Search

The book tries to trace the origin of today's Nigeria. The foundation that produced it was based on faulty principles, which came about due to the fact that both the imperial Lords and the indigenous founding fathers had no clear vision of the nature the new nation should take. The fact that many tribes, tongues and beliefs were unsystematically coerced to form this unwilling alliance added much strain to the feeble chains of unity. Every effort made to address this situation has failed so far. The author shows failures in the political, economic and religious arena while arguing that the development of the mental faculties of the Nigerian youth is the only viable option towards success. This development can only come about through comprehensive education, not based on the acquisition of paper qualifications but on the development of the entire person as an entity.

This rich and varied collection of papers is concerned with feedback in the language learning context. Each chapter deals with a different aspect of the feedback process including peer feedback, online feedback, learner-centred feedback, feedback formulation as well as feedback on specific skill areas. With its blend of theoretical overviews, action research-based empirical studies and practical implications, it will be a valuable resource for all academics and practitioners concerned with generating feedback that matters.

This study explores the argument that postcolonial Africa has been the setting for competing external language spread policies (LSPs) by ex-colonial European countries at the turn of the 21st Century. It focuses on the external LSPs developed by the governments of Portugal, Brazil, United Kingdom, France and Germany towards Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau from the 1990s to the present. The study offers a perspective on the web of relationships involving European ex-colonial powers and the African postcolonial countries of Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique. The author seeks to examine the development of external (European) LSPs and the construction of politico-linguistic blocs in a complex context whilst taking into account the colonial heritage and its lingering dependencies, the construction and maintenance of nationhood and the increasing globalisation of the world.

This volume grew out of the 34th International LAUD Symposium, which was held in March 2010 at the University of Koblenz-Landau in Landau, Germany. The symposium was dedicated to the ongoing convergence between the disciplines of Cognitive Linguistics and Sociolinguistics, bringing together concepts and methods from both fields. The 15 studies contained in this volume explore the relations between linguistic (structural), socio-cultural and cognitive aspects involved in language variation. Methodologically, the contributions range from individual case studies to larger-scale corpus analyses and combine both qualitative and quantitative findings.

Translation is rooted in diversity and its nature necessarily resides in accommodating differences of all sorts: lexical, textual, macrotextual, intertextual, individual, social, cultural, political, et cetera. This collection of papers, which deals with literature, poetry, hospital situations, minority languages, proverbs and so on, gives a good picture of how differences are accommodated in translation across languages but also across cultures. They form a good starting point for comparison between translation practices and translation approaches. They reveal how Indian and Western scholars perceive translation.

«Inklings» nannte sich eine Gruppe von Schriftstellern und Geisteswissenschaftlern in Oxford, deren bekannteste Mitglieder J.R.R. Tolkien und C.S. Lewis waren. Die Inklings-Gesellschaft e.V. widmet sich seit 1983 dem Studium und der Verbreitung der Werke dieser und ihnen nahestehender Autoren sowie der Analyse des Phantastischen in Literatur, Film und Kunst allgemein. Ihre Jahrestagungen werden in Jahrbüchern dokumentiert. Dieser Band enthält 12 Vorträge der Tagung «The Inheritance of the Inklings», die 2012 in Wetzlar stattfand und sich mit neuesten Entwicklungen in der phantastischen Literatur und anderen Medien beschäftigte, sowie 5 weitere Beiträge und zahlreiche Rezensionen. «Inklings» was the name of a group of Oxford scholars and writers; its best-known members were J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. The German Inklings-Gesellschaft, founded in 1983, is dedicated to the discussion and dissemination of the works of these authors and of writers commonly associated with them and to the study of the fantastic in literature, film and the arts in general. The proceedings of the annual Inklings conferences are being published in yearbooks. This volume contains 12 papers presented at the 2012 conference in Wetzlar, «The Inheritance of the Inklings». They explore recent developments in fantasy fiction and other media. In addition, there are 5 general articles and numerous reviews.

