In this chapter, we review the roles and responsibilities of all stakeholders involved in developing and using AI systems, with a particular focus on our role as (competent) citizens. It is important, thus, to understand our rights and obligations in order to advance to a safer and more trustworthy AI implementation in our daily lives.

Chapter 3 on Iran’s languages is the first of five chapters to focus on a specific social category. It addresses issues concerning the Persian language and its origins and developments over time. Persian is Iran’s only officially recognized language. This single-language policy disadvantages speakers of other languages there. Half of Iran’s population consists of native speakers of the Persian language, most of whom adhere to broadly defined notions of Persian culture. The other half of the population consists of Iranians who speak other native languages and who identify with their own distinctive sociocultural systems. Power and wealth are concentrated in the dominant sector of Iran’s society. The other sector is subordinated and marginalized.

There is a recent scholarly consensus on the nature of Hipponax’s interaction with Homer, especially with the figure of Odysseus in the Odyssey. According to this picture, the iambist is an early precursor to the Hellenistic poets – alluding, combining and recombining different Homeric passages in a manner we would routinely associate with Callimachus or Apollonius. Yet this picture is entirely anachronistic, divorced from the evidentiary and methodological difficulties we encounter in thinking about textual dynamics in the Archaic world, and the apparent cases of Homeric interaction are overplayed and misidentified. This chapter surveys the evidence and its scholarship with a sceptical eye, and comes to a sceptical conclusion: not only is it unjustified to relate Hipponax directly with Homer, but it also closes our eyes to the flexibility with which, and the variety of ways in which, Hipponax attempted to invoke the heroic world and its medium for his own poetry.

This chapter explores the nature and role of texts in translanguaging classrooms, both written and audiovisual texts. It acknowledges current norms of monolingual texts in ELT, exploring how we can make our interaction with and understanding of such texts more multilingual. Translanguaging with written texts is explored in detail, including through how a translanguaging teacher in China uses a mainly monolingual textbook for translingual learning in receptive skills lessons. This leads to exemplified analysis of different stages in such lessons, including preparing learners for reading, building lexis with written text, strengthening comprehension of texts and consolidating learning as we move from receptive to productive skills. Genre-based translanguaging, as an example of integrated skills work, is discussed, as is translanguaging in extensive reading for pleasure. Translanguaging with audio and video texts and the use of multimodal skills, particularly when watching, are both explored, compared and contrasted with written text usage. The chapter also investigates how both phonological awareness and initial literacy can be developed with the support of translanguaging.

A central problem in the histories and theories of African literatures written in European languages revolves around the origins and identity of this literature: When, and in what circumstances, did aspiring African writers adopt written literature as the most important cultural tool in their self-fashioning? What was the relation between new forms of writing and existing systems of expression built on orality and oral genres? The argument of this chapter is that faced with the problem of producing a literature in the language of the colonizer, African writers and critics turned to orality and African oral traditions and their interface with writing to identify the uniqueness of Africa writing. Some critics asserted the identity of African literature by giving oral forms primacy over written ones; others focused on the interface between orality and writing but affirmed orality as the central dynamic of African literature. Another group acknowledged the centrality of orality to written forms but rejected the idea that it was sign of authenticity. This chapter explores these complex debates and then shifts attention to a group of writers for whom orality was inseparable from writing.

This chapter explores how the cotton field structures the symbiotic relationships among American literature, fashion, freedom, and slavery. In an era when most paper was made from cotton rags, the page as well as the shirt or shift began their interconnected lives in the cotton south. In this sense, unfreedom is woven into the physical pages of the texts that connect free U.S. Americans to each other over an increasingly expansive United States. However, worn next to the body, clothing and objects of fashion become apparatuses for forming distinct spheres of public discourse. Attending to the material and labor conditions that generate both fashion and literature, this chapter seeks to expand our understandings of whose lives and experiences engender and constitute public discourse. In the age of the mechanical reproduction of both texts and textiles, freedom and slavery were mass produced.

The Introduction establishes the aims and bounds of the study, which examines attitudes towards, and uses of, the written word in Kent, Mercia and Wessex from the 830s to the 920s. The Introduction provides an overview of scholarship that has informed the study, as well as the new perspectives that it seeks to provide. The structure of the study is also explained.

