Practical wisdom is caring understanding of the good in the situations of a human life. Our emotions are rational to the extent that we care about the real good and are truthful about the facts. The two main kinds of virtues – the virtues of caring and the enkratic virtues – embody different aspects of practical wisdom. On the one side, in compassion, generosity, justice, and sense of duty, we care about and understand our good in its varieties and aspects. On the other side, we know about and know our practical way around ourselves, our shortcomings and the ways they may be mitigated and repaired by use of courage, patience, perseverance, and self-control. The virtues of caring form a coherent ensemble and overall picture of the good, a practical wisdom by which we see our situations in the perspective of a whole life.

After briefly touching upon the relevance of online communication to language learning and the learning of grammar in today’s world, the chapter opens with an introduction to the theoretical and historical background of grammar teaching. It then moves on to introduce some of the more popular and accessible forms of technology-based grammar instruction, elucidating how each one ties in with grammar teaching principles and pedagogical practices. Following this, relevant research practices are introduced, followed by recommendations for research and practice. The chapter ends with predictions for the future of technology-enhanced grammar teaching and learning.

Describe the challenges children face in learning language; understand key features of child language development; explain the strategies children use to learn sounds, words, and grammar.

Grammar has historically been an important component of language and literacy education. It has been understood and defined in various ways, depending on the different linguistic perspectives throughout history. This chapter discusses two main historical perspectives on grammar: traditional grammar and functional grammar. Both implicitly and explicitly underpin the Australian Curriculum: English. The metalanguage and concepts used in the Curriculum and the National Literacy Learning Progression are a combination of traditional and functional grammar terms. Many traditional grammar terms (e.g. nouns, verbs, subject-verb-object) are used alongside functional grammar terms (e.g. participants, processes, circumstances, noun groups, verb groups) to describe sentence-level components, but functional grammar terms are mostly used to describe text-level components. Therefore, it is crucial for pre-service and in-service teachers to be equipped with explicit knowledge of these two grammar traditions to be able to teach in contemporary English classrooms.

Our goal in writing this book was to address a notable gap in the availability of essential resources dedicated to this critical content area. Despite its foundational importance, no existing text offers a focused, in-depth exploration of language and literacy knowledge tailored for pre-service and in-service teachers working in Foundation to Year 10. The 2008 Bradley Review highlighted a deficiency in teachers’ language and literacy awareness and proficiency, a concern that was addressed by the introduction of the Literacy and Numeracy Test for Initial Teacher Education Students (LANTITE) in 2016. Consequently, initial teacher education programs have initiated courses and support services in English language and literacy to bolster teachers’ personal knowledge and skills, enabling them to pass the LANTITE’s literacy component.

The third chapter builds on an increase in Arabic manuscript circulation from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries in the Deccan to demonstrate how Arabic philology became a significant intellectual pursuit for a growing learned community. My research on manuscript notes traces textual practices and how they changed over time, and how this contributed to a localisation of Arabic learning across the multilingual landscape of the subcontinent. It zooms in on scholar-scribes, copyist-scribes, and owners of manuscripts. It highlights ‘definitive texts’ in the fields of Arabic grammar, rhetoric, and lexicography and what we know about their circulation across the Deccan and beyond based on two manuscript collections from Hyderabad, and the Bijapur collection. Book exchanges and the emergence of ‘commonplace notebooks’ as a multi-layered intertextual product of intellectual engagements with a scholarly text make plain the social and cultural dynamisms of this field of learning. The formation of cultural tastes in Arabic philology, new studying enactments of manuscripts, and a socially more diverse community shaped the significances of reading and writing Arabic in South Asia.

This chapter establishes what it means to do discourse analysis. This is done by defining discourse analysis and providing examples of discourse. The chapter offers a practical overview of how the discourse in discourse analysis fits within the research process. The examples of discourse that are introduced in this chapter are grammar, actions and practices, identities, places and spaces, stories, ideologies, and social structures. After reading the chapter, readers will know what discourse analysis is; understand that there are many types of discourse; know that discourse is an object of study; and understand how an object of study fits within a research project.

The goal of this chapter is to guide the reader interested in grammar in interaction through the entire research process, beginning with how to find a researchable phenomenon and culminating in how to reveal the larger significance of research findings on grammar. We focus primarily on grammatical phenomena that are morphosyntactic in nature but include discussion of how prosodic-phonetic and embodied practices can impact the exploration of morphosyntactic phenomena. We begin by addressing some of the multiple sources of inspiration for a new research project on grammar, including starting with an observation in the data, or with an observation from the linguistic literature, or with an observation from the CA/IL literature on a different language. We then explore how to delimit the phenomenon chosen and how to build a collection of pertinent instances. Finally, we turn to issues of analyzing the collection and constructing an argument, with a final discussion of how to probe the theoretical significance of grammatical findings. In conclusion, we note that because of its orderliness, grammar in general as well as language-specific grammatical practices contribute to establishing and maintaining the social order.

