Applied Languages Books

Great book, however we're using EclipseUML which seems to be more widely used now. It would be nice to be written with that program in mind. Also would be nice if it was converted to American English. Some analagies are hard to understand if you're not familiar with Brittish colloquialisms. Also, author uses Textio class to do outputs. Why not just use the System classes? Seems unnecessary to me and an extra level of confusion for beginners.

It is a good description of constraint programming. The book is very concise - I could read it in a couple of days. It helps to have some logic programming exposure although it is not required to understand the material. One can read the first two chapters and then jump straight to the particular application area that they are most interested in. For example, if you are interested in scheduling applications you could go straight to the scheduling chapter after reading the introduction.

There was some information that I wish was covered in the book but was not.

1. It would have helped to know which vendors and products support this language (OPL) and to what extent. 2. I would have liked to see a chapter on integrating OPL programs with programs written in procedural languages such as C/C++ because most real-world applications will not be written entirely in OPL. 3. There could have been one chapter or one example which illustrates how a problem can be expressed using constraints and how the same problem can be expressed in another language or using linear programming to illustrate the advantages of the language. 4. The explanation of how the run-time engine of the language works is sketchy. The book does cover how a user can guide the search space for a problem, but it would be better to explain how the default search mechanisms and heuristics work in greater detail.

In an attempt to develop a debate which in the TESOL world has had Robert Phillipson and Alastair Pennycook as notable contributors and which in the broader field of education can be traced back to Paolo Freire and earlier, Holliday seeks to go beyond questions directly related to the ever more efficient learning of English and interrogate practices, ideologies and discourses which he believes to be both morally questionable and educationally dubious. Despite what might be expected from the title he has relatively little to say about Jennifer Jenkins proposal to define a phonological core for English as an International Language - an English seen primarily as a lingua franca - and focuses instead on the teaching of English in a variety of international settings. His main themes are discourses which Other the student and the micropolitics of the classroom as well as an underlying unease about the meaning of culture.
By way of both methodology and interpretive framework he wisely chooses to ignore both Phillipson's vulgar Marxism and, frequent reverential tips of the hat towards it notwithstanding, Pennycook's dinner-party postmodernism too. Instead he has produced an ethnographic study based around reflections on his own years as a TESOL practitioner interwoven with and addressing comments from a range of e-mail informants in a variety of different countries. An autobiographical "thick-description" then, with a choral element, that aims to make certain reified practices and systems of thought answer for their effects in the classroom and beyond.
Culturism in general and a particular form of it that he describes as native-speakerism are the main targets of his critique. The former he defines as "...any thought or act which reduces a person to something less than she is according to an essentialist view of culture.", (p18) and the latter as

"...an established belief that 'native-speaker` teachers represent a 'Western culture' from which spring both the ideals of the English language and of English language teaching methodology." (p.6).

There is an acutely paradoxical element in a rejection of cultural essentialism based on an appeal for something that we essentially are to be respected. And such is the difficulty in avoiding thinking of the "Other" as being different from "Us" that Holliday himself sometimes falls prey to it when for example, (p.135) he uncritically mentions the existence of something called "the Chinese worldview".
That said, his portrait of the continued vigour of colonialist stereotypes in TESOL , in the form of the vigorous, modern, democratic, open-minded native-speaker struggling to teach the indolent, undemocratic student who is good at memorising but not at thinking for him or herself, is stingingly accurate. His reading of Foucault in the context of the micropolitics of the classroom - the U-shaped classroom as panopticon, the attempt to eliminate private speech by constant monitoring and the emphasis on the corrective aspects of pedagogy - also rings true. Furthermore, the parallels he sees between the use of realia in the classroom and the offering of trinkets to "savages" as well as the raised, slow, speaking voice of the teacher and the District Officer addressing a group of "natives" are very suggestive.
Much of what he has to say about native-speakerism is also right on the mark. Who can deny that the view that English belongs to a certain sort of native-speaker from a particular handful of countries, and that such native-speakers are uniquely equipped with certain knowledges that make them ideally suited to teach English, though under increasing attack, still holds sway in many situations where English is taught? It is also seems to be the case that there is a close relationship between the exaltation of the native-speaker and the continued vigour of certain colonialist attitudes mentioned in the previous paragraph.
The assault on native-speakerism is one of the book's strengths. However a number of issues are either passed over too lightly or ignored altogether. The view that "... language learning is owned by the student..." (p.63) is promoted but little thought is given to what we might say to students who, no doubt wrongly, prefer and seek out native-speaker teachers in preference to their - in many cases - better trained local colleagues whose mother tongue is not English. Might not such students just be looking for foreigners to teach them and not wish to make themselves the objects of native-speakerism? An interest in the exotic is not unique to English-speakers from certain developed nations.
And no mention at all is made of the fact that the most enthusiastic proponents of native-speakerism are often not native- speakers themselves. I refer to professional gatekeepers such as teacher-training college staff who, having achieved a close approximation to certain forms of native-speaker oral production themselves, go on to form a comprador class within their local profession and seek to impose similar standards of oral production on others, develop relations with the US and UK academies and publishing industries and make energetic efforts to stifle any suggestion that sum of human wisdom on English and the learning of it might be located anywhere but London or a few North American cities.
In place of native-speakerism and cultural essentialism Holliday (p.89) wants TESOL practitioners to presume that

"...autonomy is a universal unless there is evidence otherwise - and that if not immediately evident in student behaviour, that it may be because there is something preventing us from seeing it - thus treating people equally as people."