Politisch werden «Vertrauen» und «Verantwortung» ständig thematisiert. Die Untersuchung zielt hierzu auf ein reflektiertes Begriffsverständnis. Sie spannt den Bogen über staatstheoretische Ansätze von John Locke, Edmund Burke, die Federalist Papers, Benjamin Constant, Robert von Mohl und Max Weber bis in die zweite Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts. Weiterhin analysiert sie philosophische und sozialwissenschaftliche Arbeiten bis zum Beginn des 21. Jahrhunderts, darunter Niklas Luhmann, James Coleman, Russell Hardin, Bernard Barber, Wilhelm Weischedel, Georg Picht, Hans Jonas, Otfried Höffe, Ulrich Beck und Franz-Xaver Kaufmann. Auswertungen erfolgen nach Sprachen (Deutsch, Englisch, Französisch), Ländern (Deutschland, Frankreich, Großbritannien, Schweiz, USA) und Strukturen. Erkennbar werden Modernität der Problematik, Unterschiedlichkeit der Antworten sowie strukturelle Besonderheiten und Entsprechungen der Zentralbegriffe.

This volume unites a wide range of papers given at the international conference «Italy and Europe's Eastern Border. 1204-1669» in Rome in November 2010. Its content reflects the manifold research topics of a European scholarly community united in the joint endeavor to shape new aspects and to promote innovative fields of Mediterranean Studies. Therefore, various approaches to the overall topic can be found in this volume, be it from the viewpoint of war and religion, frontier and border studies, the union of churches, diplomacy, theology, economic history, humanism, diplomatics, historiography, prosopography, or genealogy. This is the first volume of the series «Eastern and Central European Studies» and at the same time an incentive for volumes to follow, which will guide the reader on his journey through space and time to hitherto unknown shores of Eastern European and Mediterranean Studies.

Die Europäische Union hat sich von Anfang an zur Mehrsprachigkeit bekannt und mit ihrer «Verordnung Nr. 1» vom 15. April 1958 eine Vollsprachenregelung beschlossen, die trotz des Anwachsens von anfänglich vier auf mittlerweile 23 «Amts- und Arbeitssprachen» bis heute gilt. Diese Studie analysiert Theorie und Praxis der EU-Sprachenregelung, zeigt auf, wie das Englische im Laufe der Jahre Französisch als «Lingua franca» abgelöst hat und bietet eine umfassende Analyse der EU-Sprachenpolitik. Dabei werden zahlreiche Dokumente erstmals wissenschaftlich ausgewertet und auch die Tätigkeit des weltweit größten Übersetzungs- sowie des Dolmetscherdienstes der EU untersucht. Hierauf folgt eine Analyse der Sprachenpolitik Deutschlands als größtem Mitgliedstaat der EU, die durch gemeinsame Bemühungen von Bundesregierung und Bundestag zur Stärkung der deutschen Sprache gekennzeichnet ist. Abschließend wird eine neue Sprachenpolitik für die EU gefordert, die einen Ausgleich zwischen Effizienz und Gerechtigkeit und zwischen Interessen und realem Bedarf bildet. An die Stelle der Vollsprachenregelung sollte eine Sprachenauswahl treten, welche die Sprachen Europas mit dem größten Kommunikationspotenzial beinhaltet: das Englische, Deutsche, Französische, Spanische und Russische. Eine solche Entscheidung erfordert Weitblick und politischen Mut – andernfalls würde sich im freien Spiel der Kräfte allein das Englische durchsetzen.

