The Caribbean is named for its sea, but the islands define the region and make its history. As a marine environment, the Caribbean Sea is a creation of the land that encloses it, with a continental coastline to the south and west, and a permeable but continuous arc of islands facing the Atlantic Ocean. Without the islands there would be no sea. The water would be nothing more than another stretch in the fluid maritime history of the ocean. Equally significant, the islands of the Caribbean surround and demarcate the sea rather than sitting in it. This geographical formation determined fundamental features in the development of the Caribbean and distinguished the experience of the region from that of other island histories around the world.

Unlike the original peopling of the Caribbean islands, which came late in the human settlement of the Americas, it was in these islands that the secondary – Columbian – colonization of the continents had its beginning. This was not the only significant difference between the two colonizations. The secondary phase, which reached the islands in 1492 with Columbus, did not have roots in the tropical rimland, as did the first colonization, but rather had its origins far away across the Atlantic, in Europe. It brought in its wake peoples, plants, animals, and technologies not only from Europe but from across the globe – particularly Africa, but also from the world beyond the Atlantic, from Asia and the Pacific. Further, whereas the first colonization peopled the islands, the initial impact of the secondary wave was characterized not by an augmentation of island populations but their destruction.

By the beginning of the seventeenth century, European colonization had reduced the Caribbean islands to a blank canvas. In truth it was not so much a blank canvas as one that had been thickly painted by a series of hands, scoured and scraped, then smeared with a rough bloody cloth, and cleaned again of yet another attempted landscape. The people and the civilizations that had flourished in the Greater Antilles before Columbus had been virtually obliterated. They had not been replaced by any new substantial population or any new form of civilization. Even regions the Spanish had attempted to populate were being evacuated. The land that had been brought to a high state of cultivation by the Taínos was being reconquered by rainforest. Exotic trees made themselves at home in the woodland. Large feral animals introduced by the Spanish crashed through the undergrowth of this landscape, otherwise silent but for the night sounds of crickets and frogs, the occasional noisy cascade or crack of thunder. Only in the smaller islands of the eastern Caribbean, which the Spanish had touched less heavily, did the indigenous people survive in significant numbers.

People came late to the Caribbean islands – late in terms of the broad sweep of human history, and late in the peopling of the Americas. The islands of the Caribbean remained uninhabited longer than almost any other of the world’s major resource-rich regions. Even when the process of colonization began, it proceeded in fits and starts and took thousands of years to complete. Some islands remained uninhabited long after their neighbours had been populated and are still uninhabited because they lack the resources to be viable. Why were the islands colonized so late, and why, once commenced, was the process so protracted and erratic? Looked at another way, the more difficult question may be why people chose to live on islands at all. Why leave behind the immense resources of the continents in order to live in small places surrounded by saltwater?

For the people of the Caribbean, World War II proved both an interruption and a catalyst. It meant blockades and shortages, and delays in dealing with social problems, and it tested loyalties to empires and imperial masters. It also exposed islanders to the challenges of self-sufficiency and, for those who joined the battle abroad, provided insights into the character of life and death in the imperial homelands and the intense racism that existed even within the fight for freedom and equality. The experience fuelled both a desire for political and human rights and a desire to live in a better place.

If the middle decades of the nineteenth century saw the Caribbean becoming relatively sufficient unto itself – turning away from traditional genetic and trade links that had tied the region to an Atlantic world but more specifically Africa and Europe – the decades after 1870 were marked by the growth of a much more clearly defined North American orientation. This new connection had three main sources. First, the United States replaced the European nations as the hegemonic imperial power in the region. Second, the Caribbean developed increasingly strong economic links with the United States and, to a lesser extent, Canada in terms of trade, capital flows, and investment. Third, it was in the period after 1870 that, for the first time, Caribbean people began to migrate out of the region in large numbers. Most common among the destinations of these new emigrants was the United States and its outliers. This newfound orientation towards North America laid the foundations for longer-term challenges to understandings of identity, nationality, and allegiance.

Users of statistical computing need to produce graphs of their data and the results of their computations. In this chapter we start with a general overview of how this is done in R, and learn how to draw some basic plots. We then discuss some of the issues involved in choosing a style of plot to draw: it is not always an easy choice, and there are plenty of bad examples in the world to lead us astray. We will talk briefly about customizing graphs, and then move on to alternate packages for producing graphics.

The study of culture is usually the preserve of social anthropologists, sociologists and cultural theorists who have developed sophisticated theories to describe and explain cultural phenomena. Recently, there has been much interest in an evolutionary approach to culture. In contrast to many earlier theories these evolutionary theories attempt to provide ultimate rather than proximate explanations of culture. One of the biggest ultimate questions about culture is why do we have culture at all? From this perspective, the phenomenon of culture is not something that ‘just happened’; there is good evidence that human culture needs a particular sort of brain in order to sustain it.