The essential moral thrust and central paradox -some may prefer the word contradiction - of Holliday's enterprise are visible here. He rightly condemns our tendency to view our students as little more than mouthpieces for certain aspects of their culture, thus stripping them of something of their humanity and individuality, while at the same time seeing, when we see it at all, our own cultural baggage as unproblematic. However, the laudable desire to let the Other simply be is predicated on the notion that he or she is always already just like us; autonomous, critical and wanting to learn on his or her own terms, a veritable Modern subject, if only we had the wit to see it.
Try as we might in TESOL no amount of theoretical tossing and turning seems to lull us into the sleep of unreason and get us away from what Habermas calls the "unfinished project of Modernity" and the questioning subject that it implies. Perhaps we ought to stop trying. Adrian Holliday's valuable book is a notable contribution to the progress of the project.

This collection of articles collected and edited by Terrence Odlin, covers some of the pressing questions in grammar instruction today. The topic I was researching wasn't covered in this book, so it wasn't so helpful for me, but a few of the articles are worth checking out. In particular, I found the article on using databases for researching the structure of grammar in use to be very fascinating. If you're thinking of getting this, be sure to check to see if it contains any relevant articles for your research. If it does, go ahead and pick it up. If not, you might want to find this in the library instead.

This "Festschrift" for Henry Widdowson is littered by contributions from the creme de la creme of applied linguistics. Claire Kramsch, for instanc,e writes about the relation between applied linguist and language teacher while N.S Prabhu explores concept and conduct in language theory and Alan Davies contributes to the native speaker debate. Other contributers include Yamuna Kachru, Braj Kachru, Joseph Bisong and Bernard Spolsky.

This book can be recommended to readers who would like to have an overview of the work of many well known linguistics in one volume.

I used this book when teaching the play to my ninth graders. It provided effective teaching materials and several options for how to implement them. These materials can form a comprehensive unit plan or be used, as I did, as suppliments. Consideration is given to understanding the characters and the languge of Shakespeare. Technology is considered and video options are given. Overall, this was a very useful book.

I am a big fan of MATLAB, and this is a good book, therefore, this book seems perfect for a Computational Sciences Survey course for undergraduates. Professionals, such as engineers or mathmematicians, can use this book to learn how easy it is to use Maple and MATLAB.

The topics are diverse, and are not systematic, which I consider to be a strength for this type of book. The writing is concise and direct.

The book is written primarily by Swiss and Czech authors; some minor grammer and puncuation errors exist and the references list many non-english titles. I think this is a strength: it is important to realize the international nature of Compuational Science.

Very basic, but quite useful for the mechanical engineers. It would be helpful, if you want to learn 'matlab' as a mechanical engineer.

This is a really technical and (obviously, by the title) linguistic explanation of the Spanish language. The author takes a very unorthodox slant on explaining Spanish. Once you get through the complexity of his explanations, you'll see how fascinating he really is. This book has offered me some new tools to use in class. If you're looking for this book, you're probably going to use it as you work on your masters at UNI...good luck!

A language proficiency interview (LPI) is where a person's speaking ability in a foreign language is assessed in a face-to-face interview with a native-level speaker. This book looks at how good a measure of speaking ability an LPI provides. It would primarily be useful to language testers, but would also be of interest to language teachers and researchers in second language acquisition. There are 14 papers by academic authors from a wide variety of disciplines. As there are no chapter summaries, the reader must plow through a lot of jargon to understand the issues and conclusions. Data are drawn from both native English speakers learning foreign languages and speakers of other languages studying English. The transripts show how difficult it is for testers to elicit and for students to produce a smooth flow of talk. Many of the contributors compare LPIs to natural conversation. Differences arise because the purpose of an LPI is to obtain a ratable sample of speech, not to hold a conversation: the tester largely controls the topics, who speaks and for how long. One author points out, however, that many interactions in English for non-native speakers also occur in interview-like situations. Some problems with LPIs are cultural. For example, in an interview in English the interviewees may provide short literal answers to questions because they do not realize that a question is an invitation to talk. In Korean, interviewees may not understand that spoken confirmation sequences, which would be unnecessary in English, help to establish the participants' status and power relationships. Two alternatives to LPIs are considered. One is the simulated oral proficiency interview, where students listen to and record their responses on tape. This is quicker and cheaper to administer than an LPI, but is of course less interactive and further removed from a conversation. The other alternative is for students to record their own conversation with a native-level speaker. While the writer lists the micro-skills that contribute to successful conversation, she has not worked out the rating scheme. "Talking and Testing" provides a comprehensive examination of the problems of language proficiency interviews and is an important text in the field of language testing. It will make you consider the meaning of what goes on in this kind of language test, whether you are the tester, testee, or an interested observer.