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Task-based Language Learning and Teaching explores the relationship between research, teaching and tasks and seeks to clarify the issues raised by recent work in this field. The book shows how research and task-based teaching can inform each other and illuminate the areas of task-based course design, methodology and testing.

Shortlisted for the Ben Warren Prize

Learners who cannot decode alphabetic script have been left out of the SLA research enterprise, at considerable cost to our understanding of the human capacity for language learning. This book offers research evidence documenting the significant impact of low literacy skill on adolescents' processing of oral L2 input and acquisition. Together with a large body of closely related research in cognitive psychology, the findings lead to a startling conclusion: language processing skills that have been assumed to be universal human traits appear instead to be a product of learners' experience with alphabetic print literacy.

This book provides a clear and accessible introduction to the main methods of analysing samples of learner language. It examines the theoretical and research bases for the different methods, and thereby serves as an introduction to the field of second language acquisition research.

One balmy Texas evening, widowed financier Ben Fosberg answers the door to two Homeland Security agents. From the minute he lets them in, his life spirals out of control. A businessman has been killed in a hit gone wrong and Ben's card is in the dead hitman's pocket. The agents have a thousand questions for which he has no answers, but the evidence is still piling up against him when a mysterious stranger, known as Pilgrim, snatches him away from the agents and sets them both on a dangerous journey. Pilgrim's boss has been abducted by a man to whom destroying Ben's life is merely a task for the day. Ben and Pilgrim flee across the US with a hoard of agents and killers on their trail. Ben is still mourning his wife, cruelly murdered two years ago on their honeymoon. He is about to get a

An overview of form-focused instruction as an option for second language grammar teaching. It combines theoretical concerns, classroom practices, and teacher education.

Key features
Addresses the role of form-focused instruction (FFI) in language acquisition theory, teaching, and learning.
Considers the influence of theory and research on FFI in teacher education.
Examines classroom applications of FFI.
Addresses questions asked by language teachers, and reports research from the vantage point of informing L2 pedagogy.
Contains contributions by leading practitioners and researchers in the field of SLA and teacher education.

This edited collection of empirical studies examines the link between interaction and second language learning. The studies provide readers with insights into a wide variety of issues at the centre of current research into the relationship between conversational interaction and second language learning outcomes.

Key features
Examines the benefits of interactional feedback, discusses the source of the positive outcomes of recasts and negotiations.
Explores the relationship between learners' perceptions and learning.
Investigates individual differences such as working memory and gender, and considers both social and cognitive factors in interaction-driven development.

Research into language learner strategies has the fundamental goal of improving the teaching and learning of second languages. This book explores the notion that the reason some learners of second languages excel and others struggle lies in what the learners themselves do-the strategies they bring to language learning and to language use.

Key features
Provides a unique and timely re-examination of key issues such as strategies in context, strategy instruction, and strategy research methods by numerous experts in the field.
Offers an invaluable overview of what is known from empirical research about listening, reading, speaking, writing, vocabulary, and grammar strategies.
Proposes a clear and focused research agenda for the next decades.

The Psychology of Second Language Acquisition offers a systematic and accessible overview of the main psychological areas and theories in order to keep abreast of the ongoing paradigm shift. Readers will find succinct and up-to-date descriptions of a wide range of psycholinguistic and neuropsychological topics such as language and the brain; neuroimaging and other research methods in psycholinguistics and brain research; non-nativist approaches to language acquisition; explicit/implicit learning and memory, procedural/declarative knowledge, and the automatization of language skills; learner characteristics, age effects, and the critical period hypothesis; and the psychological basis of language learning in educational contexts.

Winner Ben Warren Prize 2010

By drawing on multiple examples of realworld language learning situations, this book explores the subjective aspects of the language learning experience. The author encourages readers to consider language learning from new, diverse, and unique perspectives. The book analyses data from a variety of sources, including language memoirs, online data from language learners in chat rooms, and text messaging exchanges. In the analysis of this data, the book looks at:

* The relationship between symbolic form and the development of a multilingual subjectivity.
* Links with memory, emotion, and the imagination.
* The implications for language teaching pedagogy.

Winner MLA Kenneth W Mildenberger Prize

It's a cold November night, and DS Dennis Milne is waiting to kill three unarmed men. Cynical and jaded, Milne earns money on the side by doing what he does best: punishing the bad guys. But he's been set up. This time, instead of shooting drug dealers, he kills two customs officers and an accountant. The hunter has become the hunted. With his colleagues and his enemies closing in on him, Milne must use all of his skills, just to stay alive.

'We've got your daughter.' It's evening, you're back late from work - and the house is in darkness. You step inside, and the phone rings. You answer it - and your world turns upside down. Your fourteen-year-old daughter's been taken, and her kidnappers demand half a million pounds in cash. They give you 48 hours to raise the money, and warn you that if you call the police, she'll die. Trying desperately to remain calm, you realise that your husband - the man you married only two years previously - is also missing. But he can't be involved in your daughter's abduction. Or can he? As your nightmare begins, you can be certain of only two things: that you will do anything to get your daughter back alive - and that time is running out ...

Beck Hardin returns to his Texas hometown - and his estranged father - after the death of his wife leaves him with two children to raise. The town is still reeling from the murder of sixteen-year-old Heidi, whose father - Beck's old college friend - asks Beck to help him find Heidi's killer before the statute of limitations runs out. Meanwhile, Beck is pushed into becoming town Judge, and he makes some powerful enemies amongst the rich white landowners when he refuses to condone their treatment of the Mexican workers of the town. As events escalate, the landowners carefully plot their revenge...