«Bringing together specialists from linguistics, psychology and philosophy, the book offers an exciting collection of papers assessing the conceptual representation of emotion and the conceptual relationship between emotion and language. The specific issues addressed include the analyses, based on corpus and cross-linguistic methodologies, of emotions such as pride, guilt, hope, despair, satisfaction, fear and anger in a number of languages, and how language shapes socialisation practices, such as in bilinguals. Finally, it provides good examples of the methods – from metaphor analysis to experimental studies – used to achieve a better understanding of the complexity and multi-dimensionality of the conceptualisation of emotion and the emotion-language relationship. Researchers and advanced students are likely to find this book an important reference work.» (Vanda L. Zammuner, University of Padova, Italy)

This volume is a posthumous revised edition of selected papers by Andrzej Kopcewicz on classic works of American and Irish fiction, published originally between 1979 and 2005. The book opens with two introductory sketches: a semi-theoretical one on intertextuality and a semi-historical one on the interaction of high and low literary forms. The gist of the book are textual analyses of the intricacies and reciprocities of some of the best-known works by Herman Melville, Frank R. Stockton, Henry Adams, Thomas Pynchon, Gilbert Sorrentino, Donald Barthelme, Paul Auster, Flann O'Brien, and James Joyce. While the essays lend themselves to being read in any order, as well as in isolation, the underlying Peircean-Joycean premise of the book is a semiotic-mythical commodius vicus of palimpsestic recirculation. Informed by a combination of poetic sensibility and disciplined as well as erudite mind, the ten essays collected here demonstrate that the agenda and methods of the more traditional close reading and the more contemporary intertextuality are not exclusive of each other.

The Guidelines for Good Practice of the European Association for Language Testing and Assessment (EALTA) stress the importance of collaboration between all parties involved in the process of developing instruments, activities and programmes for testing and assessment. Collaboration is considered to be as important as validity and reliability, providing a crucial prerequisite for responsibility and respect for students. The papers, covering a range of topics that consider both realities and prospects of collaboration, were originally presented at EALTA conferences from 2008 to 2010.

The volume contains papers presented at the fourth Workshop «American Ethnicity: Rethinking Old Issues, Asking New Questions» which took place in Krakow, Poland, on May 24th-25th, 2010. The event was organized by the Institute of American Studies and Polish Diaspora of the Jagiellonian University, and supported by the (American) Immigration and Ethnic History Society. The tradition of organizing bi-annual workshops goes back to 2004 and continues to be a forum for discussing ongoing research and sharing ideas. The texts included in this volume provide a comparative context to immigration studies, contribute to the gender perspective, bring up new issues and remind the most important aspects of migrants'life, such as remittances and poverty. There is also a set of the articles on American Jewish experience, studied from a variety of angles, and the Polish-American section presenting texts on local immigrant communities.

New archival materials have provided the basis for rethinking the dynamic of the Holocaust in Poland. These historical sources consist primarily of court papers from postwar trials of Polish citizens. Using such files, historians are now better able to document and write the dramatic story of antagonism between Jews evading the Nazi dragnet, and a hostile rural populace which sometimes collaborated in persecution. Although important works on the Holocaust appeared earlier in Poland, only during the last several years has a scholarly milieu emerged in the country for taking the Holocaust out of its intellectual ghetto as a strictly «Jewish» subject, and repositioning it at the center of Poland's wartime history.

This book, prepared in the context of the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD), also known as Rio+20, contains the papers submitted to the World Symposium on Sustainable Development at Universities (WSSD-U-2012), which took place in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil on 5 and 6 June 2012. It pursues the following main aims: to document and disseminate experiences from universities all round the world regarding education for sustainable development; to foster the exchange of information, ideas and experiences acquired in the execution of projects; and to introduce methodological approaches and projects which aim to integrate the topic of sustainable development in the curriculum of universities. Last but not least, a further aim is to document and disseminate the wealth of experiences available today, providing a truly global coverage. Sustainable Development at Universities: New Horizons is a highly comprehensive publication on sustainability in higher education. It is meant to go beyond a description of the current state of knowledge, and shall open the way for new thinking and new horizons in what is a rapidly expanding field, of central interest to both industrialised and developing countries.

