This chapter explores the ways that language constructs our view of our bodies and the relationship between our bodies and the environment around us. It considers whether we ‘have a body’ or ‘are a body’, whether we live ‘in the world’ or ‘on earth’, and how shifts in perspective might influence not only our thoughts but also our behaviour. The chapter explores how everyday texts from weather forecasts to Men’s Health magazine construct the body and its relationship to the environment. As well as promoting critical awareness of the linguistic construction of the body and environment in popular culture, the chapter also promotes direct personal exploration of the experience of being a body in the world. This experience can stretch to empathy with other people and other animals who all equally have an existence as moving bodies intrinsically linked with and part of the wider physical environment. Finally, the chapter explores the physical environment as a text – one which has been constructed not with words but with buildings, concrete, tree planting, crop growing etc.

This chapter argues for a ‘humanistic’ approach to teaching Business Communication which aims to develop students’ critical language awareness (CLA). The chapter begins by establishing a rationale for the importance of CLA for business students. This is followed by a review of relevant literature which finds that, unlike in other areas of Languages for Specific Purposes, there is still a deficit in the acceptance and implementation of critical language pedagogy within Business Communication. I identify two types of critical language awareness: ‘metapragmatic’ and ‘socio-cultural’, which are not seen as binary, but on a continuum or cline. The remainder of the chapter demonstrates how these two types of CLA could be developed with Business students by providing a range of examples from my own teaching practice in a university setting. The activities are based on real-life written and spoken texts and aim to develop critical awareness in areas such as metapragmatic knowledge of different workplace genres, the interpersonal dimension of language or the values and ideology of a professional community of practice.

Marisa Cavalli discovered at a very young age that her family's dialect put her in a marginal position, under the symbolic domination of the tourists who invaded her Italian village every year. This situation led her to fight for the rights of minorities from an inclusive pedagogical perspective. She promotes the maintenance of languages, shedding light on the social-political power relations and, in turn, on the pedagogical aspects.

Research on heritage languages (HL) in the United States consistently demonstrated that they are lost beyond two or three generations, resulting in significant linguistic and cultural losses at the individual, familial, community, and national levels. In an effort to reverse this loss, practitioners and researchers in HL education strive to provide meaningful learning experiences for those language learners who want to reconnect with their linguistic and cultural heritage. This chapter seeks to provide an overview of HL programmatic practices in postsecondary institutions as well as innovative curricular practices emerging from current research in HL education. This chapter’s main contribution is to offer practitioners, researchers, and administrators with a review of state-of-the-art curricular and programmatic options for university-level HL learners, including innovations, achievements, current challenges, and future directions.