Previous guest lectures and seminars

2022

Transfer learning for the classification of adult vocalization

Fine-tuned deep-learning models for the classification of adult vocalization on an open-source infant and adult vocalization dataset.

Time and place: Nov. 23, 2022 2:15 PM – 3:15 PM, Hybrid: Zoom / HWH 421

Abstract

Wearable devices are often used to record parent-infant interaction to understand how infants learn their native language. However, labelling infant and adult vocalization in this kind of speech data requires much human labour and time. Recent developments in deep learning have shown that models can take raw speech signals and learn representations of speech sounds for different classification tasks like audio classification, speech emotions classification etc. We applied the transfer learning approach to classify adult vocalization with different pre-trained models and compared these models on accuracy and prediction time. We have fine-tuned these models according to our classification task on an open-source infant and adult vocalization dataset. Even though selecting an appropriate model and dataset requires further work, we have found our results motivating enough to consider applying this approach in practical scenarios. 

Biography

My name is Arun Prakash Singh. I am a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Multilingualism in Society across the Lifespan. My current research work is to examine the acoustic properties of Norwegian Infant Directed Speech (IDS) and its role in speech sound discrimination, word comprehension, and word production in 6 to 18-month-old Norwegian-learning infants. In addition, infants' language skills will be tested, in an eye-tracking paradigm, at the ages of 6, 9, 12, and 18 months. Before that, I worked as a Senior Project Scientist in the Acoustic Lab at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur (India), where I worked on speech acoustics and speech signal processing. In addition, I finished my PhD in the Acoustic lab at IIT Kanpur, India, where my research was based on multi-microphone signal processing. My PhD thesis topic was "Source localization strategies for audible frequencies". I have published my PhD research work in an international journal and at three peer-reviewed international conferences. I received Indian government scholarships for my Master's and doctoral degrees. In addition, I have completed my university and master's degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering. 

Organizer

Michelle White and Marianna Kyriacou

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Exploring orthography and spelling processes among Korean learners of Norwegian as a second language

In this talk, Camilla Cho will present her master’s project on the spelling practices among Korean learners of Norwegian as a second language. This session will be a practice talk for a presentation she will give at MONS 19.

Time and place: Nov. 16, 2022 2:15 PM – 3:15 PM, HWH 421

Abstract

In this talk, I will present my master’s project in Norwegian as a Second Language (NOAS) with the topic of spelling processes among Korean learners. Research in spelling or orthography in the field of NOAS is relatively uncommon and previous studies have mainly been focused on errors in orthography. With this master’s thesis, I wished to go beyond errors and explore the overall spelling practices of Korean learners regardless of spelling mistakes or correctness. As an alternative to Error Analysis, I used a different theoretical framework (Graphematic Solution Space; Neef, 2015) as a basis to study spelling processes that doesn’t only focus on errors. The goal was to study the Korean adults’ spelling practices by exploring what words the participants themselves expressed were difficult or easy to spell. Therefore, the project involved more of an emic approach. In this session, I will present the theory and method of the study, in addition to discussing the results and further implications.

Reference

Neef, M. (2015) Writing systems as modular objects: proposal for theory design in grapholinguistics. Open Linguistics, 1, 708-721

Bio

Camilla Cho joined MultiLing in October 2021 as a Research Assistant. She holds an MA in Norwegian as a Second Language from the University of Oslo, and a BA in Literature from the University of Bergen. She also studied Korean at Seoul National University in South Korea. Before joining Multiling, she worked as a Norwegian language teacher both in the private and public sectors, including teaching Norwegian for international students and staff at the International Summer School at the University of Oslo.

Organizer

Michelle White and Marianna Kyriacou

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Reimagining speaking assessment through testing interactional competence

This talk discusses the limitations of current speaking assessment practices and how such limitations can be addressed by the assessment of interactional competence. 

Time and place: Nov. 9, 2022 2:15 PM – 3:15 PM, Hybrid: Zoom / HWH 421

Abstract

Speaking assessment has traditionally adopted a Leveltian psycholinguistic-individualist approach, measuring componential speaker-centered proficiency indicators such as fluency, grammar, and lexical resources (Roever & Dai, 2021). This perspective on speaking can underrepresent the richness of communication in the real world, where cognitive, affective, and volitive factors all come into play (Hymes, 1972). A mismatch between what is assessed in language tests and what is valued by stakeholders in real life have grave repercussions for language education in general: it threatens not only the validity of language assessment but also creates negative washback for language learning and teaching. In this talk I will discuss the concept of interactional competence (IC), which focuses on the social, functional, and interactional nature of language use. I will illustrate how assessing IC can address some of the abovementioned issues by presenting an empirical IC test development and validation study (Dai, 2021; Dai, 2022). The talk will focus on three aspects of testing IC: 1) how the IC test construct was developed, 2) how online assessment increased the practicality of IC testing, and 3) whether there was sufficient validity evidence to support IC test validation. 

The test construct was based on everyday-life linguistic laypersons’ criteria (Sato & McNamara, 2019) of IC. Their criteria were subsequently theorized via conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis on test-taker discoursal data. This resulted in an IC test construct that measures the affective, logical, moral, and categorical dimensions of interaction, expanding previous IC constructs. The current IC construct also offers a more comprehensive coverage of Hymes’s original conceptualization of communicative competence, which had its roots in Goffman’s understanding of language use as self-presentation. 

For test practicality, the test was designed to be delivered entirely online to facilitate test-taking when face-to-face assessment was not viable during the COVID-19 pandemic. The online delivery mode allowed test-takers (N=105) from 26 different countries, different age groups and walks of life to participate, which promoted the democratization of language testing research. The nine role-play items in the tests were of differing levels of interactiveness to reduce the time required to take the test without sacrificing coverage of the language use domain or stability of the estimates of test-taker ability. 

Finally, the test development and validation process were guided by Kane’s validation framework. Both quantitative (many-Facet Rasch) and qualitative (discourse analysis) evidence will be presented to support the validity argument for this test. Directions for future research in IC assessment will also be discussed. 

References

Dai, D. W. (2021). Design and validation of an L2-Chinese interactional competence test. [Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Melbourne]. 

Dai, D. W. (2022). Measuring interactional competence – An illustration of test development and validation principles through an L2 Chinese IC test [monograph under contract]. Peter Lang. 

Hymes, D. (1972). On communicative competence. In J. B. Pride & J. Holmes (Eds.), Sociolinguistics (pp. 269–293). Penguin. 

Roever, C., & Dai, D. W. (2021). Reconceptualizing interactional competence for language testing. In M. R. Salaberry & A. R. Burch (Eds.) Assessing speaking in context - Expanding the construct and its applications (pp. 23-49). Multilingual Matters. 

Sato, T., & McNamara, T. (2019). What counts in second language oral communication ability? The perspective of linguistic laypersons. Applied Linguistics, 40(6), 894-916. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amy032

Biography

David Wei Dai is Lecturer (equivalent tenure-track Assistant Professor) of Clinical Communication in the Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences at Monash University, Australia. He is an editor for the journal TESOL in Context and a Visiting Scholar to University College London, UK. His main research interests are language assessment, discourse analysis, clinical communication, second language pragmatics, and second language acquisition. He has secured funding from British Council, Educational Testing Service, Duolingo, International Language Testing Association and other organisations to fund his research, totalling AUD 43,272 so far. He is currently working on a monograph to be published by Peter Lang on the why and how of measuring interactional competence.

Organizer

Michelle White and Marianna Kyriacou

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The PolkaNorski project: Development of language and world knowledge in Polish-Norwegian preschool children

PolkaNorski is a collaboration between three universities that investigates the development of language skills and world knowledge in Polish-Norwegian multilingual children and their monolingual peers in Poland and Norway.

Time and place: Nov. 2, 2022 2:15 PM – 3:15 PM, Hybrid: Zoom / HWH 421

Abstract

This talk will describe the progress made to date on the PolkaNorski project and what the next steps will be for the project. Through a range of materials and methods, PolkaNorski sets out to answer questions concerning multilingualism and the ways in which we can support multilingual development before children start formal education. PolkaNorski follows multilingual Polish-Norwegian children and majority speaking Norwegian and Polish children aged 2 to 6 years through four work packages. In Work Package 1, we follow the trajectory of children’s language development from the age of 2 years up to the end of preschool age. We study the neural basis of word processing in children by using EEG and eye-tracking systems in Work Package 2. In Work Package 3, the relationship between the cultural context in which children are growing up, their language abilities, and knowledge related to nature are investigated. Lastly, we explore if it is possible to effectively support parents who are expecting a child, in terms of creating an optimal environment for multilingual language development (Work Package 4).

Results from the four studies will provide a comprehensive description of monolingual and multilingual development, in terms of children’s language development, acquisition of knowledge related to nature, the neural basis of language processing, and parental beliefs concerning their child’s language development. PolkaNorski focuses on setting the boundaries of typical language development in multilingual children and will in future enable more accurate diagnosis in the event of possible language disorders. Furthermore, the studies could help in creating guidelines for supporting early multilingual language development in the family and the educational context.

Biography

Ingeborg Sophie Ribu is an associate professor at OsloMet and completed her PhD at the University of Oslo. Her research foci are language impairments and language development in mono- and multilingual speakers. She has experience with language impairment following cognitive decline and dementia, aphasia and developmental language disorders (DLD). Furthermore, she is also interested in cultural and linguistic adaptations of screening batteries for children and adults with language disorders. She collaborates with researchers at the universities of Warsaw and Copenhagen, as well at the University of Oslo and the Specialist hospital for epilepsy.

Michelle White is a postdoctoral research fellow at MultiLing, University of Oslo. She completed her PhD at Stellenbosch University and a postdoctoral research fellow position at the University of Cape Town. Her research interests lie in how young children acquire language(s) and what affects this acquisition. Her current postdoctoral project sets out to uncover how various socioeconomic status factors affect young children's language acquisition. In particular, looking at young bilingual children from two different countries - Norway and South Africa.