Over the recent years corpus tools and methodologies have gained widespread recognition in various areas of theoretical and applied linguistics. Data lodged in corpora is explored and exploited across languages and disciplines as distinct as historical linguistics, language didactics, discourse analysis, machine translation and search engine development to name but a few. This volume contains a selection of papers presented at the 8th edition of the Practical Applications in Language and Computers conference and it is aimed at helping a wide community of researchers, language professionals and practitioners keep up to date with new corpus theories and methodologies as well as language-related applications of computational tools and resources.

This study aimed at analysing the impact of two different land reform strategies on rural poverty in CIS countries, particularly in Georgia and Moldova. While Georgia distributed agricultural land parcels directly to the population at the beginning of the 1990ies, Moldova transferred land via paper shares for undemarcated land parcels. This study is based on household data, which were collected during household surveys in Georgia and Moldova in 2007 and 2008. The data had been used in order to analyse the impact of land reform on the endowment with land and other capital, the use of capital and the access to markets and credits as well as the importance of agricultural employment for rural households. A logit analysis had been run in order to detect the determinants of poverty.

This volume comprises 28 papers presented at the 1st International Conference on Non-Dominant Varieties of Pluricentric Languages in Graz (Austria) in July 2011. The conference was also held in memory of Michael Clyne – eminent linguist, scholar, language enthusiast and advocate of multilingualism who died in October 2010. The volume pays homage to his important contributions in many fields of linguistics and in the theory of pluricentric languages. The conference in Graz was the first international event to document the situation of non-dominant varieties world-wide in order to identify common or diverging features. It provided substantial insights into the codification and in corpus and status planning of non-dominant varieties. The volume deals with 18 languages and 31 different national and other varieties in 29 countries of the world.

«Inklings» nannte sich eine Gruppe von Schriftstellern und Geisteswissenschaftlern in Oxford, deren bekannteste Mitglieder J.R.R. Tolkien und C.S. Lewis waren. Die Inklings-Gesellschaft e.V. widmet sich dem Studium und der Verbreitung der Werke dieser und ihnen nahestehender Autoren sowie der Analyse des Phantastischen in Literatur, Film und Kunst allgemein. Ihre Jahrestagungen werden seit 1983 in Jahrbüchern dokumentiert. Dieser Band enthält die 9 Vorträge der Tagung «Der andere Conan Doyle», die im Mai 2011 in Leipzig weniger den Schöpfer der Sherlock-Holmes-Geschichten in den Blick nahm als den Autor von Science Fiction und phantastischer Literatur und den Verteidiger des britischen Empire, sowie 6 weitere Beiträge und zahlreiche Rezensionen. «Inklings» was the name of a group of Oxford scholars and writers; its best-known members were J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. The German Inklings Gesellschaft is dedicated to the discussion and dissemination of the works of these authors and of writers commonly associated with them and to the study of the fantastic in literature, film and the arts in general. The proceedings of the annual Inklings conferences have been published in yearbooks since 1983. This volume contains the 9 papers presented at the 2011 conference in Leipzig, «The Other Conan Doyle», which concentrated on the author of science fiction and fantastic stories and the defender of the British Empire rather than on the creator of Sherlock Holmes. In addition, there are 6 general articles and numerous reviews.

Mit der Veröffentlichung des Gemeinsamen Europäischen Referenzrahmens (GER) im Jahre 2001 wurde versucht, für Fremdsprachenlerner in Europa ein allgemeines Bewertungskonzept zur Verfügung zu stellen, das als Orientierungshilfe im sprachlichen Bereich fungieren soll. Das Ziel dieser Studie liegt in der Evaluation des innovativen Potenzials des Europäischen Sprachenportfolios (ESP), einer Folgeveröffentlichung des GER. Zu diesem Zweck wurde die Arbeit mit dem ESP bei Schülern der 7. Klasse an dem griechischen Gymnasium in Dortmund in einem Zeitraum von fünf Monaten dokumentiert. Das Augenmerk richtete sich dabei auf die Selbstreflexionsprozesse, die bei den Schülern durch die Auseinandersetzung mit den Kann-Beschreibungen des ESPs ausgelöst wurden. Die Auswirkung der Arbeit mit dem Europäischen Sprachenportfolio wurde auf der Grundlage qualitativ-empirischer Erhebungen untersucht. Insgesamt wurde eine Akzeptanz des gesamten ESPs festgestellt und es ließ sich ein starkes Argument für die Arbeit mit dem Portfolio ableiten. Offensichtlich gelang es mit der Portfolioarbeit, auch schwächere Schüler in besonderer Weise anzusprechen und zu motivieren.

