Applied Languages Books

In this book Dornyei has provided an all-in-one text about motivation. He discusses the theory behind motivation, how to increase motivation in students and teachers, and how to research motivation. It is particularly important to review the literature on motivation because so much of what goes on in the classroom and outside of the classroom depends on the motivation of the students and teachers. In particular, I found the information on grooup dynamics as a factor in motivation to be very useful. By building a sense of community or a sense of belonging, one can also build motivation in others, which leads to a more active and engaged class. This books is particularly for language teachers, but I think all teachers will be able to learn something from this book. Check it out.

The authors provide a practical guide to developing a training program designed to help people with communication difficulties. The authors also provide a state of the art review of the current training issues regarding the treatment of shyness, apprehension, and reticence.

omg lane hemaspaandra is brilliant he is like so totally da theory man buy this book now goodbye.

The book covers 7 chapters by eminent researchers in this discipline. The presentation is beautiful. The definitions are clearly presented with examples to understand the concepts.It is a very very useful book for the researchers in the disciplines of temporal logic.People of general interest in AI should at least go through chapter 1 to have some ideas on the subject.

The field of SLA, or Second Language Acquisition, is relatively new, but the language teaching profession is not. In the short history of SLA, however, researchers have sought to conduct solid L2 research and analyze the resultant data to give us teachers classroom applications of this research.

Unfortunately, two problems have persisted for TESOL and L2 teachers. The first problem is that, compared to other fields, SLA research has been rather scant. Fortunately, researchers continue to work on this. Some researchers, such as Dana Ferris, have continued to contribute greatly to pedagogy by doing work that has more practical than just theoretical value.

The second problem is that L2 research, even when it does have practical classroom application, is often written in such an unfriendly, unintelligible way that it is of little use to the average classroom teacher, i.e., the person who MOST needs to see the applications of the findings.

Luckily for the thousands of ESL, L2, and Generation 1.5 Writing teachers, Dana Ferris has just released TREATMENT OF ERROR IN SECOND LANGUAGE STUDENT WRITING. What a refreshing work! The author has done a great service to our profession by writing to teachers and not using "researcher-ese." Ferris has managed to present information in readable language for BOTH teachers and researchers. I picked up a copy of this book at a conference, started reading it just prior to boarding my flight home, and managed to read most of the book by the time my plane landed five hours later. It is so rare for a book of facts to be so captivating and informative!

I recommend this book HIGHLY to any teacher of ESL, L2 writing, or even L1 (English) composition.

Sincerely,

Keith Folse
Coordinator, M.A. TESOL Program
University of Central Florida.

This book is probably the best which I have read on its level. Packed with useful information, organized, and containing many clever examples and some humor as well. Most importantly, Professors Brown and Attardo provide many differnt viewpoints of linguistics concerning theory, rather than some of the one-sided books I have read. This is a must read for anyone wishing to jump into linguistics.

Linguists, most of them scholars and academics, tend to accept that language is in a continuing state of evolution and change. They consider this the natural state of language, and that any attempt to stop change with a set of rigid grammatical rules and notions of standards is either counterproductive or simply wrong-headed.

Lined up against them is a more traditionalist army of grammarians, plain language enthusiasts, and keepers of "correct" usage, who feel that change is undesirable and that the laissez-faire attitude of linguists is an invitation to cultural chaos. These two groups have been at loggerheads for decades, each deeply suspicious of the other.

Along comes Deborah Cameron, a linguist at Strythclyde University (UK) who decides to take a more open-minded look at the attitudes of the traditionalists and offers her colleagues a number of insights meant to scale down the level of hostility between the two camps. Her central notion is there in the title: verbal hygiene.

She proposes that not only does language evolve; it generates its own "caregivers." These people look after its welfare, wrong-headed or not, and practice a kind of "hygiene" that counteracts the messiness of uncontrolled growth. The evolution of language, she says, is actually a dynamic between opposing forces of conservation and innovation. While there is no "right" or "wrong" way to use language, Cameron suggests that language is enlivened by the push and pull between these opposing ideas.