Organizer

Michelle White and Marianna Kyriacou

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“As doctors we apply too much jargon when we speak”. Co-constructing intersubjectivity of medical terms during consultations with Polish physicians speaking Norwegian.

In this talk I will present possible sources of trouble in medical consultations between physicians speaking L2/L3 Norwegian and L1 Norwegian speakers, with special attention to the doctors’ use of professional medical terms.

Time and place: Oct. 26, 2022 2:15 PM – 3:15 PM, Hybrid: Zoom / HWH 421

Abstract

The existing research on the use of medical terminology during patient-doctor consultations has been based mainly on questionnaires and interviews about possible deviations between how doctors and patients experience and understand medical phrases (LeBland et al., 2014; Barker et al., 2014; Pieterse et al., 2013; Kitzinger & Mandelbaum, 2013). Furthermore, the main focus so far has been on monolingual consultations, where both the physician and the patient communicate in their mother tongue (Glickerman et al., 2011). There has been no research on doctors who communicate in their second language (Dahm, 2012) with the exception of one study which shows that international medical candidates fail at explaining the meaning of semi-technical terms to their patients in role-plays because of their limited competence in the language (Dahm, 2011).

In my talk I will focus on Polish physicians using L2/L3 Norwegian to achieve a common understanding of medical terms with their Norwegian-speaking patients. Do they easily fix the problems that occur when these terms are mentioned or are the explanations and corrections over-exposed (drawn too much attention to) (Bolden et al., 2022)?

I will commence by presenting what the physicians themselves perceive as troublesome when they communicate with their patients in a second/third language. These findings come from my research interviews in which the doctors themselves reported on problems with everyday Norwegian and argued that medical Norwegian language does not cause any problems for them. One of the strategies consciously used in their interactions with patients was adapting their use of medical language to suit the patients’ abilities and needs.

I will then compare the results from the research interviews with video-recordings of the medical consultations. By narrowing down my analysis to the causes of the problems that occur most often in the consultations, I will present three cases that demonstrate how differently medical terms can be introduced and the implications of this choice on the progressivity of speech. My analysis is conducted using conversation analytic methodology (Sidnell & Stivers, 2013).

References

Barker, K.L., Reid, M. Minns Lowe, C.J. (2014). What does the language we use about arthritis mean to people who have osteoarthritis? A qualitative study. Disability and Rehabilitation, 36(5), 367-372.

Bolden, G.B., Hepburn, A., Potter, J., Zhan,K. Wei, W., Park, S.H,, Shirokov, A., Chung Chun, H.,  Kurlenkova, A., Licciardello, D., Caldwell, M., Mandelbaum, J. & Mikesell, L. (2022). Over-Exposed Self-Correction: Practices for Managing Competence and Morality, Research on Language and Social Interaction, 55:3, 203-221, DOI: 10.1080/08351813.2022.2067426

Dahm, M. (2011). Exploring perception and use of everyday language and medical terminology among international medical graduates in a medical ESP course in Australia, English for Specific Purposes, 30 (3), 186-197. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esp.2011.02.004.

Dahm, M. (2012). Coming to Terms with Medical Terms – Exploring Insights from Native and Non-native English Speakers in Patient-physician Communication. HERMES - Journal of Language and Communication in Business, 25(49), 79–98. https://doi.org/10.7146/hjlcb.v25i49.97739

Glickman, S.W., Ndubuizu, A., Weinfurt, K. P., Hamilton, C.D., Glickman, L.T, Schulman, K.A., Cairns, C. B (2011). The case for research justice: Inclusion of patients with limited English proficiency in clinical research. Academic Medicine, 86, 389-393.

Kitzinger, C., Mandelbaum, J. (2013), "Word Selection and Social Identities in Talk". Communication Monographs, 80 (2), 176–198.

LeBland, T.W., Hesson, A., Williams, A. (2014). Patient understanding of medical jargon: a survey study of U.S. medical students. Patient Education and Counseling, 95(2), 238-242.

Pieterse, A.H., Jager, N.A. Smets, E.M.A., Henselmans, I. (2013). Lay understanding of common medical terminology in oncology. Psychooncology, 22(5), 1186-1191.

Sidell, J. & Stivers, T. (Eds.) (2013). The handbook of conversation analysis. Blackwell.

Biography
Magdalena Solarek-Gliniewicz joined MultiLing in November 2020. Her PhD project focuses on communication between Polish doctors and Norwegian-speaking patients. Her research is on language barriers that Polish doctors encounter during their consultations in different hospitals all over the country and uncovering the strategies and patterns they use. She is part of the Nor-Pol project, and she uses methods such as CA and qualitative interviews.

Magdalena earned her master’s degree in Norwegian Language Studies at the University of Adam Mickiewicz in Poznan, Poland and continued her education in Polish-Norwegian Interpretation in the Public Sector at OsloMet. After her studies, she taught Norwegian in intensive courses for health personnel and worked as a lecturer of Norwegian at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Warsaw. In addition, she has worked as a Polish-Norwegian interpreter at Oslo University Hospital.

Organizer

Michelle White and Marianna Kyriacou

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Dorte Lønsmann: English and Globalisation in Denmark: A Changing Sociolinguistic Landscape?

Dorte Lønsmann (Associate Professor, University of Copenhagen) will present preliminary results from the project English and the Globalisation in Denmark: A Changing Sociolinguistic Landscape. 

Time and place: Oct. 7, 2022 10:15 AM – 11:15 AM, MultiLing meeting room, HWH 421

Abstract

The project English and Globalisation in Denmark: A Changing Sociolinguistic Landscape investigates the use of and attitudes to English in contemporary Denmark. In this presentation I would like to present preliminary results from two work packages. Work package 1 compares data from a new survey with 850 respondents to the results of an earlier large-scale survey on the use of English in Denmark (Preisler 1999, 2003). I will present results focusing on the presence of English and attitudes to English in Denmark. Work package 2 uses qualitative methods in the form of ethnographically-based focus groups to investigate language attitudes and ideologies among different groups in Danish society. Here I will present preliminary results from observations and a focus group interview with a group of pen-and-paper role players.

Biography

Dorte Lønsmann is Associate Professor of English Language at the Department of English, Germanic and Romance Studies, University of Copenhagen. She works within linguistic anthropology and researches English in Denmark, English as a global language, linguistic diversity in workplaces, language and migration, language socialisation and language ideologies. Her current research project English and Globalisation in Denmark: A Changing Sociolinguistic Landscape investigates the role of English in current Danish society and sociolinguistic change in relation to globalisation. Dorte Lønsmann has published, alone and with co-authors, in highly regarded international journals such as Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Language in Society and Multilingua.

Organizer

Haley De Korne

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How physicians use metaphors in their L2

Oliwia Szymanska will present the use of novel metaphoric expressions by L2 doctors in Norway.

Time and place: Oct. 5, 2022 2:15 PM – 3:15 PM, Hybrid: HWH 421 / Zoom

Abstract

Metaphors are a crucial part of efficient communication in healthcare. Health professionals use metaphors to make the medical universe more comprehensible for the patients (Casarett et al., 2010; Olsman et al., 2014; Landau et al. 2017; Spina et al. 2018; Johannessen & Askeland, 2018). What has not been investigated in the studies to date is the ability of physicians working in their second or third language to deploy metaphors in their L2.

In this talk I will present how Polish physicians speaking L2 Norwegian use metaphorical language in their encounter with L1 Norwegian patients. The study departs from the theory of cross-linguistic influence suggested by Jarvis and Pavlenko (2008) and the cognitive metaphor theory by Lakoff and Johnson (1980, 1999), further developed by Kövecses (2020). The data are transcripts of video-recordings from a number of outpatient clinics in Norway, supplemented by interviews on the doctors’ metaphorical awareness. The qualitative analysis of the data has shown that the doctors usually use unconventional metaphorical expressions. These are often sets of expressions used repeatedly in each conversation. By deploying imageries instead of clinical explanations, the doctors cater for their L2 lexicon shortages and secure understanding. A close analysis revealed that the expressions they favored came from the L1 but were perfectly comprehensible in the L2.

At the end of the talk, I will discuss both the theoretical and practical implications of these findings, the former involving cross-linguistic transferability of the metaphors, and the latter integration of figurative language in L2 classes for medical professionals.

References

Casarett, D. et al. (2010). Can Metaphors and Analogies Improve Communication with Seriously ill Patients? Journal of Palliative Medicine, Vol. 13, No. 3.

Jarvis, S. & A. Pavlenko. (2008). Crosslinguistic Influence in Language and Cognition.  Routledge.

Johannessen, A., & Askeland, N. (2018). Metaforer om sykdom og død: en litteraturoversikt. In: A. Johannessen, N. Askeland, I. Jørgensen & J. Ulvestad (Eds.), Døden i livet, pp 153-169.  Cappelen Damm Akademisk. https://doi.org/10.23865/noasp.40.ch9

Kövecses, Z. (2020). Extended Conceptual Metaphor Theory. Cambridge University Press.

Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. The University of Chicago Press.

Lakoff, George & M.Johnson. (1999). Philosophy in the Flesh. Basic Books.

Landau,M., J. Arndt & L. D. Cameron (2017). Do Metaphors in Health Messages Work? Exploring Emotional and Cognitive Factors. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

Olsman, E. et al. (2014). Improving communication on hope in palliative care. A qualitative study of palliative care professionals’ metaphors of hope: grip, source, tune, and vision. Journal of Pain and Symptom Management, 48(5), 831–838. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpainsymman.2014.02.008

Spina et al. (2018). Enhancing Health Message Farming With Metaphor and Cultural Values: Impact in Latinas’ Cervical Cancer Screening. Annals og Behavioral Medicine. Vol. 52, No 2.