Die Arbeit untersucht, wieweit durch das Englische die Position des Deutschen als Fremd- und Wissenschaftssprache Schaden nimmt. Die Zahlen von 2005 und 2010 der Ständigen Arbeitsgruppe Deutsch als Fremdsprache (StADaF) mit dem starken Verlust an Lernern des Deutschen scheinen dies nahe zu legen. Ein Drittel der befragten Lehrenden des Deutschen als Fremdsprache oder der Germanistik sieht diese Gefahr ebenfalls. Ein Zurückdrängen der Rolle des Englischen ist bei der globalen Entwicklung in allen Bereichen sicher nicht möglich. Es kann also nur eine Balance zwischen der Verwendung des Englischen und Deutschen und insgesamt ein Festhalten an Mehrsprachigkeit angestrebt werden. Vorschläge, wie dies erreicht werden kann, bietet das Schlusskapitel und greift dabei auch die Empfehlungen der Hochschulrektorenkonferenz vom November 2011 zur Sprachenpolitik an den Hochschulen auf.

Diese Arbeit untersucht, ob sich die Sprechfertigkeit chinesischer Studierender im Deutschen während des Fachstudiums in Deutschland verbessert. Dazu wird mit mündlichen DSH-Prüfungen die sprachliche Entwicklung ermittelt. Die Ergebnisse werden dann auf die quantitativen Befunde einer Fragebogenerhebung bezogen. Mittels statistischer Tests werden soziale und psychologische Faktoren bestimmt, die sich auf die Verbesserung der Sprechfertigkeit auswirken. Zudem werden durch Interviews mit ausgewählten Probanden qualitative Daten erhoben, zu deren Analyse die Studie kulturwissenschaftliche und sozialpsychologische Ansätze heranzieht. Aus diesen empirischen Befunden werden dann differenzierte Empfehlungen für die Hochschulen zur Förderung des Weitererwerbs von Deutschkenntnissen abgeleitet.

The European linguistic diversity goes far beyond the official national languages of the present 27 member states of the European Union. In every country several languages of smaller or larger groups of speakers are used besides the official language or the languages of the majority population. These languages are autochthonous languages that have been used for a long time in the individual country as well as allochthonous languages of different groups of migrants and their descendants. The sometimes complicated relations between national, regional and minority languages within various countries are discussed in this volume. Besides reports on several countries, the general sociolinguistic and legal conditions are dealt with in overview contributions. In addition, the Dublin Declaration on the relationship between official languages and regional and minority languages in Europe is presented in 24 languages.

In dieser Studie werden die Einstiege deutscher und finnischer linguistischer Zeitschriftenartikel aus den Zeitschriften Virittäjä und Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur kontrastiv und diachron (1897-2003) untersucht. Struktur und Wandel der thematischen Einstiege werden mittels einer speziell entwickelten Methodologie – basierend auf einer Modifikation von Fredrickson/Swales (1994) – empirisch analysiert. Es erfolgt eine pragmatische Einbettung der jeweiligen Strukturanalysen durch Kapitel zur Fach- und Periodikumsgeschichte sowie zur thematischen Ausrichtung der untersuchten Periodika innerhalb der betrachteten zeitlichen Analyseabschnitte.

