Understanding Sport Heritage

We recently published Heritage and Sport by Gregory Ramshaw. In this post the author explains why the book is needed.

Sport is undoubtedly part of our cultural heritage. As Canadian author Roy MacGregor once wrote “it is impossible to know a people until you know the game they play.” Sport heritage tells us much about our shared past, what we remember, and what we value today. Indeed, we see manifestations of sport heritage everywhere! Many communities erect statues and sculptures to their sporting heroes; cities use sports museums and halls of fame as anchors of tourism development; teams, clubs, and organizations regularly employ heritage-themed events and souvenirs; chants, cheers, and rituals at matches are often thought of as a kind of intangible heritage, while sporting stadia and venues are regularly provided heritage designation and protection.

Because of this growing interest in sport heritage, a book like Heritage and Sport could not be more timely. Although there have been other texts which look at elements of the sport heritage phenomenon – such as sport museums, or heritage-based sport tourism – this book is the first which examines the whole of sport heritage. In particular, the book looks at some new topics in sport heritage – such as marketing sport heritage, managing sport heritage, and intangible sport heritages – while also bringing new perspectives to more familiar topics such as sport heritage in the fields of museums, events, and tourism. As the sporting past becomes more a part of our present, it is imperative that we have a broad understanding of sport heritage.

One of the primary aims of this book is to provide the reader with a wide-ranging understanding of sport heritage. In many ways, it is a launching-pad for other investigations, understandings, and research. A reader might associate sport heritage with, say, historic stadia, a hall of fame, or perhaps with a specific sport. What this book helps to do is demonstrate that sport heritage includes these topics – but that it is so much more! If a student, for example, reads the chapter about existential sport heritage – understanding how sport heritage is related to both bloodlines as well as the practice and performance of sport heritage – she or he might think about this in their own culture and experience. Similarly, if a researcher or practitioner reads the chapter about heritage-based sporting events or sport heritage landscapes, it may help spur ideas for future research and development.

Sport heritage has become an integral part of both the sport and heritage landscape. It is hoped that Heritage and Sport will help others to explore this fascinating topic further!

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Sport Tourism Development by James Higham and Tom Hinch.

How Language, Religion and Society are Interconnected

We recently published Language Maintenance, Revival and Shift in the Sociology of Religion edited by Rajeshwari Vijay Pandharipande, Maya Khemlani David and Miriam Eisenstein Ebsworth. In this post the editors introduce us to their new book.

Language Maintenance, Revival and Shift in the Sociology of Religion is dedicated to the memory of two great minds, Tope Omoniyi and Joshua Fishman, who revealed to sociolinguists and sociologists the interconnectedness of language and religion. Inspired by their insights, we are proud to present this volume, which includes the work of scholars from different parts of the world, working on a range of languages and faiths.

One of the striking features of this volume is the authors’ use of multidisciplinary approaches and perspectives regarding the relationships between language, religion and society, which significantly enhances our understanding of the phenomena. The landscape of this collection covers a vast terrain of geographically and historically diverse societies across the globe with astonishing variation in their sociopolitical and religious conditions and their influence on the maintenance, revival and shift of languages.

Presenting rich, empirically validated data evaluated within sound theoretical frameworks, this volume will be a valuable resource for scholars who would like to discover local (culture and region-specific) as well as global (universal) determinants of the phenomena of maintenance, revival and shift of languages and religions in past and current social settings.

Readers can travel to diverse locations including Algeria, England, India, Israel, Malaysia, Nigeria, Singapore, Uganda and the United States to discover how religious traditions and practices impact the trajectory of languages such as Arabic, Hebrew, Malay, Mandarin, Pali, Portuguese, Punjabi, Sanskrit and Yoruba. They can explore the intersectionalities of language, religion, identity, policy, and history in societal and educational contexts through the research and interpretations of international scholars through this unique volume.

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Spirituality and English Language Teaching edited by Mary Shepard Wong and Ahmar Mahboob.

Imagine if the Future Was the Same as the Past…

This month we published The Future Past of Tourism edited by Ian Yeoman and Una McMahon-Beattie. In this post the editors explain how the book explores the connection between the future and the past.

“Those who wish to look into the future are well advised to concern themselves first with the past, where all things originate” said Homer. We believe that the future is a replication of the past. If this is the case, it should be possible to analyse the past in a scientific manner to inform the future. Hence, one might ask, how does the past shape the future?

Are overtourism and sustainability old, new or constant issues in the evolution of tourism?