The conclusion brings together the findings of the previous chapters. It reiterates the importance of the mid-ninth century, since the written word was used more extensively than in prior decades to uphold and confirm social, political and economic transactions. This provides an important context for understanding the extraordinary literary endeavours of Alfred’s later reign: in the generation before Alfred, both lay and ecclesiastic people were already experimenting with – and thinking about – the social values of literary culture. It must be stressed, however, that developments were not uniform across Kent, Mercia and Wessex. Literary culture was not limited to a single agency or context, and competing visions and practices existed throughout the ninth and early tenth centuries. One of the most striking aspects to this is that, in some contexts, resources and Latin literacy levels appear to have been limited, yet documentary production continued. If anything, such limited resources intensified the value of the written word as a commodity. The Conclusion also considers what follows in the mid- and late tenth century. Several strands of continuity are identified, though social and institutional changes need to be borne in mind.

Chapter 3 is concerned with the ‘non-royal’ (or ‘private’) charter corpus – that is, documents that were issued by individuals other than kings – from Kent, Mercia and Wessex between the 830s and 880s. The chapter provides an overview of this material’s content and its production contexts and processes. Canterbury dominates, since this is where a large majority of the surviving documents comes from, though there are glimpses of other settings too. A significant portion of the material from Canterbury relates to two particular ealdormannic families, though other documents demonstrate that lay and ecclesiastic people of lesser social standing also participated in documentary activity. The picture that emerges is diverse; varying practices and contexts, and different motivations for codification, reflect the richness of contemporary documentary culture. The following important themes are considered too: female participation, the relationship between royal and non-royal documentation, and the varied uses of Latin and Old English.

This chapter considers a range of Latin documentation and poetry composed in the late ninth and early tenth centuries, with a particular focus on the social settings in which the material was produced, consumed and performed. The chapter opens with an overview of the contemporary charter corpus, which is a rich mix of Latin and Old English documents drawn up in the names of royal, non-royal, ecclesiastic and lay individuals. This survey provides several points of comparison with the material examined in Chapters 2 and 3, and it allows us to consider the possible impact of Alfredian education reform. Consideration is given to the linguistic dynamics of the corpus and to examples that employ Latin specifically to enhance the performative potential of the document. Two sets of Latin poetry are then introduced – acrostic verses in praise of King Alfred and the ‘Metrical Calendar of Hampson’ – both of which were most probably composed within, and for, the milieu of the West Saxon court. The authorship, transmission and possible sources of inspiration for this poetry are considered. It is then argued, through a comparative discussion, that the performances of this Latin documentary and poetic material were critical to their value.

Chapter 4 opens Part II of the study with an overview of literary activity during the late ninth and early tenth centuries, and the political backdrop of the emergent kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons. A summary of the kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons itself is provided, followed by discussion of three categories of evidence: epistolary correspondences, the corpus of Alfredian Old English literature, and Asser’s Life of King Alfred. Throughout, several points of continuity with earlier decades of literary activity are stressed, particularly the continued importance of letter-writing and international communication. It is also emphasised that contemporary investment in vernacular literary production was extraordinary, yet Latin remained a valued commodity as well. Just as there would have been competing political visions within the kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons, so too there would have been preferences for literary patronage of Latin or Old English. The decision specifically to compose the Life of King Alfred in Latin is assessed, particularly in light of Asser’s intended audiences. The overview provided by this chapter sets the scene for the case studies explored in the subsequent two chapters.

This chapter takes ideas from Vainikka and Young-Scholten’s chapter in the Handbook’s first edition (2013) on stages in the acquisition of L2 morphosyntax. Complementing this second edition chapter is Chapter 16, with its focus on the development of reading and writing by adult migrants with little or no literacy in their home language(s). This chapter applies ideas presented in the 2013 chapter to research on non-/low-literate adults to explore whether literacy influences their acquisition of morphosyntax. It provides an overview of key studies, of the L2 acquisition of migrant adults, both cross-sectional and longitudinal, over the decades that such research was prevalent. The focus of the chapter is application of two stage-based theories of L2 morphosyntax development, Organic Grammar and the Basic Variety. With these theories in mind, we discuss analyses of oral production data from adult migrants acquiring English and Italian, respectively. The results reveal learners’ use of unanalyzed chunks which rather than implicating literacy seems to implicate developmental stage.

This chapter explores how important it is for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students in particular to have access to studying their own languages across all jurisdictions in Australian education. It also explores the increasing options available to teachers to provide these opportunities for students from Foundation to Year 12. The value is not limited to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students; all students in Australian schools can benefit from the deeper understanding of Indigenous peoples, cultures and histories that develops through the study of Indigenous languages. Language is the vehicle of cultural expression, and when a language is no longer spoken by its people all humanity is diminished by the loss of cultural transmission that occurs when a language ‘goes to sleep’. Teachers are very well positioned to work with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities to help wake up the sleeping Australian languages and to maintain those that are still languages of everyday communication.