Ecological Perspectives in Early Language Education PDF Download

Author: Mila Schwartz
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1003831362
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
This book presents ecological perspectives towards early language education that conceptualise the phenomenon of interactions between child language-based agency, teachers’ agency, peers’ agency and parents’ agency, consequently furthering insights into the lives of young children growing up in multilingual homes. Drawing on rich empirical research evidence, the book explores teachers’ and family strategies and practices aimed at enhancing children’s interest in home language maintenance and enrichment as well as in the novel language learning. It defines early language education as the education of children up to the age of 6 and considers international evidence of children’s language from diverse sociolinguistic backgrounds and indigenous, endangered, heritage, regional, minority, majority, and marginalized languages, as well as foreign and second languages in education at home and out-of-home settings. It claims that only through collaboration between teachers, families, peers, and close environment, can the child be engaged in early language learning and fully experience his or her potential to act as agent in a novel language learning. The book will be of great interest to researchers, academics, and postgraduate students in the fields of language education, multilingualism, applied linguistics, and early childhood education. Practitioners in these fields may also find the volume a valuable resource.

Author: Leo van Lier
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1402079125
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
In this book I try to give a coherent and consistent overview of what an ecological approach to language learning might look like. This is not a fully fledged grand theory that aims to provide an explanation of everything, but an attempt to provide a rationale for taking an ecological world view and applying it to language education, which I regard as one of the most important of all human activities. Goethe once said that everything has been thought of before, but that the difficulty is to think of it again. The same certainly is true of the present effort. If it has any innovative ideas to offer, these lie in a novel combination of thoughts and ideas that have been around for a long, long time. The reader will encounter influences that range from Spinoza to Bakhtin and from Vygotsky to Halliday. The scope of the work is intentionally broad, covering all major themes that are part of the language learning process and the language teaching profession. These themes include language, perception and action, self, learning, critical pedagogy and research. At the same time I have attempted to look at both the macro and the micro sides of the ecological coin, and address issues from both a theoretical and a practical perspective. This, then, aims to be a book that can be read by practitioners and theoreticians alike, and the main idea is that it should be readable and challenging at the same time.

Author: Claire Kramsch
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0826425992
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
'This is an outstanding collection of papers by top scholars in a range of disciplines who shed stimulating, complementary insights into the social, cognitive and semiotic frameworks that shape both the acquisition of language, and the constitution of social actors through that process. The intentionally loose ecological framing of the volume provides an arena within which a range of perspectives, all united by their opposition to a mechanistic view of language acquisition, can enter into dialogue with each other. This is a most stimulating collection, with a range of insightful investigations of settings as diverse as an autistic child learning to interact with others on the playing field, professional gate-keeping encounters, and foreign language classrooms.' Professor Charles Goodwin, University of California at Los Angeles The book brings together well-known scholars in two relatively distinct fields, language acquisition and language socialization, and from a variety of orientations within applied linguistics to describe language development from a relational perspective. The papers in this volume are a response to three main questions: 1) What conceptual models best capture the ecological nature of language learning? 2) What research approaches are best likely to illuminate the relationship between language and social structure? 3) How is educational success defined for language acquisition and language socialization?

Author: Anthony D. Pellegrini
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 041515393X
Category : Early childhood education
Languages : en
Pages : 190

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Book Description
Based on a longitudinal study in U.S. homes and schools, the authors present the results of how diverse and close social relationships influence children's literacy learning as they progress through the first three years of formal schooling.

Author: Mila Schwartz
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030916626
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 939

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Book Description
This is the first international and interdisciplinary handbook to offer a comprehensive and an in-depth overview of findings from contemporary research, theory, and practice in early childhood language education in various parts of the world and with different populations. The contributions by leading scholars and practitioners are structured to give a survey of the topic, highlight its importance, and provide a critical stance. The book covers preschool ages, and looks at children belonging to diverse ethno-linguistic groups and experiencing different histories and pathways of their socio-linguistic and socio-cultural development and early education. The languages under the scope of this handbook are identified by the contributors as immigrant languages, indigenous, endangered, heritage, regional, minority, majority, and marginalized, as well as foreign and second languages, all of which are discussed in relation to early language education as the key concept of the handbook. In this volume, “early language education” will refer to any kind of setting, both formal and informal (e.g. nursery, kindergarten, early childhood education centers, complementary early schooling etc.) in which language learning within a context of children's sociolinguistic diversity takes place before elementary school.

