This chapter analyzes processes of learning sex work, observing the initiation in the activity and the development of skills and performances. Based on the approach of situated learning developed by Jean Lave (1991, 2011), the data from previous research were reconsidered and I returned to the field in a red-light district of Belo Horizonte, the Bohemian zone. The focus on learning brought new contributions: It highlighted the interaction of novices with the environment and the community, learning and adapting practices. The stories sex workers tell each other change their ways of working, talking, behaving, and dealing with customers. Analyzing continuities and differences in the practices of sex workers and the connections between different contexts through which they move also pointed out socio-historical transformations of the practice of sex work in the Bohemian zone, as well as individual and collective changes lived by the workers.

This chapter sets out the book’s aim: an attempt to map the changing lexicons of Christian expression in the English language from the end of the Middle Ages to the early Victorians. It is thus a contribution to historical theolinguistics, drawing on the one hand on corpus linguistics and, on the other, the history of the many varieties of English Christianity that existed during this period. The methodology to be adopted in the body of the book is then illustrated with reference to two contrasting groups of female writers active in the middle of the seventeenth century, a period of exceptional religious turmoil: Fifth Monarchists and Quakers. The special analytic tools and resources harnessed include the Oxford English Dictionary, Semantic EEBO, Glasgow’s Historical Thesaurus of English, UCREL’s Log-Likelihood Calculator, and Sheffield’s Linguistic DNA. The remainder of the chapter defines notions and addresses issues that will recur later in the book: notions of register and genre, and questions to do with the handling of corpora, and with the structuring of religious ‘communities of practice’.

Chapter 2 explores multiple conceptions of rights and provides a brief history of human rights and some of the arguments they evoke: they are arbitrary, demand changes to cultures, assume all humans are the same regardless of cultural and other differences, attempt to impose a Western regard for the individual over community, and responses to these criticisms. The chapter provides a short history of Amnesty International, its organizational structure, and its current “Priority Campaigns.” It provides a rationale for the ideological study of Amnesty documents and preliminary analyses of an Amnesty appeal letter, the webpage and email in which the appeal is embedded, and the report on the situation that the documents are concerned with. It provides a description of these documents, paying particular attention to the linguistic and visual resonances occasioned by their mutual contextualizations and proposes a Relevance Theory explanation for the intricate relations between the documents' linguistic and visual modes and argues for the ideological study of AI documents, particularly of the appeal letters.

The new science of complex systems explains why Zelinsky’s cube is a good model of culture. It works well with economic markets–and also language in use. We can see the evidence that a complex system has operated in American English by looking at evidence from the Linguistic Atlas Project. Linguistic variants all show the same patterns of distribution, both overall in a population and in subset populations. These frequency profiles provide a challenge to traditional ways of thinking about language with grammars and dictionaries.

The idea of social class is complicated by the multidimensional nature of culture. North American sociolinguistics began the quantitative turn in the study of language variation. Labov used a number of classes and styles to observe linguistic variation in cities. Every social group has its own characteristics of speech, as predicted by the complex systems model, and groups follow the logic of scale dependency. Sociolinguistic study can be improved by complexity science.

This chapter presents one of the most recent additions to the historical sociolinguistic toolkit, a community of practice (CoP). The discussion of definitions and delimitations of this concept places it in the ‘three waves’ of sociolinguistic research and builds comparisons and contrasts with two neighbouring frameworks: social networks and discourse communities. The focus moves on to the applications of CoPs in historical sociolinguistics. The dimensions of practice – joint enterprise (or domain), mutual engagement, and shared repertoire – are redefined for the purpose of historical sociolinguistics and illustrated with examples from studies which engage with the sociohistorical and cultural context of communication. We show how language change – or, indeed, resistance to change – may be observed through a CoP lens. Prolific contexts where the concept of a CoP has been fruitfully employed include letter writing, the production of manuscripts and early prints, professional discourse, trial proceedings, multilingual practices and online blogging.

In this chapter we will disco≠≠≠ver that language variation is a normal characteristic of speech on all language levels: in the sounds of accents, words, in grammar but also in discourse. When speaking, we always face alternative choices, and these are determined by our regional and social backgrounds and by the context of situation. We will discuss the concept of the sociolinguistic variable in more detail and find that variation is rule-conditioned and systematic. We focus on all actors and factors involved: the social dimension of variation (individuals, groups, communities) and its social correlates (region, class, gender, ethnicity, education). Last but not least, we will look at the spread of innovative features and trace patterns of diffusion from individual speakers, the point of origin of change, throughout wider society (via processes such as actuation, diffusion, and embedding).

This final chapter revisits all the issues discussed in the textbook in light of their applicability to the real classroom, that is, the relationship between research and practice. It argues for the importance of considering the usefulness of research if and when a researcher hopes to influence classroom teaching via their research. The chapter begins with a description as to how research in general is connected to our daily lives (e.g., medicine, engineering, education). It then overviews the research examining the impact of research on educational practices including second language teaching. Practical and epistemological obstacles to bridging the research–practice gap from practitioners’ and researchers’ sides are discussed. The chapter proposes a variety of actions that practitioners and researchers can take in order to foster a bidirectional, constructive, productive, equitable, and mutually beneficial relationship. The chapter ends with a series of activities designed to ensure the learning outcomes from the textbook.

The privatization of government functions has given rise to instrumental questions concerning the execution of these functions. Proponents often hail the efficiency of private institutions, while opponents often speak of the accountability of public institutions. This chapter challenges the instrumentalist terms of this debate. It establishes that there are principled, noninstrumentalist arguments against the privatization of certain goods. More particularly, it argues that there are goods that are “inherently public,” namely that they cannot be provided by private entities, even in principle.

The chapter also maintains that to count as an act of the state, the person who provides the good (the key case studies are inflicting criminal punishment and waging wars) must be a public official. To defend this latter position, the chapter develops an abstract account of public officials as agents who defer to the state’s judgments.

How stylistically sophisticated can the use of morpholexical/morphosyntactic variation be? By focusing on the range of social meanings that can be articulated by ‘levelled were’ (e.g., she were funny) – a regionally restricted variant of the type most frequently studied in sociolinguistics – this chapter explores the extent to which social meanings are fixed by a variant’s enduring association with place. It first considers how children acquire linguistic variation and the extent to which this process interacts with their ability to vary grammatical items stylistically. The analysis then explores how levelled were patterns by social class, parental place of birth, and community of practice at Midlan High. It provides evidence that all of these factors play a role in the use of levelled were, but that the most robust correlation is with community of practice. This data is used to argue that grammatical variants can mark distinctive social styles and personas, and that speakers can adapt their use of variation providing that (i) they have access to a range of variants, and (ii) that they are motivated to use them by virtue of its utility to them as a social symbol.

Schools are technology rich. Teachers routinely now use digital tools for reporting, communications within school and with parents, for maintaining class records, for preparing materials and so on. Some schools use online teaching programs or electronic textbooks. With NAPLAN moving to become fully online (see Chapter 19) there is a need for both teachers and students across the primary years to be confident and creative users of digital technology. Each chapter in this book has included examples and strategies for integrating digital tools into the teaching of mathematics across a range of mathematical content areas.