Chapter 5 builds your understanding of the thousands of students who are adding English to their language repertoire and offers many excellent teaching strategies. The chapter does not attempt to provide detailed professional development in EAL/D pedagogy but is more concerned with how harnessing English language learning can connect with wellbeing and achievement. The two overarching goals for this chapter are that you develop empathy with English learners’ perspectives, and that you acquire a wide variety of strategies to support English learning, across the curriculum, with high expectations for all students. Chapters 3 and 4 have stressed that it is important for students to maintain and develop the languages they bring to school, as well as to add English proficiency. Strong English proficiency enables participation in all areas of Australian society and economy, and participation in global communities where English is a shared language.

We have seen that in normal cases children create their mental grammar from input that has been called “poor,” but that language fails to emerge when input is totally absent. Chapter 12 shows that when the input is of “extra-poor” quality, children nevertheless manage to arrive at mental grammars of apparently sufficient complexity. The relevant situation can lead to the emergence of whole new languages. The key claim is that children, when exposed to a so-called pidgin (a relatively primitive system of communication created by adults who do not share a common language), transform such an impoverished language into a full-fledged language, which we call a creole. How can children do this? Nativists have argued that children can do this because they have an innate “manual” that dictates the construction of a mental grammar, no matter how impoverished the input. This leads to the creolization argument in support of the Innateness Hypothesis. This chapter also surveys various kinds of artificially constructed languages that are typically created by adults who either want to design a universal language or to provide groups of people in fictional stories with their own language.

Inadvertent actions in relation to legal and moral responsibility have been represented as puzzling on many occasions. In this chapter, I aim to show they are puzzling for different reasons than those usually proposed. Before I do this it is important to clarify some assumptions and presuppositions. First, the chapter presupposes that intentional action constitutes the paradigm of action . Second, it presupposes that intention and intentional actions run parallel to practical reason, and that the first-person perspective is the primary perspective to explain intentional action. Inadvertent actions seem to be an important challenge to this conception and this study aims to pave the way for thinking about negligence in the context of the first-person perspective. The aim of the chapter is modest in the sense that it neither offers an account of negligence, nor a criticism of the views that have been advanced in the literature, but identifies a puzzle that arises in the context of actions from the first-person perspective and gestures towards a possible methodology for thinking about negligent actions. I see this as a necessary and preliminary task before engaging with the nature of negligent acts and responsibility for negligence.

This chapter critically compares how the concepts of activity type and genre tend to be used within the field of pragmatics. Both concepts are broadly concerned with the way in which we categorize our experiences, and develop thereby expectations about communicative behaviour within a given context. In spite of these similarities, they have very different conceptual histories. Activity types were introduced into pragmatics by Levinson (1979), having been inspired by Wittgenstein’s (1958) notion of language games. Genres can be traced back to ancient Greek literature, and have since been applied within multiple disciplines, including art and art criticism, literary studies, rhetoric, sociology, linguistics and, more specifically, pragmatics (Bazerman, 1997; Mayes, 2003). The focus of the chapter is on mapping the development and usage of these terms within the pragmatics (or a concomitant) discipline. We also comment upon concepts that seem to share "a considerable family resemblance" (Linell, 2010: 42) with activity types and/or genres. They include footing, frames (and framing), speech events, speech activities, schemas, scripts, and prototypes.

“Sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt me.” Words do, however, sometimes hurt. Speech that promotes condoning or actually practicing physical violence is not just unpleasant but dangerous. An orchestrated war of words preceded the Rwandan genocidal slaughter. Hutu political leaders actively promoted using forms meaning ‘snake’ and ‘cockroach’ in talking of Tutsi neighbors, which made slaughtering those neighbors more readily acceptable to ordinary Hutu. The N-word in contemporary America is often used in diverse objectionable and sometimes dangerous ways. At the same time, there are affiliative uses within some black communities. And mentioning the word in order to criticize racist linguistic practices should be supported, not punished as continues to happen. Native Americans continue to protest being turned into mascots for sports teams; they resist suggestions that team names ‘honor' them. Semantic derogation of women continues, but some have tried to embrace derisive terms like slut, efforts that are unwelcome to some self-identified feminists. Even what many have heralded as successful reclamation of the term queer for non-heterosexuals, purging it of its negative flavor, does not work for all. Words harm by making public and more ‘acceptable’ the social hostility and potential violence of those using (not ‘mentioning’) them.