World Health Organization. (2022). Global Strategy on Human Resources for Health: Workforce 2030: Reporting at Seventy-fifth World Health Assembly. https://www.who.int/news/item/02-06-2022-global-strategy-on-human-resources-for-health--workforce-2030

Biography

Oliwia Szymanska is a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Multilingualism in Society across the Lifespan. She has a doctoral degree from the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. Previously, she has worked as a senior lecturer in Norwegian as a second language at the University of Oslo. Before moving to Norway she was an assistant professor and leader for Norwegian language studies at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Warsaw. For many years, she also taught Norwegian to physicians within specialist healthcare, published teaching materials, and developed a language proficiency test for the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Oliwia investigates different aspects of second language acquisition in Polish speakers of Norwegian deploying conceptual transfer hypothesis. Currently, she focuses mainly on the comprehension and production of L2 metaphorical expressions, and L2 Norwegian in specialist healthcare.

Organizer

Michelle White and Marianna Kyriacou

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Multilingualism and patterns of language use in Gamo: implications for language policy decisions

Almaz Wasse Gelagay (Kotebe University of Education) will give an open talk about multilingualism and patterns of language use in Gamo.

Time and place: Sep. 28, 2022 3:15 PM – 4:15 PM, Henrik Wergelands hus, MutliLing meeting room 421 / Zoom

Abstract

Gamo refers to an administrative area located in South-Western Ethiopia, a multilingual East African country where more than 85 languages are spoken (Lewis, 2009), to the people and their language. People in Gamo are multilingual in their native language Gamo, an Afro-Asiatic Omotic language spoken by 1,070,626 people (CSA 2008, p.91), in Amharic a lingua franca and in English in the education and business sector. Recently, linguistically significant developments are happening both at the Federal and regional levels of the country. The Federal government has planned to introduce a new language policy to use five languages in state services. This decision will likely influence the language practices at all levels of administration. In addition, the Southern Nations Nationalities and People’s Regional State (SNNPR) of the country is being divided in to different regional states where speakers of diverse languages come together.

These new scenarios have brought the issue of language policy in to discussion. Decisions concerning language in education and other domains should be informed by studies of language use like this one. Hence, the endeavor of this research is to describe language use patterns of Gamo-Amharic bilingual speakers in different domains. It specifically attempts to see which language (Gamo, Amharic or English) is used where, location or domain, and with whom, addressee (Holmes 2013, p. 21), and if the language of education policy (1994) that has been in place for over 25 years has brought any change on the language practices of speakers. To this end, quantitative data were collected from 95 participants whose age ranged from 18-56 years old via a sociolinguistic questionnaire. Individual interviews and focus group discussions were also held with 21 students and teachers. The findings indicate that the Gamo language was used mostly at the home domain with grandparents and parents and with intimate friends, in market places and in shops. Gamo was also used in situations where speakers had to express emotions as for praying, blessing, cursing, when angry and surprised. Amharic was used in settings outside the home like in office communications, in public transports such as buses and taxies and in shops as well. Amharic was also used to write personal or educational materials, to read books, and to listen to music mostly since electronic and paper publications were not sufficiently available in Gamo. Writing in Gamo was also perceived to be taking more time and space for personal use due to presence of gemination, vowel length and diagraphs in the orthography.  

Key words: Ethiopia, Gamo, multilingualism, language use, domains

References

Central Statistical Authority. 2008. The Population and Housing Census: Statistical Report for Country level. Addis Ababa: CSA.

Education and Training Policy, Ethiopia.1994. Addis Ababa.

Holmes, Janet. 2013. An Introduction to Sociolinguistics (4thedition). New York: Routledge.

Lewis, M. Paul. (ed). 2009. Ethnologue: languages of the world. Dallas, TX: SIL International. http://www. ethnologue.com/.

Biography

Almaz Wasse Gelagay is a faculty member at Kotebe University of Education in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. She has got her PhD in Linguistics, specifically in Sociolinguistics from Addis Ababa University in 2017. Her research areas include, but not limited to, language policy, language learning/teaching and multilingualism, and language use in multilingual contexts. She has been a long-time collaborator of Center for Multilingualism in Society across the Lifespan (MultiLing) since she was a PhD student in 2014. She is now a visiting researcher at MultiLing.

Organizer

Unn Røyneland

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Similarity and order effects in multilingual speech perception and production

This talk will address the roles of linguistic similarity and learning order in crosslinguistic influence at the phonetic level in multilinguals.

Time and place: Sep. 21, 2022 2:15 PM – 3:15 PM, Hybrid: HWH 421 / Zoom

Abstract

In this talk, I will report on recent and ongoing work examining the dynamics of cross-linguistic influence in multilingual speech. First, I'll describe a line of research examining the roles of acquisition order and phonetic similarity in influencing progressive cross-linguistic influence during third language (L3) perceptual learning. The results of this research show a facilitative effect of prior tonal experience, whether from one's first-learned language (L1) or second-learned language (L2), in L3 tone perception, but also a larger effect of L1 tonal experience; furthermore, the results show no effect of typological similarity, although there are effects of crosslinguistic perceptual similarity and within-language acoustic similarity. Second, I'll outline a line of research examining the roles of acquisition order and typological similarity among L1, L2, and L3 in regressive cross-linguistic influence, focusing on the case of speech rhythm in "stress-timed" and "syllable-timed" languages within the same linguistic repertoire. The results show a prevailing effect of similarity, but also an interaction between effects of similarity and of order. I will discuss the implications of these findings both for models of later language acquisition and for models of nonnative speech.

Biography

Charles B. Chang is Associate Professor of Linguistics at Boston University (BU), where he directs the Phonetics, Acquisition & Multilingualism Lab (PAMLab: sites.bu.edu/pamlab) and holds affiliations with the Center for Innovation in Social Science, Center for the Study of Asia, and Hearing Research Center. Funded in part by a Peter Paul Career Development Professorship, the BU Center for the Humanities, and the National Science Foundation, his research examines phonetic and phonological aspects of language learning, bilingualism and multilingualism, and language attrition. Links to publications can be found on his website at cbchang.com.

Organizer

Michelle White and Marianna Kyriacou

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The lack of diversity in child language research and what we can do about it

We will talk about the diversity of research published in the four main child language acquisition journals, and discuss possible steps to increase linguistic coverage and to build a more diverse discipline.

Time and place: Sep. 7, 2022 2:15 PM – 3:15 PM, Hybrid: Zoom / HWH 421

Abstract

In the first part of the presentation, we will talk about our paper which looked at the last 45 years of research published in the four main child language acquisition journals: Journal of Child Language, First Language, Language Acquisition and Language Learning and Development. We coded each article for several variables, including (1) participant group (mono vs multilingual), (2) language(s), (3) topic(s) and (4) country of author affiliation, from each journal’s inception until the end of 2020. We found some significant shortcomings of the current state of child language research: a large skew in our evidential base towards English and a few other Indo-European languages, that partly has its origins in a lack of researcher diversity. In the second part of the presentation, we will discuss possible steps to increase linguistic coverage and to build a more diverse discipline, based on the 21 commentaries on our paper.

Biography

Rowena Garcia is a postdoc researcher in the Developmental Psycholinguistics group of the University of Potsdam in Germany, and a guest researcher at the Language Development department of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands. Her main interest is in figuring out how children, endowed with the same neurobiology, can learn the diversity of the languages of the world. She investigates morphosyntactic acquisition in Tagalog, an understudied language spoken in the Philippines, as well as phonotactic acquisition in German and Russian. She uses corpus data analysis and psycholinguistic methods like eye-tracking and structural priming to investigate how children process the input that they hear and how they acquire their ambient language.

Evan Kidd is currently a Professor of Psychology at The Australian National University, and a Senior Investigator and Research Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands. His research investigates the psychology of language, with a main focus on the developmental processes that contribute to language acquisition and use. His current research interests include (i) the acquisition and processing of syntax, (ii) individual differences in first and second language acquisition, (iii) the neurocognitive mechanisms that support syntax acquisition and use (e.g., memory, statistical learning), and (iv) the role of socio-cognitive processes such as symbolic play in language acquisition. He has conducted research on a number of languages, including English, German, Italian, Finnish, Cantonese, Mandarin, Persian, Murrinhpatha (Non-Pama-Nyungan), Pitjanjatjara (Pama-Nyungan), and Tagalog (Austronesian).

Organizer

Michelle White and Marianna Kyriacou

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Multilingualism Research Forum/Flerspråklighetsforum: Migration, language learning, and professional trajectories of highly educated Indonesian migrants in Norway
Nuranindia Endah Arum (Doctoral Research Fellow, MultiLing) will give a talk on her in-progress PhD project on Norwegian language learning experiences of highly educated Indonesians in Norway.

Time and place: Aug. 31, 2022 2:15 PM – 3:15 PM, Hybrid: Zoom / HWH 421

Abstract

Learning the language(s) of the host country is one of many challenges that migrants might have to face to be professionally and socially included in the new country. This study examines experiences of highly educated newly arrived and long-term migrants from Indonesia in Norway in learning the Norwegian language. Using a mixed-method approach, which includes online questionnaires, semi-structured interviews, focus group discussions, language diaries, and language-related policy document analysis, this study aims to understand opportunities and constraints in learning Norwegian, especially for professional purposes.

In this talk, I will present my work in progress and discuss preliminary results from a nexus analysis (Scollon & Scollon, 2004) of recently arrived migrants' opportunities and challenges for Norwegian language learning and job searching. The findings suggest that different structural conditions, such as migration status and the pandemic situation, have had an impact on their language learning and employment possibilities. However, these recent migrants' efforts to create learning opportunities do not always translate into successful inclusion despite their historical bodies as highly educated migrants.