In the nineteen seventies, Steven Krashen put forward what has become both a controversial and an influential model, which he referred to as the Monitor Model (Krashen, 1979, 1982, 1994). He actually put forward five hypotheses, which are sometimes given the name of the Input Hypothesis (his fourth hypothesis) and sometimes the Monitor Model (his third hypothesis). His basic thesis was that adults can learn a language consciously from explicit transmission of declarative knowledge, but that this learned knowledge does not help them to communicate spontaneously. In order to achieve this, they need to acquire the language from exposure to comprehensible input (see Chapter 1 in this volume). In Krashen’s view, the only role for learned declarative knowledge was to help learners monitor their utterances prior to and subsequent to production of language. While acknowledging that this could be a useful (but limited) role, he pointed out that excessive monitoring could slow down a speaker and make their hesitant speech very difficult to listen to. He also categorised learners into three types: over-monitors, who nearly always monitor their production and suffer the communicative consequences of hesitation and reticence; under-monitors, who rarely monitor their production and thus make many errors; and optimal monitors, who monitor when it is appropriate and significant (e.g. in formal writing or in speech situations where accuracy is important). Whilst not disagreeing that the main role of explicitly learned knowledge is monitoring, we would go further than Krashen and say that such monitoring takes place before, during and after production, that monitoring is not just of accuracy but of fluency, appropriateness and effect, that implicitly acquired procedural knowledge can play a crucial role in spontaneous monitoring, that effective monitoring facilitates effective production and that effective monitoring can make a valuable contribution to language acquisition. Amazingly, given its importance in the process of producing language, monitoring has received very little attention in the research literature on language production, an area which is itself under-researched in our view. In this chapter we will refer to what research literature there is on monitoring and language production, but much of the chapter will be theoretical in the sense that we will be using our experience as researchers in a number of academic fields, our experience as language users and teachers and our informed introspection and intuition to posit a description of the mental processes involved. For some SLA researchers such theorising is taboo and only empirical evidence is acceptable. For us, theorising can help to fill the gaps in the research literature by stimulating thought, provoking controversy, inspiring application and suggesting profitable areas of research. After all, in applied linguistics there is an honourable tradition of philosophical theory with such influential figures as Pit Corder, Strevens, Chomsky, Halliday, Widdowson, Stevick, Faneslow and Maley inspiring thought and exploration with their novel theories rather than with their empirical evidence.

We both started our careers as teachers of English, Brian in Nigeria and Hitomi in Japan. At that time, we were young and enthusiastic, and focused on keeping our students interested and attentive. Now we are “mature” and enthusiastic, and focused on applying what we know about how languages are best acquired to the practicalities of teaching, teacher training and materials development. This change in focus has been a result of our increased experience, knowledge and awareness, and our determination to bring the theory and the practice of language learning much closer together.

sexual selection • female choice • parental investment • handicap hypothesis • parasite theory • Muller’s ratchet • tangled bank • the Red Queen • arms race • androphilia • gynephilia

In this chapter, we will report on research and theories relating to intake from the literature on second language acquisition that we consider relevant and applicable to the learning of an L2, both for learners and for practitioners. As you will discover, some of the findings of the research are controversial, even contradictory, and some would not be easy to apply, given the political, cultural and practical constraints faced by many learners and practitioners. Here, we are going to focus mainly on those findings and theories for which there is a general consensus of acceptance and which we have found to offer potential for application to many actual contexts of learning. However, as intake is both a mental process and a mental product, we are also going to make reference to research findings and theories from neurolinguistics, in which such procedures as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electrophysiology have been used to find indicative evidence of neurolinguistic processing during language activity. “fMRI detects the magnetic signals resulting from blood oxygenation and flow that occur in response to neural activity” (Wong, Yin & O’Brien, 2016, p. 4). It has been used, for example, to identify the areas of the brain that are active during the processing and use of language, and has produced “compelling evidence for a ‘universal’ language network of the human brain” (Wong, Yin & O’Brien, 2016, p. 5). Electrophysiology is “a technique for recording electrical voltage potentials produced by cellular activity” in the brain during language processing (Morgan-Short, 2014, p. 15). It has been found, for example, that “L2 neurocognitive processing changes qualitatively with time” (Morgan-Short, 2014, p. 15) and that processing is easier for features that are similar in the L1 and the L2, or are unique to the L2. It has also been shown that it is more difficult for features that the two languages share but that are instantiated differently, and that implicit language training is more likely to lead to native-like processing of syntactic structures than explicit language training (Morgan-Short, 2014, p. 31).

nativism • empiricism • constructivism • epigenetic landscape • domain specificity • modularity • imprinting • critical period • sensitive period • theory of mind • autism • Williams syndrome • neuroconstructivism