To challenge the idea that standard English exists apart from the people who use it, she provides an account for how it comes into being, at least as she sees it among UK writers. And she challenges the confident trust we might have in the use of dictionaries as a measure of "correctness." Reading her analysis, you realize that dictionaries are part of a circular process that both reflects and determines usage.

Cameron extends her discussion of language with insightful and entertaining analyses of "political correctness," communication between genders, and the types of politically-inspired public hysteria that spring up around the schools' perceived failure to teach correct grammar. She even takes to task our confident acceptance of George Orwell's dictums in his often cited essay, "Politics and the English Language."

This is a book for anyone fascinated by not only the language of politics but the politics of language. Its ideas are argued thoughtfully and with considerable insight. As companions to this book I'd also recommend the books of American linguist Deborah Tannen ("You Just Don't Understand") and Simon Winchester's account of the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary, "The Professor and the Madman."

Verbmobil: Foundations of Speech-to-Speech Translation

This exceptionally readable (in English) account of the German Verbmobil project (1992-2000) is comprised of 47 contributions from the principal participants in the project. These contributions cover all aspects of this major effort in natural language processing under the headings:

- Introduction (Overview by editor) - From Speech Input to Augmented Word Lattices - Lexical and Syntactic Processing - Semantic Processing - Dialogue Translation - Dialogue Processing and Context Evaluation - Language Generation and Speech Synthesis - Data Collection and Evaluation - System Architecture and Software Integration.

The project culminated in a working prototype which allows bi-directional telephone dialogues in three discourse domains: Appointment Scheduling, Travel Planning and Remote PC Maintenance,- between German, Japanese and American-English speakers.

The work reported,

- represents the state of the art in Speaker-Independent Spontaneous Dialogue Recognition, Translation and Speech Synthesis, - provides quantitative data which illustrate the strength and weaknesses of symbolic and statistical approaches to translation in this context. - illuminates the tradeoffs in various approaches to deep linguistic analysis - illustrates the important role of acoustical and lexical data collection and processing. - gives insight into the interaction between the many modules as reflected in the detailed End-to-End evaluation of the system and its components - demonstrates the role of the underlying system and software architecture in providing both, a test-bed development environment and the basis for a near-real-time demonstration system. - reflects upon some of the management issues encountered in a project of this scope

The reported work includes a number of advances, including

- a speech controlled telephone dialogue system including speaker-language identification - integration of deep and shallow processing: results from concurrent translation threads. - systematic use of (multilingual) prosodic information at all processing stages, - Parsing, Dialog Understanding, Translation, Generation and Speech Synthesis - understanding of spontaneous speech repair - generation of dialogue summaries

The people responsible for editing this volume have raised the bar for technical writing. The result is an unusually lucid, concise and consistent exposition of work from several disciplines, generally only accessible to the specialists. Limiting the length of the individual contributions, has confined the reporting to what was accomplished in the course of the project., without compromising scientific rigor. If I have any criticism at all, it is the lack of a subject and author index and the occasional use of abbreviations not spelled out, at first use, within an article.

To those interested in speech recognition and machine translation, this is essential reading; - they'll be surprised to find it satisfying as well.

Those concerned with large-scale, distributed software development will find several new benchmarks in this project.

See also for a project overview. .

This book descrives all the changes, additions and modifications made in vhdl language in 1993. Every change/addition has it's own chapter, in which the author explains the rationale behind the change/addition and illustrates them with a few examples. A good book for ppl. who want to know all the differences between vhdl '87 and vhdl '93. The title is a sort of misnomer, as latest version of vhdl was finally balloted in '93, and hence is called vhdl '93 and not vhdl '92 !!

Recently bought and tread the book Vocabulary Myths by Keith S. Folse. The book is an excellent starting point for considering many of the current beliefs in second language acquisition. It provides practical advice based on research, much of it firsthand.