The studies in this volume explore a number of issues in education today. One paper reveals what actually motivates teachers to develop their career, another, how to teach primary teachers to talk about visual art. Children's artworks were explored in one article to see how they relate to their adjustment to school. In another, a case study was successful in developing reasoning in primary school students. The measurement of mathematics achievement revealed no difference between Estonian speaking and Russian speaking schools. Performance-related goals were shown in another article to be associated with the self-concept of the students. The learning disabilities of children were analysed, and the production of narratives by children with language impairment. The analysis of aggressive behaviour in children in Estonia and Finland indicated gender and country differences in their behaviour.

The last comprehensive study of the motives for studying German in Australia was conducted in the late 1980s. The main objective of this thesis is not only to fill the gap of recent data but at the same time to analyse the new data in the context of relevant theories of language learning motivation. The data analysis focuses on students'demographic backgrounds, their motivation to learn German, and on their expectations towards course content. Where possible, the new data is compared with former studies in order to investigate what changes have occurred over the last two decades. It will be shown that these changes are primarily a reflection of changes to higher education policies. Overall, the thesis establishes a theoretically informed and data-based platform for curriculum development which will assist German Studies programs in designing their courses for the future.

The linguistic domains of business and commerce are especially affected by the economic and communicative globalization. Since language use in these domains has an impact on the use of a language in other domains, the future development of the European languages will not mainly depend on language-internal processes, but will increasingly be influenced by the use of English as the international vehicular language. The present development in Europe is discussed in several overview articles and a series of reports on the specific situation in various European countries. In addition, the Lisbon Resolution of EFNIL, pointing at the advantages of multilingualism in international business, is presented in 26 languages including the 23 official languages of the European Union. It calls the EU and its members to acknowledge languages as key factors for economic success, also from the perspective of consumers and workers.

Electronic signature legislation seeks to facilitate e-commerce by providing an electronic equivalent to handwritten signatures in paper-based contracts. However, electronic signature legislation enacted in the past years in different jurisdictions has followed a dissimilar approach. In light thereof, this book analyzes the legal validity of electronic signatures in international contracts potentially subject to divergent electronic signature regulation. To this end, four major issues are addressed: the technological and legal concept of electronic signatures; the legal regulation of electronic signatures; the determination of the electronic signature legislation that will be applicable to an international contract; and, finally, the implications of applying one electronic signature law or another. The research covers the laws of Argentina, Germany and the United States of America as well as international conventions.

Die Terrorismusbekämpfung hat seit den Terroranschlägen vom 11. September 2001 weltweit einen vollkommen neuen Stellenwert bekommen – nicht nur politisch, sondern auch rechtlich. Auf der Ebene der Europäischen Union hat dies zu der Frage geführt, wie durch die Gemeinschaft der europäischen Staaten der Terrorismus wirksamer zu bekämpfen sei. Aufgrund der internationalen Dimension der Terrorismusbekämpfung versuchen die EU-Mitgliedstaaten dem Terrorismus gegenwärtig unter anderem im Rahmen der Europäischen Sicherheits- und Verteidigungspolitik (ESVP) entgegen zu treten. Die Arbeit untersucht, welche Instrumentarien der EU im Rahmen der ESVP zur Verfügung stehen und welche Probleme bei ihrer Anwendung auftreten. Darüber hinaus wird der Blick ausgeweitet auf die Frage, wie das zukünftige Gesicht der ESVP aussehen wird, insbesondere inwieweit der Lissabon-Vertrag das Potenzial für wirksame Reformen in sich trägt.

Questions of tolerance are as old as human society. In acknowledgment of the crucial importance of tolerance and intolerance in contemporary life, a conference was convened in 2007. The 16 papers included in this volume all have their origins in that conference, which brought together a wide array of over 100 academics from fifteen nations, all interested in furthering discussion on tolerance. The goal of this book is to stimulate further historical and contemporary critical reflection on the foundational philosophical, religious, and cultural value and problematic future of tolerance. The title – Literature, Culture, and Tolerance – emphasizes the interconnections between the social and the artistic, between the political and the literary, in thinking through the phenomena of tolerance and intolerance in the modern world.

