In order to add to the growing literature on the emotional lives and silences of adolescents, Bosacki (education, Brock U., Ontario) explores the crucial role silence plays in the adolescent school experience. She provides educators with ideas to integrate the concept of silence into their classrooms, and to address issues of self-growth, especiall.

Why are second language learners in Japan's universities so silent? This book investigates the perplexing but intriguing phenomenon of classroom silence and draws on ideas from psychology, sociolinguistics and anthropology to offer a unique insight into the reasons why some learners are either unable or unwilling to speak in a foreign language.

What is the state of that which is not spoken? This book presents empirical research related to the phenomenon of reticence in the second language classroom, connecting current knowledge and theoretical debates in language learning and acquisition. Why do language learners remain silent or exhibit reticence? In what ways can silence in the language learning classroom be justified? To what extent should learners employ or modify silence? Do quiet learners work more effectively with quiet or verbal learners? Looking at evidence from Australia, China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, the book presents research data on many internal and external forces that influence the silent mode of learning in contemporary education. This work gives the reader a chance to reflect more profoundly on cultural ways of learning languages.

In this first-hand study of the relationship of gender, ethnicity and the participation of children within an English-language teaching classroom, Julé re-assesses Lacan's approach to belonging with other theoretical approaches to gender and language, making use of case-study methods. She asks key questions: Are there observable tendencies in the way that boys and girls receive and use talk in the classroom? How might such tendencies be constructed or encouraged within an ESL classroom, where gender and ethnicity intersect in particular ways?

This collection of papers examines key ideas in cultural-historical approaches to children’s learning and development and the cultural and institutional conditions in which they occur. The collection is given coherence by a focus on the intellectual contributions made by Professor Mariane Hedegaard to understandings of children’s learning through the prism of the interplay of society, institution and person. She has significantly shaped the field through her scholarly consideration of foundational concepts and her creative attention to the fields of activity she studies. The book brings together examples of how these concepts have been employed and developed in a study of learning and development. The collection allows the contributing scholars to reveal their reactions to Hedegaard’s contributions in discussions of their own work in the field of children’s learning and the conditions in which it occurs.

Why are students silent? Using written reflections and interviews, Mary M. Reda examines students' perceptions of speaking and being silent in a first-year composition classroom, and explores how their teachers, classroom relationships, and their own sense of identity shape their decisions to speak or be silent. By challenging many firmly held beliefs about those quiet students in the back of the classroom, Between Speaking and Silence offers the new vision that silence is not necessarily problematic.

Eleven historical-ethnographic case studies examine the social and cultural projects of modern schools, and the contestations, dramatic and not, that emerge in and around and against them. These case studies, ranging from Taiwan to South Texas, build upon an original joining of anthropology, critical education theory, and cultural studies. The studies advance the concept of cultural production as a way of understanding the dynamics of power and identity formation underlying different forms of "education." Using the concept of the "educated person" as a culture-specific construct, the authors examine conflicts and points of convergence between cultural practices and knowledges that are produced in and out of schools.

This book identifies three types of influential forces that pose challenges to innovations: socio-cultural dynamics, teacher individuality, and local circumstances. It uses languages, cultural traits, and intellectual heritages in the Asia-Pacific region as an example to show the resistance to Western-based pedagogies due to disparities between the innovations and these local heritages. It reveals personal and professional values that teachers hold and how these values, while seemingly supporting creative ideologies, happen to prevent them from incorporating innovations in their practices. The book discusses how informal educational activities and services that a society possesses could impede pedagogical innovations. There is, therefore, a need for institutions and educators to develop a positive relationship between these phenomena and teaching innovations.

Within the complex process of second language acquisition there lies a highly variable component referred to as the silent period, during which some beginning second language learners may not willingly produce the target language. Silence in Second Language Learning claims that the silent period might represent a psychical event, a non-linguistic as well as a linguistic moment in the continuous process of identity formation and re-formation. Colette Granger calls on psychoanalytic concepts of anxiety, ambivalence, conflict and loss, and on language learning narratives, to undertake a theoretical dialogue with the learner as a being engaged in the psychical work of making, and re-making, an identity. Viewed in its entirety, this study takes the form of a kind of triangulation of three elements: the linguistically described phenomenon of the silent period; the psychoanalytically oriented problem of the making of the self; and the real and remembered experiences of individuals who live in the silent space between languages.

A magisterial narrative account of the creation and consumption of all forms of ‘culture’ across the European continent over the last two hundred years.