Author: Phil Benson
Publisher: Multilingual Matters
ISBN: 1788924924
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 165

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Book Description
This book is the first in-depth examination of the application of theories of space to issues of second language learning. The author introduces the work of key thinkers on the theory of space and place and the relevance of their ideas to second language acquisition (SLA). He also outlines a new conceptual framework and set of terms for researching SLA that centre on the idea of 'language learning environments'. The book considers the spatial contexts in which language learning takes place and investigates how these spatial contexts are transformed into individualised language learning environments, as learners engage with a range of human and nonhuman, and physical and nonphysical, resources in their daily lives. Revisiting linguistics and language learning theory from a spatial perspective, the book demonstrates that the question of where people learn languages is equally as important as that of how they do so. This work is essential reading for any researcher wishing to research the role of the environment as an active player in SLA.

Author: Anthony Pellegrini
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351236245
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 190

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Book Description
Originally published in 1998. This book presents a model of social-contextual influences on children’s literacy and literate language. Literate language is similar to the language teachers use and to the language used in reading books for young children. Based on a longitudinal study in homes and schools, the authors here present the results of how diverse and close social relationships influence children’s literacy learning as they progress through the first three years of formal schooling, and discuss implications for teaching practice. Different types of reading matter in the home are examined and it is suggested that peers are helpful to the learning of literacy. Rather than separate friends as often happens in the classroom, this book suggest that interaction should be encouraged. It will be of interest to researchers and students of developmental and educational psychology, and to anyone interested in early cognitive and social development.

Author: Subhan Zein
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030762513
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description
This volume analyses the policymaking, expectations, implementation, progress, and outcomes of early language learning in various education policy contexts worldwide. The contributors to the volume are international researchers specialising in language policy and early language learning and their contributions aim to advance scholarship on early language learning policies and inform policymaking at the global level. The languages considered include learning English as a second language in primary schools in Japan, Mexico, Serbia, Argentina, and Tanzania; Spanish language education in the US and Australia; Arabic as a second language in Israel and Bangladesh; Chinese in South America and Oceania; and finally, early German teaching and learning in France and the UK.

Author: Erika Piazzoli
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040002668
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description
This book investigates the use of performative language pedagogy in working with refugees and migrants, exploring performative language teaching as the application of drama, music, dance and storytelling to second language acquisition. Documenting a community-based project – funded by the Irish Research Council and conducted with three groups of refugees and migrants in Ireland and Italy – the book explores the methodological, pedagogical and ethical elements of performative language learning in the context of migration. Written by a team of arts-based researchers and practitioners, chapters discuss findings from the project that relate to factors such as embodied research methods, a motivation to belong and the ethical imagination, while exhibiting how performative language pedagogy can be effective in supporting children and adults in a range of challenging contexts. Offering a poetic and pictorial representation of the Sorgente Project, this book will be of interest to postgraduate students, researchers and academics in the fields of English language arts and literacy education, drama in education, the sociology of education and second language acquisition more broadly. Those working in refugee and migrant studies, and teacher education studies will also find the volume of use.

Author: Eleanor J. Gibson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780195347395
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
The essential nature of learning is primarily thought of as a verbal process or function, but this notion conveys that pre-linguistic infants do not learn. Far from being "blank slates" that passively absorb environmental stimuli, infants are active learners who perceptually engage their environments and extract information from them before language is available. The ecological approach to perceiving-defined as "a theory about perceiving by active creatures who look and listen and move around"-was spearheaded by Eleanor and James Gibson in the 1950s and culminated in James Gibson's last book in 1979. Until now, no comprehensive theoretical statement of ecological development has been published since Eleanor Gibson's Principles of Perceptual Learning and Development (1969). In An Ecological Approach to Perceptual Learning and Development, distinguished experimental psychologists Eleanor J. Gibson and Anne D. Pick provide a unique theoretical framework for the ecological approach to understanding perceptual learning and development. Perception, in accordance with James Gibson's views, entails a reciprocal relationship between a person and his or her environment: The environment provides resources and opportunities for the person, and the person gets information from and acts on the environment. The concept of affordance is central to this idea; the person acts on what the environment affords, as it is appropriate. This extraordinary volume covers the development of perception in detail from birth through toddlerhood, beginning with the development of communication, going on to perceiving and acting on objects, and then to locomotion. It is more than a presentation of facts about perception as it develops. It outlines the ecological approach and shows how it underlies "higher" cognitive processes, such as concept formation, as well as discovery of the basic affordances of the environment. This impressive work should serve as the capstone for Eleanor J. Gibson's distinguished career as a developmental and experimental psychologist.