The biggest concerns about the future of tourism today is the exponential growth of tourism and its effect on communities and the environment, therefore we have invented the word ‘overtourism’. But these concerns are not new. As Thomas Cook began to capitalise on the idea of package holidays and mass tourism, a number of people began to complain about the negative effects of tourism. European towns and countryside were seemingly overrun with tourists, and ‘ruined by the increase in guesthouses, pensions and restaurants’. Tourists took a carefree approach to flowers, fish and fowl; they tended to do what they liked, unless restrained by keepers and land managers. In 1861, in what has been called an early instance of the ‘ecological blight that tourism so often brings in its wake’, Thomas Cook became embroiled in the alleged shooting of an eagle by one of his tourists on Iona.

The seaside in Scotland was a magnet for increasing numbers of visitors, of all social classes. But while there was the collecting of shells and fossils, the raiding of rock pools for crabs and sea life, the cheerful use of the sands, there was little worry about the impact on the beaches. There was, however, concern over the impact of mass tourism at the seaside, in terms of the behaviour of the day-tripper and the excursion­ist. There were tensions over mixed bathing, over the use or non-use of the Sunday, over dress and language. There was occasional damage to property, and more regularly to public order. But there seems to have been no concern in Victorian times over the use of the sea or the condition of the beaches, although access to the seaside itself could provoke objections from local landowners. Bigger numbers did lead to concerns over amenities at the seaside resorts: there were real questions of water supply, sewage and sanitation for the swollen summer populations. The overloading of systems could lead to outbreaks of epidemic disease, e.g. the typhoid epidemic in Bournemouth in 1936, which was due to contaminated ice-cream and milk. But resort enteritis, or beach tummy, was a small price to pay for the pleasure of a summer break from the harshness of the urban environment.

Changing Society

Tourism has become democratised as a result of changes in society i.e. the industrial revolution. The industrial revolution was the catalyst for new forms of transport such as the steam train which enabled new tourists from the middle and working classes to travel further afield, marking the beginnings of mass tourism. Further technological developments in aviation, have meant tourists can travel further e.g. the Kangaroo route. This advancement in technologies was a game changer as the cost of aviation in real terms fell, making aviation not a form of luxury but a commodified product. As mass tourism created demand, so was born a new industry of infrastructure and supply, whether it was travel agents, airlines, hotels, destination planning or legislative frameworks. However, some things don’t change: the purpose of travel and why we go on holiday. Tourism is about adventure, connecting with family, mindfulness, relaxation, hedonism, enjoyment and culture. The motivation and behaviours stay the same. It’s just as the past moves into the future, the number of tourists has grown exponentially.

The Future

Right at the heart of The Future Past of Tourism is the concept that the future is just a re-occurrence of the past. What we have set out to do is identify the key turning points in tourism evolution in order to predict the future. In futures research, change is the constant from the past to the future. One of the roles of futures research is to model the development of society, looking for signs, social movements, technological advancement and signs of change at the point of evolution. This is what we have done. So, if you want to know what the future holds, read this book.

 

For more information about this book, please see our website. 

If you found this interesting, you might also like Histories, Meanings and Representations of the Modern Hotel by Kevin J. James.

To “Er” is Human: Combining and Expanding Approaches to Second Language Fluency

This month we published Fluency in L2 Learning and Use edited by Pekka Lintunen, Maarit Mutta and Pauliina Peltonen. In this post the editors explain what inspired them to put the book together.

We proudly announce that our edited volume Fluency in L2 Learning and Use has now been published! The volume has been on our minds for a few years, and it is now very exciting to see it in its final form. The idea for the volume came from our shared interests in second language fluency.

We had previously approached the topic from different perspectives and wanted to combine our forces to develop a comprehensive collection on the topic. We had noticed that various approaches had been used to investigate the same phenomenon and many researchers seemed to discuss the same themes without explicitly referring to fluency or using concepts from earlier fluency studies. Our volume now includes, for instance, sign language studies and translation assessment. The title of the volume, “Fluency in L2 Learning and Use” emerged from the observation that fluency as a concept can also be applied beyond the traditional second language learning, teaching and assessment contexts to characterizing second language use and learners that are gradually becoming users of the second language as their proficiency grows. We stress that to hesitate or search for words is natural and disfluent use of language is not automatically wrong: to “er” is human.

After the initial idea, we invited researchers from different fields to a workshop on second language fluency in November 2017. We challenged researchers to reconsider their earlier approaches to fluency-related features in L2 learning and use. The workshop helped us to understand each other’s perspectives and find common interests. Based on the workshop presentations and discussions, it became clear that we wanted to include both empirical studies on L2 fluency and review chapters mapping new openings into L2 fluency research in the volume. Now, about two years after the workshop, we can celebrate with the finished publication in our hands.

