Once signed languages are recognized as natural human languages, a world of exploration opens up. Signed languages provide a powerful tool for investigating the nature of human language and language processing, the relation between cognition and language, and the neural organization of language.

Our species has been a maker and user of tools for over two million years, but "cognitive technology" began with language. Cognition is thinking, and thinking has been "distributed" for at least the two hundred millennia that we have been using speech to interact and collaborate, allowing us to do collectively far more than any of us could have done individually. The invention of writing six millennia ago and print six centuries ago has distributed cognition still more widely and quickly, among people as well as their texts.

 

The study of teacher cognition - what teachers think, know and believe - and of its relationship to teachers' classroom practices has become a key theme in the field of language teaching and teacher education. This new in paperback volume provides a timely discussion of the research which now exists on language teacher cognition.

Bilingualism in Development describes research on the intellectual development of bilingual children, showing how it is different from that of monolingual children. The focus is on preschool children, examining how they learn language, how they acquire literacy skills, and how they develop problem-solving ability in different domains. It is unique in that it assembles a wide range of research on children's development and interprets it within an analysis of how bilingualism affects that development. It is the only book to interpret this large research from a single theoretical perspective, leading to coherent conclusions

Conversation analysis is a methodology that originated over three decades ago as a sociolinguistic approach but has since been adopted by scholars in a variety of other areas, including applied linguistics and communication. It is of great utility in second language acquisition research for its demonstrations of how micro-moments of socially distributed cognition instantiated in conversational behavior contribute to observable changes in the participants' states of knowing and using a new language.