertation is that continuous phonetic details of all stem vowels including the transparent vowels are relevant for the phonological alternation in suffixes. The dissertation proposes an integrated model that relates phonetic and phonological aspects of...

A Case Study of Seven Taiwanese English as a Foreign Language Freshman Non-English Majors’ Perceptions about Learning Five Communication Strategies

by Grace Hui Chin Lin

2007

The purpose of this study was to identify what were Taiwanese University English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners’ perceptions about learning communication strategies. This study collected qualitative data about students’ beliefs and attitudes as they learned communication strategies. The research question guiding the study was: What are Taiwanese University EFL learners’ perceptions about learning communication strategies? Twenty-four university students were trained for 10 weeks to use strategies in Faerch and Kasper’s (1983a) taxonomy, and seven volunteers were interviewed. None of the students majored in English but were enrolled in a required Basic English course in a Freshman English Non-Majors’ (FENM) program in Agriculture College at Tunghai University. In the middle and at th...

Margins of Desire

The Foundations of Derrida's Social Ethics

by Niva Arav

2010

In this research, the author analyzes Derrida's understanding of the way society is created out of a collection of individuals, how the individuals preserve their singularity and freedom within a social system and the meaning of ethics, as it comes out in his early writings. In this work, the researcher used a phenomenological method of research and Cassirer's way of analyzing the symbolic forms as a framework to analyze the early writing of Derrida. Although it is not a common approach to combine Derrida's philosophy with that of Cassirer's, the researcher found that Cassirer's ideas help to show Derrida's unique position.

Recovering Argument

A Guide to Critical Thinking and Writing

by Richard E. Mezo

1999

Recovering Argument is a textbook or handbook that sounds a revolutionary call to teachers and students of rhetoric, asking, as it implicitly does, for a return to reason as the basis of all argument. The implied purpose of the book is to recover argument from its current status among teachers, who often view composition as a merely personal exercise, with an emphasis upon "invention" (now the most important part of so-called "process" writing). It attempts to provide a framework for understanding discourse and its position and function in a democratic society. In addition to calling for a return to reason, Recovering Argument suggests new models and approaches to the teaching of writing. A model of communication (a "humanistic" model) is offered as a replacement for the widely-accept...

Fire i' the blood

A Handbook of Figurative Language

by Richard E. Mezo

1999

There are great differences between the oral use of figurative language and its written use. Nevertheless, the only separately published textbook for figurative language is almost entirely concerned with oral figurative language, offering such examples as "you have a heart of stone" or "you make my blood boil." Much, if not most, oral language consists of long, repetitious portions of cliché and platitude, and not surprisingly, the figurative language used follows the same pattern. Writing teachers generally ask their students not to use clichés and platitudes, even though they may (mistakenly, I think) advise students to "write like you speak." Understanding figurative language should be considered only one part of a larger attempt to teach reading (understanding written works); how...

Concepts and Choices

A Writer's Companion and Personal Advisor

by Richard E. Mezo

2001

Concepts and Choices is a new approach to teaching writing, one that incorporates recognized concepts and techniques with some neglected ones and some entirely new ones. The assumption is made that extensive practice without attending to such concepts provides nothing more for students than the opportunity for frequent repetition of error. Therefore, this book calls for smaller, manageable units of instruction. In addition, the so-called "process" model of writing used extensively by teachers today has emphasized the "discovery" of arguments (neglecting almost entirely descriptive/narrative writing) at the expense of more important elements, including the quality of content. Writing is a complex activity that cannot be reduced to an analogy in which it is compared to an assembly line ...

The Effect of Community Context on Intergenerational Spanish Maintenance and English Proficiency among Latina and Latino Children

by Nancy A. Garrett

1997

In this dissertation I investigate how community context affects Spanish language use and English proficiency among Latina and Latino children in the United States, focusing on the children of immigrants. I view children's language attributes through a sociological perspective that recognizes that children learn and use languages within specific social and cultural contexts, and that these contexts have an important effect on language acquisition and use. This theoretical perspective leads to the hypothesis that children's language skills and language use will be affected by the communities they live in. I predict that living in a metropolitan area with a greater propinquity and availability of Spanish speakers will increase a child's likelihood of speaking Spanish, because this will incr...

Essential Structures

A Guide to English for Readers and Writers

by Richard E. Mezo

2000

Essential Structures is a guide for any student of English who wishes to become more familiar with the basic structures of the language. It provides authoritative and essential information about: * The Parts of Speech * Sentence and Paragraph Structures * Structures of Larger Forms * English Usage * Critical Thinking * Denotation and Connotation * Problems in Writing * The Development of English Guidelines and exercises are provided in this handy book written for both native and non-native speakers of English. Essential Structures might be used for individual study or as a supplement in a high school or college English developmental course. It assumes a high degree of maturity on the part of the reader; readings and exercises are taken from materials written for a ...

Johnson's Quarrel with Swift

Johnson's Part in the Swiftian Tradition

by Jordan P. Richman

2010

Samuel Johnson included in his Lives of the Poets a "Life of Jonathan Swift." His friends, including his biographer, believed he had formed a prejudice against Swift's life and works. They were relieved to find that Johnson's biography of Swift was fair and judicious, indeed. This dissertation shows the parallels, as well as divergences, between the two writers in satire, political thought, and theological philosophy.