The book reflects our initial idea of an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary collection of approaches to fluency, which brings the different senses of fluency together and helps to refine the terms further. With this volume, we aim to show how much the field has expanded in recent years and open new avenues for fluency research to focus on in future.

We hope that readers will benefit from the empirical findings, theoretical definitions and methodological solutions presented in the volume. The volume will be of particular interest to students and researchers focusing on the teaching, learning or assessment of L2 fluency or fluent L2 use. In addition, the chapters provide valuable pedagogical and practical suggestions for teachers at all levels of education. We also hope that other professionals, such as translators and language assessment specialists, will find the volume useful.

Pekka Lintunen, Maarit Mutta and Pauliina Peltonen

For more information about this book please see our website.

Explaining Complexity and Dynamic Systems Theory (CDST)

This month we published Research Methods for Complexity Theory in Applied Linguistics by Phil Hiver and Ali H. Al-Hoorie. In this post the authors explain why their book is so important for complexity research.

What are the big questions that occupy researchers in the human and social sciences? Chances are that these questions share two key features. First, many social questions, from the minute level to the grand scale of things, are interconnected. Second, their optimal solutions are constantly changing over time. As the late theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking once said, the 21st century is likely to witness a general intellectual reorientation around a complex, interconnected, and dynamic view of the world, a view that is indeed sweeping through various human and social disciplines. And, if many of the major issues of our time are complex and systemic, they need to be approached with a corresponding shift in perception. One such approach is complexity and dynamic systems theory (CDST).

Of course, once we began to adopt a CDST understanding of language learning, development, and use in our work in applied linguistics, it seemed to us that everything straightforward was ruined. Like many others, we had happily operated on the assumption of a neatly ordered and simple world. We studied phenomena by breaking them up into smaller parts, drawing boundaries between those parts, and studying them separate from their environment and in isolation. It is no wonder that before long we ended up frustrated and puzzled as to why we were no closer to understanding and capturing reality than before. While embracing a CDST view promised to bring us closer to an approximation of this complex and dynamic reality, we quickly realized that there was very little guidance for the methods necessary to do this kind of research. Many sources of information were too abstract or conceptual, but also misleading (e.g. “qualitative data are inherently better for studying complex systems”); others were far too technical (e.g. “Lyapunov functions are scalar functions that can be used to measure asymptotic equilibrium in stochastic models”) and did not seem to lend themselves to the kinds of questions that concern us applied linguists.

Methods for doing CDST research did prove elusive at first. But with just a little more digging, we became convinced that certain existing research templates, techniques for data elicitation, and methods of analysis that have a firm complexity basis in other human and social domains did hold promise. This book is the result of that journey we took to learn about already well-established designs and methods for complexity research. Based on our search, and a healthy dose of trial and error, we set out to share a variety of methods for complexity research already in widespread use by social complexivists. In the end, this is the book that we wish we had when we set out nearly a decade ago to explore the issues and questions of interest to us in applied linguistics. We hope it will function like a road map in pointing the way forward to many others who are also interested in the interrelated and dynamic reality of the human and social world.

For more information about this book please see our website. 

If you found this interesting, you might also like Profiling Learner Language as a Dynamic System edited by ZhaoHong Han.

Chronotopicity: The Inseparability of Time and Space

This month we are publishing Chronotopic Identity Work: Sociolinguistic Analyses of Cultural and Linguistic Phenomena in Time and Space edited by Sjaak Kroon and Jos Swanenberg. In this post the editors discuss how their book explores the concept of chronotopicity.

How often have you encountered a colleague, for instance at an international sociolinguistics conference, who started talking to you about Bakhtin? And how often did you subsequently engage in a somewhat vague and not very satisfying discussion about some of Bakhtin’s central concepts like heteroglossia or chronotopicity?

Over the last few years, chronotopicity has received renewed attention, not only in the field of literary studies where Bakhtin coined it, but also in other scientific fields. The inseparability of time and space also applies to, for example, social interaction and recently several scholars have shed new light on the possible contributions of the concept of chronotopicity to theorizing in sociolinguistics. This almost automatically led to questions on whether and how the concept could be used in empirical, mainly ethnographically-oriented sociolinguistic research.

In our edited volume Chronotopic Identity Work, we attempt to bring together a variety of empirical studies that put some flesh on the bones of the rather abstract chronotopic theorizing as presented thus far in the field of sociolinguistics. By doing so, we aim to show how Bakhtin’s concept of chronotopicity can be used for unraveling the intricate relationships between language, culture and identity in an era of globalization, digitalization and superdiversity.