This chapter deals with the methodological procedures of a CA study by tracking the development of a collection of instances of a multimodal practice and its variants. We describe the development of a study of the use of the German formats darf/kann ich…? (‘may/can I…?’; Deppermann & Gubina, 2021). Requesters use this format to ask if they may/can perform some embodied action while already starting or even fully performing it before the requestee’s confirmation. We first describe the process of sampling candidate cases to create a collection allowing us to identify a certain practice. Second, we describe how we analyzed (i) the time course of embodied action and its relationship to participants’ talk, (ii) the relationship the linguistic turn format, the sequential position and the multimodal context of the turn, and (iii) the relationship between situated action formation, linguistic design, action types, and interactional properties of a practice. Finally, we stress the importance of applying various strategies of comparative analysis and analytic induction to a larger dataset. We also discuss attending to the multimodal formation of social action on the basis of video data and multimodal transcripts is crucial for our understanding and analysis of face-to-face interaction.

The didactic poems of Niketas of Herakleia chiefly concern grammar and are written in various metres, all of them accentual, even including hymnographic metres. Rather than being mere reformulations of existing grammatical knowledge, the poems urge us to consider questions related to contemporary teaching practices. How does verse help to transmit knowledge, and which roles do accentual rhythm and musical heirmos play in this process? Issues of performance, audience and patronage are of undeniable importance for this question. The poems reflect a lively (sometimes unruly) classroom situation and an equally lively competition between teachers in Constantinople. Especially Niketas’ remarks on schedography reflect this competitive teaching field. Thus, the poems of this versatile author may explain why grammar became in the twelfth century an object to be reflected upon, reformulated, debated and even aestheticized. The chapter also situates Niketas in the literary tradition of didactic poetry. How does he, as a poet, at the same time represent himself as an able teacher and expert? And how does he combine poetic form and avowedly dry subject matter?

This chapter explores the topics and didactic strategies involved in teaching grammar through poetry in twelfth-century Byzantium by taking the prolific grammarian John Tzetzes and his Homerizing Carmina Iliaca as its case study. Tzetzes furnished his poem with numerous explanatory scholia, which give us a glimpse into Tzetzes’ teaching practice and illustrate how works of poetry served as model texts in the classroom of a grammarian. The chapter studies Tzetzes’ scholia against the background of the Art of Grammar by Dionysius Thrax, which was central to the Byzantine study of grammar and as such provides a relevant framework for analysing the grammatical material in Tzetzes’ scholia. By considering Tzetzes’ grammar lessons in the context of the various technical resources at his disposal and placing his scholia into dialogue with the scholarly and didactic works of his contemporaries Eustathios of Thessalonike and Gregory of Corinth, the chapter augments our understanding of Byzantine linguistic and literary thought.

This chapter defines heritage languages and motivates their study to understand linguistic diversity, language acquisition and variationist sociolinguistics. It outlines the goals of Heritage Language Variation and Change in Toronto (HLVC), the first project investigating variation in many heritage languages, unifying methods to describe the languages and push variationist sociolinguistic research beyond its monolingually oriented core and majority-language focus. It shows how this promotes heritage language vitality through research, training, and dissemination. It lays out overarching research questions that motivate the project:

• Do variation and change operate the same way in heritage and majority languages?

• How do we distinguish contact-induced variation, identity-related variation, and internal change?

• Do heritage varieties continue to evolve? Do they evolve in parallel with their homeland variety?

• When does a heritage variety acquire its own name?

• What features and structures are malleable?

• How consistent are patterns across languages?

• Are some speakers more innovative?

• Can attitudes affect ethnolinguistic vitality?

• How can we compare language usage rates among communities and among speakers?

The chapter considers gesture studies in relation to corpus linguistic work. The focus is on the Multimedia Russian Corpus (MURCO), part of the Russian National Corpus. The chapter includes a brief biography of the creator of this corpus, Elena Grishina. The compilation of the corpus out of a set of Russian classic feature films and recorded lectures is described as well as the methods of annotating it in detail. The gesture coding is not limited to manual/hand gestures, but also includes head gestures and use of eye gaze. The chapter considers the findings from the corpus, and reported in Grishina’s posthumously published volume on Russian gestures from a linguistic point of view. The categories include pointing gestures, representational gestures, auxiliary (discourse-structuring) gestures, and several cross-cutting categories, including gestures in relation to pragmatics and to grammatical categories, like verbal aspect. Additional consideration is given to other video corpora in English (and other languages) which are being used for gesture research, namely the UCLA NewsScape library being managed by the Red Hen Lab and the Television Archive.