Dr Jane Stabler in the English department has won the Rose Mary Cranshaw Prize for outstanding published works by women of any nationality on any subject connected with English Literature for her book 'Byron, Poetics and History' published in 2002. She shares the prize with Claire Tomalin for her biography of Pepys.
Drawing on new archival research into Byron's correspondence and reading, Jane Stabler traces the complexity of the intertextual dialogues that run through his work. From his early satires to Don Juan, she argues that Byron's poetics developed in response to his reception by the English reading public and that he finally accepted the element of uncertainty and risk in the reading process and incorporated it into the texture of his poetic experiments.
Jane will be presented with her award which was established in 1888 and is judged by the Council of the British Academy at the annual British Academy Prize giving dinner in London next month.
Testing Second Language Speaking
by Glen Fulcher, Centre for Applied Language Studies
Longman/Pearson, ISBN 0582 472709
Testing second language speaking has become extremely important since the Second World War. When it was realised the American service personnel were often ill equipped to communicate, that their inability to speak in a second language might be 'a serious handicap to safety and comfort', the push for tests of second language speaking began in earnest. From the needs of the military, the practice soon spread to colleges and universities. Today, speaking tests are available from all major test producers, for a multitude of purposes.
This book offers a comprehensive treatment of testing speaking in a second language. It will be useful for anyone who has to develop speaking tests in their own institutions, which is becoming an increasingly common requirement placed upon teachers who may have no training in test development. For teachers this book contains a generic programmatic approach from design to implementation that can be adapted to local conditions. The book provides clear guidance about the kinds of questions teachers may ask, and how to evaluate the answers. But it is never prescriptive.
The book is also intended for students of Applied Linguistics, languages and Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL). It brings together in one volume a summary and critical analysis of research into testing second language speaking. There is a wealth of examples, not only of task types that are commonly used in speaking tests, but of approaches to researching speaking tests, and specific methodologies, that students may have to use in their own projects. The approaches and methodologies are presented with examples from the literature, and are carefully referenced for follow-up study.
Differential Equations and Mathematical Biology
by D S Jones, University of Dundee and B D Sleeman, University of Leeds
ISBN 1 58488 296 4
The conjoining of mathematics and biology has brought about significant advances in both areas, with mathematics proving a tool for modeling and understanding biological phenomena and biology stimulating developments in the theory of nonlinear differential equations. The continued application of mathematics to biology holds great promise and in fact may be the applied mathematics of the 21st century.
Differential Equations and Mathematical Biology provides a detailed treatment of both ordinary and partial differential equations, techniques for their solution, and their use in a variety of biological applications. The presentation includes the fundamental techniques of nonlinear differential equations, bifurcation theory, and the impact of chaos on discrete time biological modeling. The authors provide generous coverage of numerical techniques and address a range of important applications, including heart physiology, nerve pulse transmission, chemical reactions, tumour growth and epidemics.