Our cooperation with colleagues who agreed to face the challenge of using chronotopicity as a central concept in their research has taken us to:

• young adults in Mongolia interacting on Facebook through mixed and inverted language practices;
• fame-seeking identity plays by so-called baifumei (white, rich, beautiful, young women), within the Chinese ‘attention economy’;
• changes in picturing bureaucratic personhood through descriptions with deictics in local newspapers in Indonesia;
• touristic entertainment in a former traditional rural neighborhood in China;
• the commodification of cultural heritage and identity work in an ethnic minority community in Enshi, China;
• navigations of teachers and students between different language regimes in a multicultural school in Denmark;
• normative behavior and attitudes regarding different language resources in and around school situations in the Netherlands;
• the construction and meaning of Polish identity in an immigrant community in a superdiverse neighborhood in Belgium.

We think this collection of sociolinguistic analyses through the lens of chronotopicity clearly illustrates how the concept can be used in empirical research and how it contributes to the understanding of identity work in relation to the context of time and space.

Sjaak Kroon and Jos Swanenberg

Department of Culture Studies & Babylon, Center for the Study of Superdiversity, Tilburg University (The Netherlands)

a.p.c.swanenberg@uvt.nl

 

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Multilingualism, (Im)mobilities and Spaces of Belonging edited by Kristine Horner and Jennifer Dailey-O’Cain.

New Ways of Looking at Language Learning Motivation

This month we published Contemporary Language Motivation Theory: 60 Years Since Gardner and Lambert (1959) edited by Ali H. Al-Hoorie and Peter D. MacIntyre. In this post the editors explain how the idea for the book came about.

The idea behind this book was born during the second Psychology of Language Learning conference (PLL2) in Jyväskylä, Finland. At the conference, which took place in August 2016, Ali and Peter realized that the 60th anniversary of the seminal paper by Gardner and Lambert (1959) entitled “Motivational variables in second language acquisition” (Canadian Journal of Psychology, 13, 266-272) was on the horizon. That 1959 paper was brief, only seven pages in length, but it is one of the most influential papers in applied linguistics because it helped establish motivation as a valuable subject for study, on par with aptitude.

At the PLL2 conference we were able to approach several potential authors to invite them to join this project. To our delight, we received a favorable response from everyone we spoke with, and they encouraged us to go ahead with the project. People appreciate the impact that Robert Gardner, the Father of second language motivation, has had on our field.

While still at the conference, we also approached Laura at the Multilingual Matters desk to pitch this idea. As always, she offered all necessary assistance and encouragement to speed up the process and complete the paperwork and other preparations. The project was born!

Now, as the physical copy of the book comes into our hands, the project has reached a milestone. We hope that it will inspire new ways of looking at language learning motivation in the Gardner tradition. There seems to be a resurgence of interest in all things motivational just now, so perhaps this is coming at the best possible time to inspire new research with a strong connection to well-established theory, methods, and findings. That Gardner’s contribution to all three areas has been sustained over some 60 years is a notable achievement – worth celebrating, and worth continuing.

We think it is worth carrying on the work of looking at the social psychology of motivation for language learning, and the new book suggests a number of exciting new directions for those studies to take. Maybe we will need a 70th anniversary edition as well.

 

For more information about this book please see our website. 

If you found this interesting, you might also like Motivational Dynamics in Language Learning edited by Zoltán Dörnyei, Peter D. MacIntyre and Alastair Henry.

The 1963 Coral Way Bilingual Program: Looking to the Past and Moving into the Future

This month we published The Coral Way Bilingual Program by Maria R. Coady. In this post the author explains how the book came together.

Among bilingual educators in the US, the name “Coral Way” is a virtual household word. Whenever scholars think about the start of dual language programs, they accurately cite the Coral Way School and its contributions to the field. Yet few know the real stories, people, and energy that went into opening the country’s first publicly funded dual language program – referred to in 1963 simply as “the bilingual program.” This book changes that.

In 2017, I began to read and revisit the early work by Dr. Richard Ruiz and Bess de Farber at the University of Arizona, who collected archival data and oral histories from former teachers, students, and “Cuban Aides” at Coral Way Elementary. An under-examined archive was housed there, but few in our field knew about it.

Coral Way School in 1963

Next I dug deep into archives that hadn’t yet been examined. I unearthed the sole dissertation on Coral Way students from 1968 by Dr. Mabel Richardson. I examined memos, notes, reports and grant applications archived in New York at the Rockefeller Dimes Archive Center on the Ford Foundation. I collected new oral histories from Coral Way teachers and students who participated in the program between 1961 and 1968. The story of Coral Way came more clearly into focus.