Dieser Sammelband besteht zum Teil aus den Referaten der Sprachinselsektion der 1. Internationalen Tagung der IGDD, die im März 2003 in Marburg an der Lahn stattgefunden hat. Die anderen Beiträge wurden von Forschern aus verschiedenen Sprachinselregionen der Welt beigesteuert. Im Zentrum der Aufsätze stehen soziolinguistische, dialektologische und kontaktlinguistische Entwicklungen, die in deutschen Sprachinseln der Welt am Anfang des 21. Jahrhunderts stattfinden. This collection of papers contains contributions to the language island section of the First International Conference of the International Society for German Dialectology (IGDD), which took place in Marburg an der Lahn, Germany in March 2003. In addition, further contributions are included on research done in language island regions of the world. The focus of the essays is the socio-linguistic, dialectological and contact-linguistic survey of the development of German language islands across the world as registered at the beginning of the 21st century.

The literary works of J. R. R. Tolkien, especially The Lord of the Rings, are marked by their author's professional interest in the history of English. This study shows how philological features such as nomenclature, archaism and echoes of Old English poetic forms have been reflected in a selection of published translations into Germanic and Romance languages. It demonstrates how current translation theory based on a hermeneutic approach can explain translators'compensation techniques such as the use of analogous historical resources in the target languages, and how these can preserve literary and poetic effects. In doing so, it also offers a survey of characteristic stylistic features in the source text.

Lingua francas are languages used for communication between individuals for whom they are not the first language. Based on empirical work throughout, the individual contributions to this volume address lingua franca communication from sociolinguistic as well as from conversation analytic perspectives, or place this form of communication within the wider context of foreign language teaching. The volume as a whole attempts to broaden the traditional view of lingua francas as languages employed by non-native speakers to serve specific, restricted communicative purposes only. Instead, it is demonstrated that lingua francas have gained a number of varied functions, and that they are employed by a heterogeneous group of speakers for whom they do not always have the same status of a second or foreign language. The papers reveal intriguing similarities in form across different lingua francas, but also point at significant differences. As a result, it is proposed that approaches to teach lingua francas as such need to be developed on the basis of empirical evidence.

This book is a collection of papers that explores the notion of learner autonomy and the problem of helping language learners to manage their learning effectively. The first part of the book deals with issues of definition: what is the cognitive base for autonomous learning behaviour and how is this mediated by social and cultural expectations of a learner's role? The second part reports on experiences of working with learners and with teachers to promote learner autonomy. In working with learners, the focus is on language learning strategies and how strategic learning might be developed through strategy training, materials design, reflection and counselling. In working with teachers, the focus is on bringing about change in traditional perspectives on the roles of learners and teachers within education systems.

The present book is a collection of selected papers held at the 23rd International LAUD Symposium on «The Cultural Context in Communication Across Languages» (26-31 March 1997) in Duisburg, Germany. The papers included in this volume highlight several aspects pertaining to the cultural dimension of foreign language teaching and learning. The topics covered range from theoretical accounts on text, language, and culture through to empirically-based aspects of non-native discourse as well as sociolinguistic and cultural awareness in foreign language teaching. Finally, the volume brings together contributions from a wide variety of languages and cultural settings. The Cultural Context in Foreign Language Teaching will interest students of educational linguistics and language pedagogy, intercultural communication and discourse analysis.

This volume brings together 8 previously unpublished papers dealing with various modes of allocating jointly consumable goods (i.e. public goods). The issues covered range from voluntary contributions and price exclusion (market allocation) to positive and normative analyses of different political allocation procedures for public goods. Given this wide spectrum of allocative schemes for public goods there does not seem to be an easy and clear-cut message from modern public-goods theory to public allocation policy.