World Languages: Welcome

This is the complete beginning-level course for spoken Mandarin Chinese designed to have you speaking quickly and accurately! TheBasic Mandarin Chinese series offers a complete introductory Chinese language course specifically designed for native English speakers. These books teach spoken and written Chinese separately, allowing you to focus on the area most important to you, and to learn the spoken and written forms of Chinese at different speeds depending on your available time and interest. The free audio and video recordings included with this book reinforce the content and make the learning process easy. Whether you're learning Mandarin for work, travel or other reasons--theBasic Mandarin Chinese approach of having two separate but integrated "tracks" helps you to learn the language more efficiently and more successfully. Key features of this Chinese textbook and discs include: Clear and detailed pronunciation, grammar and cultural explanations Exercises and activities based on real-life experiences in China Hours of video recordings filmed on location featuring dozens of native speakers in various parts of China and beyond Six hours of native-speaker audio recordings for all the book's dialogues and exercises Special software allowing you to interact with the recordings. This Mandarin textbook is designed to be used with its separately available workbook,Basic Mandarin Chinese--Speaking & Listening Practice Book which provides a range of drills and exercises designed to dramatically enhance your spoken proficiency and improve your Chinese language skills. This book is a new edition ofBasic Spoken Chinese.

The Dictionary of Louisiana French (DLF) provides the richest inventory of French vocabulary in Louisiana and reflects precisely the speech of the period from 1930 to the present. This dictionary describes the current usage of French-speaking peoples in the five broad regions of South Louisiana: the coastal marshes, the banks of the Mississippi River, the central area, the north, and the western prairie. Data were collected during interviews from at least five persons in each of twenty-four areas in these regions. In addition to the data collected from fieldwork, the dictionary contains material compiled from existing lexical inventories, from texts published after 1930, and from archival recordings. The new authoritative resource, the DLF not only contains the largest number of words and expressions but also provides the most complete information available for each entry. Entries include the word in the conventional French spelling, the pronunciation (including attested variants), the part of speech classification, the English equivalent, and the word's use in common phrases. The DLF features a wealth of illustrative examples derived from fieldwork and textual sources and identification of the parish where the entry was collected or the source from which it was compiled. An English-to-Louisiana French index enables readers to find out how particular notions would be expressed in la Louisiane.

The Language Teachers's Portfolio: A Guide for Professional Development is written for use by both preservice and inservice teachers. It links elements of educational practice and theory that students of education frequently find difficult to assimilate in language teaching. This text purposefully integrates material such as foundations of education, educational psychology, elements of planning and lesson preparation, reflective teaching, and classroom management issues into the reality of the language classroom. Thus, students of world language education are provided a holistic perspective of the challenges required to bring what may seem to be disjointed theoretical information into workable elements of classroom practice. Teacher educators can utilize this text to guide students to use the portfolio as an assessment tool or a project for an instructional development class. The material in te text is designed so that students are able to rely on the text to guide them in preparing many elements of a portfolio, thus freeing educators to devote more classroom time to other topics. It is also useful for programs that have a portfolio as an exit requirement and for teachers who plan to use the portfolio to document their professional development.

Swahili was once an obscure dialect of an East African Bantu language. Today more than one hundred million people use it: Swahili is to eastern and central Africa what English is to the world. From its embrace in the 1960s by the black freedom movement in the United States to its adoption in 2004 as the African Union's official language, Swahili has become a truly international language. How this came about and why, of all African languages, it happened only to Swahili is the story that John M. Mugane sets out to explore. The remarkable adaptability of Swahili has allowed Africans and others to tailor the language to their needs, extending its influence far beyond its place of origin. Its symbolic as well as its practical power has evolved from its status as a language of contact among diverse cultures, even as it embodies the history of communities in eastern and central Africa and throughout the Indian Ocean world. The Story of Swahili calls for a reevaluation of the widespread assumption that cultural superiority, military conquest, and economic dominance determine a language's prosperity. This sweeping history gives a vibrant, living language its due, highlighting its nimbleness from its beginnings to its place today in the fast-changing world of global communication.