I will also discuss ideas for future research. The first idea concerns space and place (Benson, 2021) in relation to power relations, ideologies and regimes of legitimacy of migrants as second language learners. For the second idea, I will explore how social context influences migrants' strategies and sources of regulation in learning Norwegian (Gao & Hu, 2020). The seminar audience is invited to engage in the discussion of the ideas after the talk.

References

Benson, P. (2021). Language Learning Environments: Spatial Perspectives on SLA. Multilingual Matters. https://doi.org/10.21832/BENSON4900

Gao, X. (Andy), & Hu, J. (2020). From Language Learning Strategy Research to a Sociocultural Understanding of Self-Regulated Learning. In M. J. Raya & F. Vieira (Eds.), Autonomy in Language Education: Theory, Research and Practice (1st ed., pp. 31–45). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429261336

Scollon, R., & Scollon, S. B. K. (2004). Nexus analysis: Discourse and the emerging internet. Routledge.

Biography

Nuranindia Endah Arum is a Doctoral Research Fellow at MultiLing — Center for Multilingualism in Society across the Lifespan, University of Oslo. She holds an MA in Italian Studies and Linguistics (University of Bologna, Italy) and BA in French Studies (University of Indonesia). She also has several years of experience teaching Italian, French, and Indonesian language. Her PhD project focuses on language practices and Norwegian language learning experiences of highly educated Indonesians in Norwegian professional settings.

Organizer

Michelle White and Marianna Kyriacou

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Pomme, manzana, sagarra, or eple... How do multilinguals control and switch between their languages?

Angela de Bruin will discuss language control in multilingual speakers and how they manage competition, word selection, interference and switching between languages. Open lecture. 

Time and place: June 7, 2022 2:00 PM – 3:15 PM, Hybrid/Henrik Wergelands hus, meeting room 421

Abstract

All language users have to select which words they want to use: Do I refer to a cute Dalmatian puppy as “dog”, “puppy”, or “Dalmatian”? Multilinguals do not just have words in one language to choose from but can select from multiple languages. Even if only one language is possible in a certain context (for example, when giving this talk in English), words in the other languages might compete for selection. In the first part of this talk, I will discuss how multilinguals manage this competition between languages by applying language control to make sure they select words in the target language, avoid interference from other languages, and switch when needed. I will focus on contexts that require use of one specific language (single-language contexts) and on dual-language contexts that require multilinguals to switch languages in response to cues (for example, the face of a monolingual English-speaking interlocutor requiring you to switch from Norwegian to English). However, while much research has focused on these more “controlled” types of language use, some multilinguals also switch between languages more freely, for example when they are speaking with another multilingual who shares their languages. In the second part of the talk, I will therefore focus on contexts in which bilinguals can use two languages freely. I will discuss (some) factors that influence language choice and will evaluate how language control varies between different types of switching contexts.

Biography

Dr Angela de Bruin is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor equivalent) in the Department of Psychology at the University of York (UK). She completed her PhD at the University of Edinburgh (2013-2016) and then worked at the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language as a postdoctoral researcher and Marie Curie fellow (2016-2019). Her main research interests are bilingualism, language production, cognitive ageing, and executive control.

Organizer

Elisabet García González

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Multilingualism Research Forum/Flerspråklighetsforum: For ein språkaktivist det kan jo mange vera: theoretical reflections on ethnographies of Nynorsk, Catalan and Scots language activism

James Konrad Puchowski (PhD Candidate, University of Edinburgh) will share theoretical reflections on ethnographies of Nynorsk, Catalan and Scots language activism. 

Time and place: May 25, 2022 2:15 PM – 3:15 PM, Zoom Link

Abstract

In theories of language variation, change and shift, language activism and language activists have been assigned various theoretical definitions in order to position the contributive role of various social actors. At times, these definitions appear to either essentialise language activists with a range of more prescriptive definitions, so as to distinguish them from other actors such as politicians and academics, whereas other attempts to define language activism theoretically are intentionally vague. Through my ethnographic research—primarily amongst Nynorsk activists, but extended to Catalan and Scots—I propose an alternative perspective which underlines who has the potential to engage in metadiscourse and language ideological conflict, and how conceptualised boundaries between activists and other social actors are often, and necessarily, blurred. My reflections and arguments should lead to an open debate for sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists alike: is "language activism/activist” an even useful term for linguists in the first place? 

Biography

James Konrad Puchowski is a PhD candidate at the University of Edinburgh, and Lecturer (Teaching) in Norwegian at University College London. He completed his MA (Hons.) in 2017 and wrote an MSc by Research dissertation in 2018 on Nynorsk language activism and the work of Norsk Målungdom. His PhD thesis is a collection of three articles, examining each a case of language activism in Catalonia, Norway and Scotland. He is a linguistic ethnographer focusing on language activism as social discourse, and uses content analyses and metapragmatic frameworks throughout his research.

An active Nynorsk-user and former member of Studentmållaget i Oslo, he has has written several articles for framtida.no, Aftenposten and Klassekampen. His first peer-reviewed paper was released this year in the Journal of Postcolonial Linguistics on his research in Catalonia with ’non-native’ activists. His second article, on Nynorsk activism, is currently under review at the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology. 

Aside from his academic work, James is the Co-convenor of the Council of the Scottish Green Party, has a home library of over 600 books, and owns three vintage typewriters. 

Organizer

Aleksandra Olszewska, Gavin Lamb and Haley De Korne

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Multilingualism Research Forum/Flerspråklighetsforum: Pre-service teachers’ raciolinguistic ideologies about refugee students’ education in Turkey

Tuba Yilmaz (Lecturer, Necmettin Erbakan University, Turkey/ University of Florida, USA) will discuss pre-service teachers’ raciolinguistic ideologies about refugee students’ education in Turkey.

Please note this is an event open to public.

Time and place: May 18, 2022 2:30 PM – 3:30 PM, Zoom Link

Abstract

Limited deliberate and planned immigration policies and salient, popularized, and politicized “hate speech” in the (social) media caused an increase in the circulation of raciolinguistic ideologies in Turkey. Particularly targeting the over 3.7 million registered ‘temporary’ Syrian refugees, these raciolinguistic ideologies position refugees as ‘other’, ‘inferior’, and ‘linguistically deficient,’ reiterating their ‘temporary’ status in Turkish law and demanding their repatriation. Raciolinguistic ideologies circulating in broader society are also observed in schools, among teachers, parents, and mainstream students (Aydin & Kaya, 2019; Cirit-Karaagaç & Guvenc, 2019; Rosa, 2016).  This study explores how pre-service teachers employ raciolinguistic ideologies and discourses as they prepare to work with refugee students. 

For this study, pre-service teachers in 9 different teaching programs at a state university were interviewed about their ideologies and anticipated interactions with refugee-background students.  The findings demonstrated that social, economic, and cultural factors supported and accelerated the raciolinguistic ideologies among the pre-service teachers; however, the strength of ideologies varied based on city and time. Moreover, pre-service teachers perceived integration in Turkish mainstream classrooms impossible due to the powerful raciolinguistic ideologies at schools. Finally, pre-service teachers demonstrated unwillingness and unpreparedness to teach refugee students.

Biography

Tuba Yilmaz works as a lecturer in the English Language Education program
at Necmettin Erbakan University, Turkey. She completed her master’s and doctorate degree in the ESOL/Bilingual Education program at the University of Florida, US.
She has one year of K-8 and seven years of tertiary level teaching experience in Turkey and in the US. Her research interests include translanguaging, multilingual/multicultural education, refugee student education, and critical pedagogy.

Organizer

Aleksandra Olszewska and Gavin Lamb

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Multilingualism Research Forum/Flerspråklighetsforum: The Comprehensive Aphasia Test across languages: insights from Norwegian and Croatian

Ana Matić Škorić (Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Zagreb) will discuss the Comprehensive Aphasia Test across languages. 

Time and place: May 11, 2022 2:15 PM – 3:15 PM, Zoom Link

Abstract

Aphasia symptoms depend on a range of factors, such as the severity, cause, location and size of the lesion, time post onset, and individual’s age, education, and prior language competence (Eng & Kerman Lerner, 2010; Plowman et al., 2012). These factors interact and impact the course of therapy, so it is important to obtain a comprehensive language profile of the individual. Besides, more than half of the world's population is bilingual or multilingual, so there is an urgent need to understand the characteristics of aphasia symptoms in these individuals, and to ensure appropriate assessment and treatment (Goral & Hejazi, 2021).

Nevertheless, developing multilingual tests is very challenging for a number of reasons. The need for a reliable and comparable assessment tool across countries was recognized by Working Group 2 within the Collaboration of Aphasia Trialists. Its members agreed to adapt the Comprehensive Aphasia Test - CAT (Swinburn et al., 2004) into their respective languages. Recently, CAT-N (Swinburn, Porter, Howard, Høeg et al., 2021) and CAT-HR (Swinburn, Porter, Howard, Kuvač Kraljević et al., 2020) were normed in Norwegian and Croatian.

Since analogous (psycho)linguistic and psychometric decisions were made during test development (Fyndanis et al., 2017), the two tests are expected to be comparable. To examine their comparability, performance on 10 subtests of the Language Battery was compared between the two samples (N group = 71) with equal distribution in terms of age, educational level, and aphasia severity.

The conducted analyses revealed a few differences, with the Norwegian sample achieving slightly higher overall results. Interestingly, more specific analyses revealed the main effect of aphasia severity on all dependent variables (individual subtests), while the effect of language was found only in a few subtests. The obtained findings will be discussed with respect to the differences in structural features of the two languages, and concrete research and clinical implications will be emphasized.

