Isaak Papadopoulos – författare

The book titled “International Perspectives on Creativity in the Foreign Language Classrooms” aspires to provide a reflective and descriptive account of creative practices as well as research related to creativity from an international perspective. In particular, through a collection of 12 studies conducted in various countries and continents, an attempt is made to provide readers with creative examples of teaching practice and research incentives, as proposed and presented by the authors of this collected edition. The contributors of this book report and reflect on classroom practices that increase motivation, promote creative learning, heighten learners’ creativity, enhance their learning potential and their multicultural sensitivity. They discuss challenges of applications in diverse contexts based on playful activities and stories that develop a creative learning environment in a foreign language classroom. Some other studies focus on multiple intelligences theory approach making students ‘know’ and ‘apply’ the appropriate behaviour and they present creative ways and multisensory approaches of approaching dyslexic students in a language classroom. The authors provide perspectives from different angles on the above mentioned issues demonstrating that multiliteracies practices, games, different art forms, popular-culture texts, digital storytelling and interactive activities could be effective tools in foreign language learning.

This book aspires to provide a reflective and descriptive account of innovative research works and practices related to promoting and accommodating cultural and linguistic diversity in education. Within a diverse world, classrooms with diversity are not considered to be a major challenge, especially when researchers and teachers are making a joint attempt to accommodate this diversity of skills, competences, knowledge, expertise, feeling, languages, and cultures. This book has been developed to cover various aspects of approaching and supporting multilingual and multicultural classrooms through a selection of chapters, which shed light onto experiences in the field. The contributors of this book report and reflect on practices that raise students’ multilingual and inter/multicultural awareness, communication and interaction. They discuss challenges of various contexts and provide perspectives from different angles on the above-mentioned issues underlining the need for continuous research, implementation and reflection in modern diverse classrooms. Teachers and researchers internationally seem to have placed this diversity at the center of their attention and this book is an example of best practices and pieces of research towards supporting such classrooms which have been seen as a crossroad for languages and cultures.

Superdiverse classrooms, curriculum reforms, the need for alternative, formative assessment methods, sound research to identify student populations at risk, thought-provoking proposals to develop lexical areas and components of intercultural communication skills – these are just a few of the topics that make International Current Trends in Applied Linguistics and Pedagogy a compelling book for anyone interested in theoretical developments, trends, and examples of good practices and inspiring ideas in the field of applied linguistics, language education and pedagogy. This book includes a collection of engaging pieces of research and reminds us that “education is a form of living and in this respect, it is a daily practice that resides between the spaces of phronesis and theoria” (Baldacchino, in this volume). Global in the results reported and innovative in its suggestions, International Current Trends in Applied Linguistics and Pedagogy paves the way for a better understanding of the direction that language education needs to take in the 21st century – a century of multiple and multiplying social, cultural and technological challenges. Through a multidimensional and multicultural collection of research, an attempt is made to shed light onto the current diverse context of research, teaching and learning and offer incentives for further investigating and consideration.

This book offers a descriptive account of studies, which have been designed and implemented to shed light into the current situation of language education in various national contexts. In particular, the contributors of this book report and reflect on classroom practices, they discuss challenges of applications in diverse contexts based on multimodal activities. Through the careful consideration of the chapters included in the book and the studies presented in each chapter, this book aspires to delve into major aspects of language education examining them from different perspectives and angles.