The journey I undertook led me across the US and Europe, to newspapers and obituaries, and to academic journals from the 1960s to today. I was astonished that the voices of our antecedents – our bilingual educator roots – remained virtually absent from current conversations, accomplishments, and challenges in bilingual education.

My goal in writing The Coral Way Bilingual Program was not only to document a legacy but, more importantly, to carry the stories of our past into the present and future. I hope this book is a start to connecting these places in time and to advancing our knowledge on behalf of bilingual and multilingual students and families.

 

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Profiles of Dual Language Education in the 21st Century edited by M. Beatriz Arias and Molly Fee.

Multilingualism – An Asset or A Threat?

We recently published Multilingualism, (Im)mobilities and Spaces of Belonging edited by Kristine Horner and Jennifer Dailey-O’Cain. In this post the editors explain the themes covered in the book.

Like many others in our profession, the two of us are highly mobile people. Each of us changed countries in order to take up our current academic positions – Kristine commutes between the small European country of Luxembourg and the UK, and Jennie relocated from the United States to Canada – and of course our work as linguists is full of regular trips both of the “long-haul” and “short hop” variety.

Even as much of the world we live in considers this kind of mobility of privileged white professional academics as unremarkable, though, the mobility of other kinds of people – such as those from the global South – is often considered far more problematic. While some of us can claim the right to call ourselves “skilled worker immigrants” or even “expats” (a term that conjures up a sort of glamorous yet highly temporary “just passing through” lifestyle), others are dismissed by the societies we live in as “foreign workers” or “migrants”.

It is not all that different with multilingualism. Some forms of it are regarded as an asset or even as an essential skill (such as learning English or French in school and making use of those languages in an eventual work setting), while others can often be deemed problematic or even threatening to national unity. In the end, whether language is a resource, a barrier, or even a site of struggle will tend to come down to who you are, which languages you speak, and especially which contexts you are trying to use those languages in.

Our new book is about what mobility means in different circumstances, some of the different ways that language plays a role in those situations, and how complex social processes play a role in how these occasions and uses of language in those instances are perceived. In addition to our introduction, it includes nine previously unpublished research papers based on fieldwork in Africa, Asia, Australasia and Europe, and three insightful commentaries from experienced researchers that help tie the different papers together. Before publication, many of the contributing authors had the opportunity to discuss work in progress at workshops in Sheffield, England and Cape Town, South Africa. These meetings led to thought-provoking discussions that led us to reflect further on our positionality as scholars. This process was pivotal to the development of the book.

Divided into three thematic sections, the book explores the contestation of spaces and the notion of borders, examines the ways that heritage and authenticity are linked or challenged, and interrogates the intersections between mobility and hierarchies as well as the ways that language can be linked to issues of belonging. We believe that future research will benefit from connecting scholarship in sociolinguistics more closely to scholarship in migration studies and globalization studies. This book is a step along this pathway.

 

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Sociolinguistic Perspectives on Migration Control edited by Markus Rheindorf and Ruth Wodak.

Are Spanish L1 Users More Direct than English L1 Users in the Workplace?

We recently published Exploring Politeness in Business Emails by Vera Freytag. In this post the author explains what inspired her to write the book.

For several decades, there has been the view in cross-cultural pragmatics that Spanish L1 users reveal a higher level of directness than English L1 users, irrespective of a particular language variety. This view was established and reconfirmed in a wide range of comparative studies by means of data elicitation methods such as the Discourse Completion Task.

Having lived in both language cultures for some time and worked with both English and Spanish L1 users, I was increasingly interested in the question of whether directness and politeness are language-dependent dimensions and to what extent contextual factors play a role in one’s use of linguistic strategies and their perception in terms of directness and politeness. Specifically in the workplace context, does it matter if the sender and recipient know each other well? Does it matter whether the sender is of higher, lower or equal hierarchical status compared to the recipient? Does the communication channel matter? Does it matter whether the sender and recipient are of the same or opposite sex?

When I was given the chance to collect 600 English and Spanish business emails of a Community of Practice that I had worked for for six months, I was excited to immerse myself in this email corpus and investigate the contextual complexities that underlie the event of writing email directives. During the time of data analysis and the challenging task of finding explanations for my – partially unexpected – findings, I soon learned that there are many more factors apart from language that appear to influence the choice and perception of a particular directive strategy. I also learned that the complexity of language use and perception can only be examined through a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods both with regard to the collection and interpretation of the data.

Finally, the book reflects my attempt to shed some light on the interdependencies of language and culture in computer-mediated workplace directives and aims to contribute to the field of cross-cultural pragmatics by providing new insights.

 

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Objects, Bodies and Work Practice edited by Dennis Day and Johannes Wagner.