Biography

Ana Matić Škorić is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Speech and Language Pathology (SLP), Faculty of Education and Rehabilitation Sciences, University of Zagreb. She has an MA in SLP and a PhD in Linguistics. Her main research activities revolve around speakers with typical development as well as developmental and acquired language disorders. She has been or is currently involved in 8 national and international projects funded by the CSF, COST or EU structural and investment funds. She has published over twenty papers and book chapters (with 5 in publication), and co-authored two tests for the assessment of language. She received a competitive DAAD scholarship to visit the University of Konstanz in 2019/2020, as well as several STSMs (visits to different European universities) and was acknowledged as a highest achieving young researcher at her faculty in 2019.

Organizer

Hanne Gram Simonsen, Monica Norvik, Aleksandra Olszewska and Gavin Lamb

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Multilingualism Research Forum/Flerspråklighetsforum: Handling the Other in anti-racist talk: Narratives on ’immigrant students’ in a prestigious Swedish secondary school

Rickard Jonsson (Professor, Stockholm University) will discuss anti-racist ways of constructing the ethnic and racial Other in talk.

Please note this is a closed event for MultiLing and ILN members only.

Time and place: May 4, 2022 2:15 PM – 3:15 PM, HWH 421

Abstract

In Swedish public media debates, commentators often present a master narrative of Sweden as a country without racism. With the exception of a few right-wing extremists and a populist party, this anti-racist discourse portrays Sweden as generally being a welcoming society without structural discrimination or prejudice. However, as Teun van Dijk (1992) reminded us already three decades ago, the denial of racism can be closely connected to the racism that is said to be rejected. This double discourse, which simultaneously denies and produces racism, departs from an often taken for granted dichotomy of tolerant versus intolerant positions.

This paper argues that such dichotomy needs to be critically explored. In order to do so, I shall investigate the example of anti-racist stories told by students in a Swedish school context. Drawing on linguistic ethnographic data from a high prestigious secondary school in Stockholm, the paper examines how accounts of school problems and disruptive students seem to evoke the category of the ‘immigrant student’ –  a category that in turn is associated with a wide range of other problems, such as ‘bad behaviour’ or ‘deviant linguistic practices’. The paper discusses how students rhetorically manage the dilemma to tell these stories with help from a so called political correct vocabulary and without sounding disparaging or in any other ways excluding. Put differently, this paper is an investigation of anti-racist ways of constructing the ethnic and racial Other in talk.

Biography

Rickard Jonsson is a professor in Child and Youth studies, at Stockholm University. His research concerns masculinity, sexuality, ethnicity and youths language use. Using a linguistic ethnographic approach, together with Narrative and Discourse analysis of talk in interaction,  he investigates the construction of young masculinities in everyday school life. Other areas of interest are the construction of Swedishness, whiteness and anti-racism in mundane talk, narratives of boys’ failure and underachievement in school, and, more recently, the study of humor and laughter as a lens to investigate power and social order in media and youth institutions.

Organizer

Aleksandra Olszewska, Gavin Lamb and Bente Svendsen

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Multilingualism Research Forum/Flerspråklighetsforum: Covid-19 information texts in teaching metaphorical expressions

Oliwia Szymanska (Postdoctoral Fellow, MultiLing) will discuss the acquisition of L2 metaphoric expressions by Polish adult learners of Norwegian.

Please note this is a closed event for MultiLing and ILN members only.

Time and place: Apr. 27, 2022 2:15 PM – 3:15 PM, HWH 421, Hybrid Format

Abstract

Mastery of L2 metaphorical expressions is a challenging issue that might affect receptive and productive skills by either impairing comprehension or yielding unidiomatic language use. As L1 knowledge is reported to have a substantial impact on whether and how one understands metaphoric expressions in L2, using the L1 knowledge to stimulate learners’ metaphorical awareness seems to be an effective measure. Despite a great body of research on metaphorical expressions in L2, many call for more practical solutions for awakening of metaphoric awareness in the classroom.

The study investigates the acquisition of L2 metaphoric expressions in adult learners during a 90-minutes teaching session. The main research tool comprised two translation tests with metaphoric expressions extracted from information pages on Covid-19 published by Norwegian Institute of Public Health - the original text published in Norwegian, and the Polish translation.

The reasoning behind this choice was to ensure that the participants had come across the expressions in either one or both languages. This was important for the priming effect to occur in the acquisition process. As the study was carried out in autumn 2021 when the pandemic was vividly present in the media and in the public awareness, the probability for this was considered high. The purpose of this talk is to present how such a session can be designed, and what can be achieved by referring to cross-linguistic similarities when working with metaphors.

Biography

Oliwia Szymanska is a postdoctoral researcher at Center for Multilingualism in Society across the Lifespan. She has a doctoral degree from Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. Previously, she worked as a senior lecturer in Norwegian as a second language at the University of Oslo. Before moving to Norway she was an assistant professor and leader for Norwegian language studies at University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Warsaw. For many years, she has also taught Norwegian to physicians within specialist healthcare, published teaching materials, and developed a language proficiency test for Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Oliwia investigates different aspects of second language acquisition in Polish speakers of Norwegian deploying conceptual transfer hypothesis. Currently, she focuses mainly on the comprehension and production of L2 metaphorical expressions, and L2 Norwegian in specialist healthcare.

Organizer

Aleksandra Olszewska and Gavin Lamb

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Multilingualism Research Forum/ Flerspråklighetsforum: Linguistic diversity, trust, and vaccine inequalities: the role of interpreters in the COVID-19 vaccination campaign in Italy

Andrea Ciribuco (Lecturer, NUI Galway/ Fellow, University College London) and Federico M. Federici (Professor, University College London) will discuss the role of interpreters in the COVID-19 vaccination campaign in Italy.

Time and place: Apr. 20, 2022 2:15 PM – 3:15 PM, Zoom 

Abstract

In June 2021, a report from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control warned about “emerging evidence of low COVID-19 vaccination rates in some migrant and ethnic minority groups in the EU/EEA”. Health inequalities between migrant communities and local populations are often the result of social and economic inequalities. However, cultural differences and linguistic diversity may contribute to prevent migrants from accessing trusted information in a language that they can understand, as per the guidelines of the World Health Organisation (WHO 2017).

Drawing on semi-structured interviews with intercultural communicators and commissioners of language services for migrant communities, this paper looks at the COVID-19 vaccination campaign in two areas of Italy, Rome and the Emilia-Romagna region. The paper will explore the role of linguistic differences, and of the (un)availability of multilingual information, in generating vaccine hesitancy among Italian-based migrants. It also presents the efforts of interpreters and cultural mediators who have worked to reduce vaccine inequality by acting as a bridge between medical personnel and migrant communities.

The talk will reflect on the challenges that mediators encountered at both linguistic and social level, and how they met those challenges by building relations of trust with both medical personnel and target populations.

Biography

Andrea Ciribuco is a lecturer in Italian in the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at NUI Galway. As honorary fellow at the Centre for Translation Studies at University College London, he is involved in the British Academy- funded project STRIVE (Sustainable Translations to Reduce Inequalities and Vaccination hEsitancy). Previously, between 2017 and 2021, he has worked as an Irish Research Council / Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow in Italy to research multilingualism and intercultural communication in refugee reception centres, working in collaboration with the Italian NGO Tamat (www.tamat.org). His work concerns multilingualism and creativity; migrant autobiographies; and the social implications of translation in the everyday lives of migrants and refugees. He is the author of the volume The Autobiography of a Language. Emanuel Carnevali's Italian/American Writing (2019). He is a member of the Transnational Italian Studies Working Group.

Federico M. Federici is Professor of Intercultural Crisis Communication at the Centre for Translation Studies, University College London. Previously, he designed the curriculum, founded, and directed the EMT MA in Translation Studies at Durham University, UK (2008-2014). His research focuses on translators and interpreters as intercultural mediators, online news translation, and the study of translation in crises. His latest edited volume is entitled Language as a Social Determinant of Health (2022). Federico was member of the EU-funded INTERACT Crisis Translation Network (2017-2020) led by Sharon O’Brien (Dublin City University) with whom he is developing cross-disciplinary projects in Crisis Translation. Federico is the principal investigator of the project STRIVE: Sustainable Translations to Reduce Inequalities and Vaccination hEsitancy, funded by the British Academy.

Organizer

Aleksandra Olszewska and Gavin Lamb

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Multilingualism Research Forum/Flerspråklighetsforum: Does the word order of languages change sequential learning and processing?

Luca Onnis (Associate Professor, MultiLing) will discuss how basic sequence learning and processing mechanisms become attuned to the canonical word order imposed by natural languages.

Time and place: Apr. 11, 2022 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM, HWH 421, Hybrid Format

Abstract

A long-standing debate in the cognitive and linguistic sciences is whether and to what extent language shapes cognition. I propose that basic sequence learning and processing mechanisms become attuned to the canonical word order imposed by natural languages.

For example, left-branching (LB) and right-branching (RB) languages are differentially predictive of linear and constituent word order, placing a parsing emphasis on predictive/forward-looking (LB) or retrodictive/backward-looking (RB) conditional probabilities between words (Onnis & Thiessen, 2013). Consistent with this observation, I show that in implicit learning tasks English and Korean adults and infants process novel sequences of pseudowords differently, favouring prediction (Korean) and retrodiction (English) respectively (Thiessen et al., 2019).

This suggests that statistical learning rapidly adapts to the predominant syntactic structure of the native language. Such adaptation may facilitate subsequent learning by highlighting statistical structures that are likely to be informative in the native linguistic environment. Indeed, in two self-paced reading tasks and an eye-tracking reading task involving natural language sentences, adult English native speakers used retrodictive word relations to achieve more fluent reading (Onnis et al., 2022; Onnis, & Huettig, 2021).

Given the prevalent view that the brain is inherently a ‘prediction machine’ (Clark, 2013), these findings are of general theoretical importance for reevaluating retrodiction mechanisms more as a cognitive principle, and I propose ways to further integrate its role in future research.

