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This study draws on recent language acquisition research to present a language teaching programme based on the use of "prefabricated" language. The authors demonstrate that the unit of language they term "the lexical phase" can serve as a basis for both second and foreign language learning.

First Prize English-Speaking Union's Duke of Edinburgh Book Competition

This is an attempt to redraw the boundaries of foreign language study. It focuses attention on cultural knowledge not just as a necessary aspect of communicative competence right

Winner MLA Kenneth W Mildenberegr Prize

This book develops a rational approach to the teaching of language as communication, based on a careful consideration of the nature of language and of the language user's activities. It will stimulate all language teachers to investigate the ideas that inform their own practice.

Twelve-year-old Jamie Gabriel gets on his bike before dawn to deliver newspapers in his suburban neighbourhood. Somewhere en route, he vanishes without a trace. Fourteen months later, still with no sign of Jamie and having lost all faith in the police, his parents Paul and Carol are on the verge of abandoning hope. Then they meet private investigator Frank Behr, a tough, reclusive ex-cop. Abandoned by his former colleagues, separated from his wife and haunted by his own terrible past, Behr doesn't make it a practice to take on hopeless cases, but the desperate couple's plea for help awakens a personal pain he can't ignore.

Inspector Jian is a Chinese cop from the Siberian borders who thinks he's seen it all. But his search for his missing daughter brings him to the meanest streets he's ever faced - in rural England. Migrant worker Ding Ming is distressed - his gangmaster's making demands, he owes a lot of money to the snakeheads and no one will tell him where his wife has been taken. Maybe England isn't the 'gold mountain' he was promised. Two desperate men, uneasy allies in a baffling foreign land, are pitted against a band of ruthless criminals. There's Bad Traffic ahead.

This volume critically reviews the most prominent issues in language teaching today and relates them to general perspectives on the nature of language and of language teaching and learning.

The end of the world starts now ...Ancient wisdom predicts the end of the world with uncanny precision. But it also provided the key to staving off apocalypse: a flawless sapphire of incomparable beauty carved into the perfect likeness of a human skull. Hidden for four centuries, a crystal skull of exquisite beauty has just been found by Stella Cody, who also inherits its legacy of dark secrets, intrigue, and murder. Facing an increasingly implacable enemy, Stella and her lover, Kit, struggle to crack the code that hides the Skull's intended resting place. Their search takes them from the intellectual rigour of Cambridge University to the untamed wildness of England's prehistoric stone circles. But time is against them, and they have days - hours - left to uncover the secret

This volume provides a wide-ranging overview of the diverse issues in applied linguistics today. The contributors consider the relation of their own areas of enquiry both to professional practice and to the discipline as a whole.

Stumbling headlong into a passionate fling and an impromptu marriage to music star Trey, Maeve's life is about to change beyond recognition. Trey wants to whisk her off to his country house in North Carolina and Maeve follows him without a backward glance. But when she first lays eyes on her new home - a dilapidated old cabin in the middle of nowhere - she begins to feel uneasy. Nothing quite matches up to what she's been led to expect and, below the surface, a dark secret lies buried that has never been resolved. Too late, Maeve realizes that she is all alone in a strange country, sharing a life with a man she hardly knows ...

Myron screwed up. His job was to protect someone. He fell in love with that someone and then she died. End of story. So he's dropped out, left, run away to the Caribbean to escape his guilt. But now everything that he left behind has come back to haunt him. A friend is in trouble, murder trouble. The victim? One of his own clients. In order to help his friend, Myron must battle for her freedom - against her own wishes...

This study takes a perspective on the nature of poetry and follows it through to a proposal for teaching poetry. Its principles are then put into practice through a demonstration of classroom procedures using original poems writing.

This work represents a major statement of the current research being conducted on the learning of second languages from a sociocultural perspective. Specific topics covered include: L1 mediation in the acquisition of L2 grammar; and gestural mediation in a second language.