Through its fifty-plus narrators and three central characters, the aspiring 17-year-old poet and narrator Juan Garcia Madero and his two “visceral-realist” mentors, Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, Bolaño’s 1998 The Savage Detectives offers both a parody of the detective novel and an endlessly deferred quest, through the figure of Cesárea Tinajero, for “true” poetry. Radically raising the stakes of Bolaño’s commitment to the development of what a pivotal passage calls “poemas-novela,” its prose-poetic strategies resembling less a novel in the traditional sense than an impossibly sustained assemblage of loosely linked prose poems on an “epic,” in Bakhtin’s sense “novelistic” scale, it challenges the emphasis of the detective novel, and of the novel generally, on a certain violence of narrative emplotment, the monetized violence of narrative drive, of linear narrative, as plot itself. Complicit as Bolaño knows himself to be with the detective genre’s commercial appeal, he understands the legacies of Poe, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud, of detective fiction and the prose poem, as both a “savage” threat to poetry, leading to its “death” and “murder,” and as a potential convergence that makes possible, as the last name of the narrator Amadeo Salvatierra suggests, its rebirth and redemption in manifold forms.

Through its fifty-plus narrators and three central characters, the aspiring 17-year-old poet and narrator Juan Garcia Madero and his two “visceral-realist” mentors, Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, Bolaño’s 1998 The Savage Detectives offers both a parody of the detective novel and an endlessly deferred quest, through the figure of Cesárea Tinajero, for “true” poetry. Radically raising the stakes of Bolaño’s commitment to the development of what a pivotal passage calls “poemas-novela,” its prose-poetic strategies resembling less a novel in the traditional sense than an impossibly sustained assemblage of loosely linked prose poems on an “epic,” in Bakhtin’s sense “novelistic” scale, it challenges the emphasis of the detective novel, and of the novel generally, on a certain violence of narrative emplotment, the monetized violence of narrative drive, of linear narrative, as plot itself. Complicit as Bolaño knows himself to be with the detective genre’s commercial appeal, he understands the legacies of Poe, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud, of detective fiction and the prose poem, as both a “savage” threat to poetry, leading to its “death” and “murder,” and as a potential convergence that makes possible, as the last name of the narrator Amadeo Salvatierra suggests, its rebirth and redemption in manifold forms.

Questions of genre, of the commodification of genres and of genres as commodities, of their specialization and marketability, questions central to the institutionalization of creative writing in the academy over the past several decades, preoccupied Bolaño early on when the idea of making a living from writing appeared beyond reach. Written in 1980 but only published in 2002 (its English translation not appearing until 2010), Amberes/Antwerp has aptly been called the “Big Bang of the Bolaño universe.” Recalling Mikhail Bakhtin’s distinction between the novel’s characteristically dialogical, heteroglossic investments and poetry’s more monological tendencies, Antwerp pursues a consistently dialogic, heteroglossic self-questioning. Oscillating between minimalist narrative and meta-lingual, meta-fictional, meta-textual gestures, it continually stages its own suspension and recommencing. Torn between the pleasure and urgency of a “tax-free” poetic discourse and the commercial viability of the detective novel, the Bolaño of Antwerp aspires to write not “novels that are copies of other novels” but a genreless text in which he can affirm, without reserve, that “‘the only beautiful thing here is the language.’” Positioned roughly halfway between Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris and Rimbaud’s Illuminations, Antwerp remains Bolaño’s most disjunctively Rimbaldian performance.

Questions of genre, of the commodification of genres and of genres as commodities, of their specialization and marketability, questions central to the institutionalization of creative writing in the academy over the past several decades, preoccupied Bolaño early on when the idea of making a living from writing appeared beyond reach. Written in 1980 but only published in 2002 (its English translation not appearing until 2010), Amberes/Antwerp has aptly been called the “Big Bang of the Bolaño universe.” Recalling Mikhail Bakhtin’s distinction between the novel’s characteristically dialogical, heteroglossic investments and poetry’s more monological tendencies, Antwerp pursues a consistently dialogic, heteroglossic self-questioning. Oscillating between minimalist narrative and meta-lingual, meta-fictional, meta-textual gestures, it continually stages its own suspension and recommencing. Torn between the pleasure and urgency of a “tax-free” poetic discourse and the commercial viability of the detective novel, the Bolaño of Antwerp aspires to write not “novels that are copies of other novels” but a genreless text in which he can affirm, without reserve, that “‘the only beautiful thing here is the language.’” Positioned roughly halfway between Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris and Rimbaud’s Illuminations, Antwerp remains Bolaño’s most disjunctively Rimbaldian performance.