References 

Clark, A. (2013). Whatever next? Predictive brains, situated agents, and the future of cognitive science. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 36(3), 181-204.

Onnis, L., & Thiessen, E. (2013). Language experience changes subsequent learning. Cognition, 126(2), 268-284.

Onnis, L., & Huettig, F. (2021). Can prediction and retrodiction explain whether frequent multi-word phrases are accessed ‘precompiled’from memory or compositionally constructed on the fly?. Brain Research, 1772, 147674.

Onnis, L., Lim, A., & Huettig, F. (2022). What does it mean to say the mind is inherently forward looking? Exploring probabilistic integration in language processing. Manuscript under revision.

Thiessen, E. D., Onnis, L., Hong, S. J., & Lee, K. S. (2019). Early developing syntactic knowledge influences sequential statistical learning in infancy. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 177, 211-221.

Biography

Luca Onnis holds an M.A. in Translation Studies from the University of Bologna, Italy, and a Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Warwick, UK. He was a Research Associate at Cornell University, and held professorial positions at the University of Hawaii (USA), Nanyang Technological University (Singapore), and the University of Genoa (Italy). He founded two Psycholinguistics labs and was Director of the Centre for Second Language Acquisition. He has won several prestigious grants from the European Research Council (ERC), the U.S. National Institutes of Health, and the Singapore National Research Foundation, for a total of 6M Euros. He is on the editorial board of the Journal of Cultural Cognitive Science.

Organizer

Aleksandra Olszewska and Gavin Lamb

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Multilingualism Research Forum/ Flerspråklighetsforum: Engaged Collaboration for Multilingual Student Learning

Dr. Maria Coady (Professor, University of Florida) will discuss engaged collaboration for multilingual student learning.

Time and place: Apr. 6, 2022 2:15 PM – 3:15 PM, Zoom

Abstract

Multilingualism is neither a new nor recent phenomenon worldwide. However, educational systems and the preparation of educators to support multilingual (ML) students have neither kept pace with demographic shifts nor revealed more nuanced ways to ensure equitable education for ML students. Problematic is that access to well-prepared educators and high-quality language education programs remains irregular across varied school settings. This presentation describes a three-year educator professional development (PD) project with 22 rural educators. Using a framework of relational trust (Bryk & Schneider, 2002) and critical dialogue (Freire, 1970), the data collected (participant coursework, focus groups, surveys, and on-site observations) revealed how relationships among participants emerged over the PD and how this extended beyond the educators. Data also show that ML student learning was predicated upon strong educator collaboration, how educators thought about their rural ML students, and how they made changes to their practices for rural ML students. The presentation ends with a discussion and implications for engaged collaboration in and beyond schools.

References

Bryk, A. S., & Schneider, B. (2003). Trust in schools: A core resource for school reform. Educational leadership, 60(6), 40-45.

Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Continuum.

Biography

Dr. Maria Coady is Professor of ESOL and Bilingual Education at the University of Florida. She received her doctor of philosophy degree from the University of Colorado, Boulder, where she studied bilingualism and bilingual education. Her dissertation examined Irish-English bilingual schools, Gaelscoileanna, in the Republic of Ireland. Using a lens of equity, Dr. Coady examines multilingualism, bilingual education, place-based teacher education, and language policies. Dr. Coady prepares both in- and pre-service teachers to work with ML students in the US and worldwide. She has prepared educators in countries such as Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ukraine, the United Arab Emirates, China, Ireland, and South Africa. Her new books include The Coral Way Bilingual Program (2020), Connecting School and the Multilingual Home: Theory and Practice for Rural Educators (2019), Why TESOL (5th ed., 2018, with E. W. Ariza), and Early Language Learning Policies in the 21st Century (Ed., with S. Zein, 2021). Her forthcoming book (2022) is titled Teaching, Learning, and Leading for Rural Multilingual Students (with P. Golombek and N. Marichal). Dr. Coady serves as an expert consultant with the US Department of Justice and Office of Civil Rights on matters related to ML student language and literacy development. She is currently on assignment (2021-22) as Distinguished Chair in the Humanities and Social Sciences at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland, with the US Fulbright Commission.

Organizer

Aleksandra Olszewska and Gavin Lamb

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Multilingualism Research Forum/Flerspråklighetsforum: COVID-19 first lockdown as a unique window into language acquisition: What you do (with your child) matters.

Natalia Kartushina (Associate Professor, MultiLing) will discuss the role of child-parent activities on early language development during the first Covid 19-related lockdown.

Time and place: Mar. 30, 2022 2:15 PM – 3:15 PM, HWH 421, Hybrid Format

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic, and the resulting closure of daycare centers worldwide, led to unprecedented changes in children’s learning environments. This period of increased time at home with caregivers, with limited access to external sources (e.g., daycares) provides a unique opportunity to examine the associations between the caregiver-child activities and children’s language development.

The vocabularies of 1742 children aged 8-36 months across 13 countries and 12 languages were evaluated at the beginning and end of the first lockdown period in their respective countries (from March to September 2020). Shortly after lockdown began in early March 2020 across 13 countries, parents were asked to complete an online questionnaire containing questions on the child’s age, exposure to different languages, number of siblings and vocabulary development. 

Parents were then contacted again at the end of the lockdown (for that family or in that area, in general). They were asked about the amount of time children spent during lockdown on the following activities  (together with a caregiver or alone): shared book reading, structured child-caregiver games (referred to as structured parent-child interaction in the preregistration), free play with their caregiver, singing, speaking, outdoor activities, watching TV, baby shows or cartoons (henceforth, referred to as passive screen exposure), playing digital baby games (henceforth, active screen exposure involving interaction with a de-vice), and playing freely without adults.

Parents were also asked to complete a standardized vocabulary checklist indicating the number of words their child understood and/or said at the beginning, and again, at the end of lockdown so that an increase in the number of words gained over lockdown could be calculated. Then, we assessed whether the time spent on these activities predicted vocabulary development during lockdown, as indexed by the difference in the child’s vocabulary size (in percentile, compared to norms, and in raw scores, where norms were not available) at the beginning and end of the lockdown period. In addition, we also measured caregiver’s education (as a proxy for SES) to account for its potential associations with vocabulary development.

Children who had less passive screen exposure and whose caregivers read more to them showed larger gains in vocabulary development during lockdown, after controlling for SES and other care-giver-child activities.  Children also gained more words than expected (based on normative data) during lockdown, either caregivers were more aware of their child’s development, or vocabulary development benefited from intense caregiver-child interaction during lockdown, or both. We discuss these results in the context of the extraordinary circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Biography

Natalia Kartushina is an Associate Professor in Psycholinguistics, who joined MultiLing in December 2020. She holds a PhD in Experimental Psycholinguistics (University of Geneva) and had previously worked as a postdoctoral researcher at BCBL (Spain) and BabyLing (Institute for Psychology, UiO). Her research interests cover first and second-language phonological/lexical acquisition and the role of environment in shaping language learning.

Organizer

Aleksandra Olszewska and Gavin Lamb

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Multilingualism Research Forum/Flerspråklighetsforum: How do you design a psycholinguistic experiment?

Elisabet García González (Doctoral Research Fellow, MultiLing) will discuss how to design a psycholinguistic experiment.

Everyone, students or researchers, seeking to learn about experimental design are welcome to join regardless of their research background. Come ready to ask questions. 

Time and place: Mar. 23, 2022 2:15 PM – 3:15 PM, Hybrid event

Abstract

If you are interested in methodology and are curious to learn more about how experiments in the language sciences are planned and designed, this is the seminar for you. Experimental research on language has evolved and changed significantly in the last decade, and many of the current methodologies have a greater overlap with psychology and the cognitive sciences than with traditional linguistics. In this interactive talk, I will walk you through some of the key aspects one must take into account when designing an experiment. I will focus on tasks from one of my current studies, where we measure language switching as well as several cognitive measures. I will also discuss limitations of experiment design, experiment protocols for safe data collection, and how to make your research design more open and collaborative, prior, during and post data collection.

Biography

Elisabet is a Doctoral Research Fellow in Psycholinguistics at MulitLing. Her research focuses on language and cognition in multilingual children, the role of executive functions in language switching, and language use in multilingual families. She has carried out an online study on the effects of the pandemic in multilingual families in Norway, and she is currently collecting data for her study on language switching in children in Norway and Finland. Prior to joining MultiLing, she carried out research in The Netherlands on prediction in L2 acquisition, and heritage language development.

Organizer

Aleksandra Olszewska and Gavin Lamb

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Multilingualism Research Forum/Flerspråklighetsforum: Personal names in historical contexts: Sociolinguistic approaches

Michelle Waldispühl (Associate Professor, University of Gothenburg; Guest Researcher, University of Oslo) will discuss the historical use of personal names in multilingual contexts.

Please note this is a closed event for MultiLing and ILN members only.

Time and place: Mar. 16, 2022 2:15 PM – 3:15 PM, HW421

Abstract

I will present on-going research within my project “Variation and contact in medieval personal names” (funded by the Swedish Research Council) and address social and situational variation of personal names in historical multilingual contexts.

The usage of personal names in multilingual contexts is in general an under-investigated area of research and historical material in particular is unexplored. A recent volume titled Names and Naming: Multicultural Aspects (edited by Oliviu Felecan and Alina Bugheșiu, Springer 2021) provides a rich and important contribution to the filling of that gap with case studies from a wide range of different geographic areas. However, many studies are lexically descriptive and only few include sociolinguistic considerations about, for example, the connection between personal names and identity or its role for social affiliation or segregation in multilingual contexts. Moreover, historical perspectives are utterly scarce.

In my presentation, I will focus on historical personal names mainly from the Liber vitae of the Reichenau Abbey in Southern Germany, a medieval confraternity book containing more than 38 000 names in lists written down between the 800s-1300s. I will discuss different examples of language and writing system encounters in the names taking a sociolinguistic perspective.