A Tale of Two Cities in Arabic Translation

by Fatima Muhammad Muhaidat

2009

This study investigates the problems translators encounter when rendering features of Dickens's style in A Tale of Two Cities into Arabic. Examples of these features are singled out and analyzed. Then, they are compared with their counterparts in published translations of the novel in Arabic. The comparisons depend on back translation to give non-readers of Arabic a clear idea about the similarities and differences between the source text and target one(s). The features under focus are sound effects, figurative language, humor, repetition, and the French element. The discussion dedicated to onomatopoeia, alliteration, and rhyme shows that there is no one-to-one correspondence between English and Arabic in reflecting these linguistic phenomena. Translators may resort to techniques like rew...

Effect of Grouping on Language Development of English Learners

by Seema Sabharwal

2009

The purpose of the study was to examine if there was a significant difference between first-grade English Learners (EL) who constitute a majority (>50%) of the English language mainstream classroom (homogeneous grouping) and first-grade EL who constitute a minority (<50%) of the English language mainstream classrooms (heterogeneous grouping) in the area of English language acquisition as measured by the California English Language Development Test (CELDT). To accomplish this, the researcher gathered CELDT scores of entire English language mainstream EL who were enrolled in first grade for the 2006-2007 school year and who maintained enrollment in the same district for second grade in the fall of 2007-2008 school year at a Unified School District (USD). In this study, the researcher also de...

Alcoholic Iliad/Recovery Odyssey

Utilizing Myth as Addiction Metaphors in Family Therapy

by Jeff Sandoz

2009

Alcoholic Iliad/Recovery Odyssey focuses on the use of metaphor within addiction and recovery counseling. The central core of the book involves the telling of the story of one who undergoes a transforming life event and wishes to share that experience with others. This book offers a treasure trove of metaphorical images which will not only assist the counselor, but also the client throughout the various stages of recovery.

The Waveform Model of Vowel Perception and Production

by Michael A. Stokes

2010

This book presents a new model of vowel perception and production derived from visual cues identified in waveform displays. In addition to describing waveform displays of vowels beyond previous descriptions, included in the book are descriptions of experimental evidence supporting near 100% vowel identification accuracy across 20 male talkers using the concepts in the model. The book content will be of interest to several academic fields including Cognitive Science, Psychology, Linguistics, Speech and Hearing, Language Acquisition, Neurolinguistics, Phonetics, and areas within Physics and Mathematics. Beyond these academic fields, the new model of vowel perception presented here could possibly be used to improve accuracy and speed within existing speech recognition systems, or it could be ...

Joyce's Finnegans Wake: The Curse of Kabbalah

Volume 3

by John P. Anderson

2010

This third in a series continues this non-academic author's ground-breaking word by word analysis of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, Joyce's last blessing on mankind. This volume covers chapters 1.5 and 1.6 with the intent to explore them as art objects, to examine how they work as art. By contrast with previous reduction-based chapters, Chapter 1.5 features expansion, One becoming Many. The spirit of the female principle registered in ALP's letter or "mamafesta" hatches the expansion. This chapter honors creativity in literature along with the human female instinct for giving birth to new human potential. An academically-oriented Professor explores but misses the meaning of the letter. Aristotle's concept of the infinite and the legend of Krishna injecting independence in Gopi milk w...

Using New Media in the Task-Based German Conversation Classroom

by Rene Fassbender

2009

The main purpose of this study is to demonstrate how new audiovisual media, such as YouTube, can be effectively combined with task-based teaching approaches for communicative language teaching at the advanced level. Based on an examination of prior research, this study generates a set of criteria which are essential to the development of task-based units that utilize authentic video material to increase students' cultural awareness and communicative skills. The proposed sample units serve as models for instructors to use the presented criteria for the creation of further language activities and units that will effectively incorporate new media and task-based teaching within an engaging, student-centered learning environment.

Telicity and the Syntax-Semantics of the Object and Subject

by Miren J. Hodgson

2010

This dissertation presents a study on the acquisition of telicity by Spanish and English native speakers. In addition to the study of acquisition, it investigates the syntactic and semantic properties of locatum constructions (e.g., the water filled the bucket), which are sentences that contain two internal arguments and whose subject is non-agentive. This dissertation explores the syntactic and semantic properties of elements of the verb phrase that had not been previously considered in the interpretation of telicity, such as the role of non-agentive subjects and the type of movement that takes place in the checking of the verb's telic features. Contrary to the assumption that only the direct internal argument of the verb can delimit an event, I argue that objects generated in the lower ...

Joyce's Finnegans Wake: The Curse of Kabbalah

Volume 2

by John P. Anderson

2009

This second volume continues this non-academic author's ground-breaking word-by-word analysis of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, Joyce's last blessing on mankind. In chapters 1.3 and 1.4, which are covered by this volume, the Kabbalah-based analysis peers into the darkness of the Egyptian Land of the Dead and corresponding Book of the Dead. These chapters are joined at the hip by Egyptian death-obsessed theosophy and increase the font on Joyce’s principal subject matter—the loss of human potential to fear and dependency. Joyce finds Kabbalah-cursed paralysis in ancient Egyptian religion as part of his effort to show the same paralysis in nearly all religions and to champion the independent individual. In these chapters, the search for meaning in the god/mankind relationship serves up seve...