Biography

Michelle Waldispühl is Associate Professor of German Linguistics and Language Education at the University of Gothenburg and guest researcher at ILOS at the University of Oslo at present. Her current research interests include historical sociolinguistics and multilingualism with a particular focus on historical writing, onomastics and cryptography.

Organizer

Aleksandra Olszewska and Gavin Lamb

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Multilingualism Research Forum/Flerspråklighetsforum: Narratives on professional identity and positioning among highly educated Poles in Norway (conference paper in progress)

Toril Opsahl (Associate Professor, MultiLing) will report on a study of how Poles navigate stereotypical expectations and negotiate professional identities in narratives in interaction in L2 Norwegian. The study is a collaboration with professor Anne Golden.

Please note this is a closed event for MultiLing members only.

Time and place: Mar. 9, 2022 2:15 PM – 3:15 PM, HWH 421

Abstract

Studies of Norwegian representations of Polish migrants in the media reveal strong stereotypical notions of Poles, and a set of rather limited subject positions seem to be available for Polish migrants (Obojska 2020; Opsahl 2021). One dominant identity position available is “the worker subject”; the Polish blue-collar work migrant who is happy to take on hard, physical work that Norwegians tend to avoid (Dyrlid 2017). Dyrlid shows how Polish migrants enter, negotiate or distance themselves from such positions. At the same time, Przybyszewska (2021) describes trends of downward professional mobility among Poles in Norway.

Building on and expanding previous research, this qualitative study aims at exploring the relationship between professional identity and language. Drawing on data from four different focus group conversations conducted in the participants’ L2 Norwegian, the paper explores the experiences shared by highly educated Polish migrants in manoeuvring their professional identities while facing expectations rooted in stereotypes.

Methodologically, the study draws on narratives that appear during the conversations, analysed from two different, but overlapping perspectives: One related to the thematic content, i.e. the professional roles and positions that are made relevant and available in the narratives. The other concerns functional aspects, i.e. how the participants use narratives to position themselves professionally in the conversations.

The results provide insights into a broader set of subject positions and professional identities -- or the experience of being “a completely different kind of Pole”, as one of the participants puts it -- as well as into the role of language in the construction of professional identities among migrants within the Norwegian context.

References

Dyrlid, L. M. 2017. Transnasjonalisme mellom stolthet og stigma. Polske migranters narrativer om arbeid, tilhørighet og posisjonering. Doktoravhandlinger ved NTNU (112).

Friberg, J. Horgen  & A. H. Midtbøen (2018) Ethnicity as skill: immigrant employment hierarchies in Norwegian low-wage labour markets, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 44:9, 1463–1478.

Golden, A.; Steien, G. Bordal & Tonne, I. (2021). Narrativ metode i andrespråksforskning. NOA - Norsk som andrespråk. ISSN 0801-3284. 37(1-2), 133–155.

Obojska, M. 2020. What’s in a name? Identity, indexicality and name-change in an immigrant context. European Journal of Applied Linguistics, 8(2), 333–353.

Opsahl, T. (2021). Invisible Presence?: Polish in Norwegian Public Space. I Blackwood, Robert & Dunlevy, Deirdre A. (Red.), Multilingualism in Public Spaces: Empowering and Transforming Communities. Bloomsbury Academic. ISSN 9781350186590. pp. 111–136.

Pavlenko, A. (2007).  Autobiographic  narratives  as  data  in  applied linguistics. Applied Linguistics, 28(2), 163–188.

Przybyszewska, A., (2021). Downward Professional Mobility among Poles Working and Living in Norway. Nordic Journal of Migration Research, 11(1), 35–49.

Biography

Toril Opsahl is Associate Professor at the Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies (ILN), and since 2017 a CoE MultiLing Core group member. She serves as PI of the NorPol project financed by RCN's FRIPRO scheme (2020-2024). Her research interests are multilingual language practices, attitudes and stereotypes; language in the workplace; multiethnolectal speech styles; discourse markers and phenomena associated with the grammar-pragmatics interface. She teaches sociolinguistics, second language acquisition, literacy and related topics.

Organizer

Aleksandra Olszewska and Gavin Lamb

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Multilingualism Research Forum/ Flerspråklighetsforum: Modeling the Tenets of Critical Pedagogy for Future Teachers Working in Multilingual and Multicultural Environments

Dr. Aimée Myers (Assistant Professor, Texas Woman's University), Dr. Jorge F. Figueroa (Associate Professor, Texas Woman's University), and Dr. Barbara Muszyńska (Fulbright Scholar, Texas Woman's University) will discuss modeling the tenets of critical pedagogy for future teachers who will be working in diverse, multilingual learning environments.

Time and place: Feb. 23, 2022 2:15 PM – 3:15 PM, Zoom 

Abstract

This study sought to determine if Education Preparation Programs (EPPs) in North Texas, Poland and Spain devote their curriculum to principles of critical pedagogy. It was guided by a critical pedagogy framework developed by Giroux (2020). This framework was used to analyze the EPPs required courses’ syllabi. In this presentation, we examine how EPPs support preservice teachers in learning aspects of critical pedagogy while preparing them to work in a multilingual and multicultural educational environment. We’re also going to make implications for further use of the framework to assess EPP curriculum, guide program revisions, and encourage discourse among EPPs on how to best serve students.

Biography

Aimée Myers, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Curriculum and Instruction at Texas Woman’s University. Dr. Myers teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in the Department of Teacher Education. She also teaches courses affiliated with the Department of Multicultural Women’s and Gender Studies and the Department of English, Speech, and Foreign Languages. Her teaching specializations include diversity, equity, and inclusion. In her research, Dr. Myers focuses on culturally responsive and sustaining pedagogies. She works to utilize social constructivist approaches with marginalized and underserved populations. Her current research project focuses on supporting critical literacy with refugee and immigrant secondary students. For further details about her research and publications please see her staff page.

Jorge F. Figueroa, Ph.D., is the Associate Dean for Research, Inclusion, and Innovation for the College of Professional Education (COPE) at Texas Woman's University (TWU). He is an Associate Professor of Bilingual and ESL Education in the Department of Teacher Education and Affiliate Faculty to the Department of Literacy and Learning. With over 20 years of experience in higher education, he had trained pre-service and in-service teachers in the United States, Latin America, and Europe. His research  focuses on the intersection between emergent technologies and emergent bilinguals with emphasis on extended realities (XR), gamification and game based learning, second language acquisition, culturally responsive/sustaining teaching, and critical pedagogies. For further details about his research and publications please see his staff page.

Barbara Muszyńska, Ph.D., works as an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Applied Studies of the University of Lower Silesia in Wrocław, Poland. From the start of Dr. Muszynska’s academic career, her research focuses on bilingual and multilingual education. She sees multilingual and inclusive education as issues of paramount importance in today's world and believes that education and curricula should provide opportunities to include otherness and conflicting voices, thus creating conditions for critical reflection. Her research is interdisciplinary, it combines educational linguistics and pedagogy. In 2020, Dr. Muszyńska received a prestigious award from the Ministry of Education in Poland for significant achievements in teaching and pedagogical approaches to education, and in 2021, the Fulbright Commission nominated Dr. Muszyńska for a Fulbright Senior Award, a 5-month research scholarship at Texas Woman's University in the USA.

Organizer

Aleksandra Olszewska and Gavin Lamb

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Multilingualism Research Forum/ Flerspråklighetsforum: Scaling the pandemic dispositive: a multimodal analysis of mask-requirement signs during 2020

Jannis Androutsopoulos (Professor II, MultiLing and Professor of German and Media Linguistics, Universität Hamburg) will discuss the emergence and transformation of pandemic signage during 2020.

Time: Feb. 16, 2022 2:15 PM – 3:15 PM

Abstract

This paper uses the notions of dispositive and scale to explore the emergence and transformation of pandemic signage, focusing on a subset of regulative signs, i.e. requests to wear a mask. Based on a crowdsourced dataset of pandemic signs collected in Hamburg, a multimodal analysis examines the multimodal resources sign-makers mobilize to create mask-requirement signs, and the change of these signs in the transition from the first to the second pandemic wave during 2020. The findings show that regulative measures within the pandemic dispositive, are scaled, i.e. given a particular spatio-temporal validity. This scaling is not a single definitive act, but dynamically iterated as regulation changes its scope. The iterative fitting of directive acts such as face-mask requests to orders of spatio-temporal validity is reflected in the multimodal makeup of regulative signs, whose linguistic, pictorial and composition choices shift as mask-wearing regulations are rescaled to cover outdoor space.

Biography

Jannis Androutsopoulos is Research Professor (Professor II) at MultiLing and Professor of German and Media Linguistics (Linguistik des Deutschen und Medienlinguistik) at Universität Hamburg.

Organizer

Haley De Korne, Aleksandra Olszewska and Gavin Lamb

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Multilingualism Research Forum/Flerspråklighetsforum: Å undervise mellom barken og veden: Lærerperspektiver på flerspråklighet i yrkesfagene

Mari J. Wikhaug Andersen will present an in-progress study centered on multilingualism and multilingual practices in mainstream vocational classes in Norway. The study is based on selected teacher interview data gathered in her PhD fieldwork in the school year 2020-2021. It sheds light on the complex roles and experiences of non-language subject teachers in increasingly diverse and multilingual school settings. 

Mari will give the talk in Norwegian. Please note this is a closed event for MultiLing and ILN members only.

Time: Feb. 9, 2022 2:15 PM – 3:15 PM

Abstract

Med utgangspunkt i språketnografiske data samlet inn i skoleåret 2020-2021 viser jeg hvordan et utvalg programfagslærere på yrkesfag rapporterer å forvalte den språklige definisjonsmakten de har i klasserommet. Som en kontrast til makten som ofte er forbundet med lærerrollen, forteller lærerne om følelser av blant annet språklig og strukturell avmakt. Dette gjelder særlig i møte med elever med kort botid i Norge som går i ordinære og hovedsakelig norskspråklige klasser. Lærerne opplever å havne i en profesjonell og språklig klemme som følge av strukturelle forventninger og rammevilkår.

Datagrunnlaget består først og fremst av individuelle intervjuer og gruppeintervjuer med en av de yrkesfaglige programfagslærerne som deltok i studien. Intervjuene er en del av et større og sammensatt datamateriale som ble samlet inn ved en videregående skole på Østlandet. Det språketnografiske feltarbeidet ble gjennomført kort tid etter den nye overordnede delen av læreplanen (Kunnskapsdepartementet, 2017) ble tatt i bruk.  

Det analytiske rammeverket er basert på Jaffes (2009) sociolinguistic stance. Jeg ser særlig på hvordan lærere posisjonerer seg selv i sine egne fortellinger om klasseromspraksis, og hvordan de opplever selv å bli posisjonert av strukturen de jobber innenfor. I så måte er læreraktørskap og læreres profesjonelle handlingsrom (Priestley et al., 2015; Helleve et al., 2018) aktuelle teoretiske innramminger. Jeg identifiserer også språkideologier i hvordan yrkesfaglærere etablerer og opprettholder en bestemt språklig ramme i klasserommet.

Funnene i studien belyser yrkesfaglærernes komplekse og utfordrende rolle. Studien bidrar til et kunnskapsgrunnlag som er viktig for lærere og andre som jobber med flerspråklige elevgrupper, samt for nasjonal utdanningspolitikk.

Referanser

Helleve, I., Ulvik, M., & Smith, K. (2018). «Det handler om å finne sin egen form» Læreres profesjonelle handlingsrom—Hvordan det blir forstått og utnyttet. Acta Didactica Norge, 12(1), 1-sider. https://doi.org/10.5617/adno.4794

Jaffe, A. (2009). Stance: Sociolinguistic perspectives. Oxford University Press.

Kunnskapsdepartementet. (2017). Overordnet del – verdier og prinsipper for grunnopplæringen. https://www.regjeringen.no/contentassets/53d21ea2bc3a4202b86b83cfe82da93e/overordnet-del---verdier-og-prinsipper-for-grunnopplaringen.pdf

Priestley, M., Biesta, G. J. J., & Robinson, S. (2015). Teacher agency: An ecological approach. Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing, Plc.

Biography

Mari J. Wikhaug Andersen er doktorgradsstipendiat ved MultiLing – Senter for flerspråklighet. Hun forsker på flerspråklighet i den norske utdanningskonteksten. Doktorgradsprosjektet hennes dreier seg om yrkesfaglæreres perspektiver på og praksiser knytta til flerspråklighet i klasserommet, særlig i språklige varierte elevgrupper i ordinære yrkesfaglige studieløp. Andersen er utdannet lektor (MA i nordisk språkvitenskap) og jobbet som språklærer i videregående skole før hun startet som stipendiat.

Organizer

Aleksandra Olszewska and Gavin Lamb

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Multilingualism Research Forum/ Flerspråklighetsforum: Linguistic activism and social justice – why languages matter

Bjørn Torgrim Ramberg (Professor, University of Oslo) and Unn Røyneland (Professor, Director of MultiLing, University of Oslo) will discuss linguistic activism, power, and the concept of language.

Time and place: Feb. 2, 2022 2:15 PM – 3:15 PM, Zoom (click to enter)

Abstract

The idea that we may improve social and political conditions by acting on language is attractive, but also elusive. A dominant current trend draws on anti-essentialist critique of the notion of a language to frame activist agendas against various forms of linguistic oppression. In this paper we argue that this stance, and the predominantly bottom-up approach to activism that follows in its trail, is insufficient as a response to linguistically embedded social hierarchies and power inequalities. In much the same way that a focus on individual freedom of choice falls short in response to the accumulating structural inequalities of open-market economies, the anti-language approach to activism pushes out of reach a level of social organization where hierarchies are instituted and maintained—but where they may also be challenged.

Turning away from the complicated normative issues involved in top-down language policy development and intervention, unbridled linguistic anti-essentialism severely limits the activist tool-kit. Drawing on cases of standardization and norm regulation, we argue that effective linguistic activism aimed at social justice requires us to overcome what we call the fear of structure, and rather face up to the essentialist presuppositions and normative dilemmas about language and meaning that top-down intervention allegedly faces.

Biography

Bjørn Torgrim Ramberg is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oslo, specializing in contemporary pragmatism and the philosophy of language. For further details about his research and publications please see his staff page.

Unn Røyneland is Professor of Scandinavian Linguistics and Director of the Center for Multilingualism in Society across the Lifespan at the University of Oslo, Norway. For further details about her research and publications please see her staff page.

Organizer

Aleksandra Olszewska and Gavin Lamb

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Wednesday Seminar: What’s your story? The Impact of Bilingual Narrative Intervention

Carmit Altman will discuss the impact of Bilingual Narrative Intervention (BINARI) on critical narrative features in BOTH languages and cross-linguistic effects in preschool bilingual children with typical language development (TLD) and developmental language disorder (DLD).

Please note this is a closed event for MultiLing and ILN members only.

Time: Jan. 12, 2022 2:15 PM – 3:15 PM

Abstract

The two languages of bilingual children are the most important resources they have. Yet most research on narrative features as well as narrative intervention studies with bilingual children focus on a single language. Narrative intervention in both languages of bilingual preschool children with typical language development (TLD), intending to assist children in recognizing and using key components of narrative structure, is an acknowledged challenge. The main objective of the proposed study is to examine the impact of Bilingual Narrative Intervention (BINARI) on critical narrative features in BOTH languages and cross-linguistic effects in preschool bilingual children with TLD and DLD. Critical features include story grammar elements and vocabulary. Targeting narrative skills in the school language and home language has been shown to be a key factor in improving the academic outcomes of bilingual children (Castro, García, & Markos, 2013), however, this practice has not been implemented in Israel. Baseline vocabulary and narrative tasks were administered to bilingual English-Hebrew preschool children (aged 5-6) following Story Champs protocol (Spencer et al., 2017). The experimental group attended twelve narrative sessions (6 in English and 6 in Hebrew), after which all the children were reassessed on the baseline tasks at 4 different time periods: before English intervention, before Hebrew intervention, after Hebrew intervention, after a peiod of no intervention. Results show differential patterns of bilingual growth following BiNARI in both microstructure and macrostructure. In microstructure, bilingual children showed growth in vocabulary following home language (English) intervention only while in the societal language, children show growth in vocabulary following home language and societal language intervention.With regards to macrostructure, gains were found in both languages at different stages of the intervention. Crosslinguistic influence was apparent from the home language (English) to the societal language (Hebrew) but not vice versa. The discussion will focus on the impact of bilingual narrative intervention on microstructure and macrostructure skills in both the home and school languages and the underlying reason behind unidirectional crosslinguistic influence.

Biography

Altman’s academic career has followed an interdisciplinary trajectory from the outset. Her research on bilingual processing and Developmental Language Disorder draws from psycholinguistics and her interest in social identity and language use in bilingual preschool children draws from sociolinguistics. Her research focused on narrative analysis and intervention has been supported by grants from the Binational Science Foundation, Israeli Scientific Foundation and from the Ministry of Education. Her work has been published in the International Journal of Bilingualism, Applied Psycholinguistics, Plos One and Frontiers in Psychology. Altman's training includes a PhD in Linguistics (Bar-Ilan) and a post-doc from the Program in Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences (CUNY-The Graduate Center). She is head of the Child Development Program in the Faculty of Education and affiliated with The Gonda Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center. She is deputy director of Bilingualism Matters, Israel and the Co-director of the Impact Center on Multilingualism and Multiculturalism across the Lifespan.

Organizer

Aleksandra Olszewska and Gavin Lamb

2021

Wednesday Seminar: Dynamics of multilingualism in language revitalisation and activism: Applied linguistic insights from Oaxaca, Mexico

Haley De Korne (Associate Professor, MultiLing) will use this session as a practice talk for a presentation she will give in Cambridge Linguistics Forum.

Please note this is a closed event for MultiLing and ILN members only.

Abstract

What does it take to alter current processes of language endangerment and displacement? What can meaningfully support speech communities who experience discrimination and work to revitalize and reclaim their unique ways of communicating? There are multiple possible responses to these questions, ranging from addressing political and economic inequalities, to changing education systems, shifting monolingual societal paradigms, and documenting languages. This talk will draw on ethnographic research on Isthmus Zapotec (diidxazá) promotion initiatives in Oaxaca, Mexico (2013-2018) in order to examine language activism strategies, with a focus on the role of multilingualism in language reclamation and endangered language education. I present a framework of language activism strategies that may be pursued by a wide range of social actors, from researchers to teachers to rappers. I argue that the dynamics of multilingualism and language learning play a crucial role in these activism strategies, and illustrate where tensions arise between purist versus pluralist language ideologies, and orientations to past versus future speech communities.

This is a practice talk for a presentation in Cambridge Linguistics Forum, open for MultiLing and ILN only.

Wednesday Seminar: The chat function as a resource in learning-related sequences in video-mediated L2 interaction

Jenny Gudmundsen (Doctoral Research Fellow, MultiLing) will discuss how the chat function is used for language learning in online language cafés.

Time and place: Nov. 10, 2021 2:15 PM–3:15 PM, HW421

Abstract

Language cafés are informal arenas where second language users (or LX users, cf. Dewaele, 2018) can practice a new language with first language users. Using Conversation Analysis (CA) with a multimodal approach, I explore a longitudinal set of video recordings of naturally occurring interactions from a language café on Zoom.
When participants in a video-mediated setting encounter problems identifying or understanding specific words or phrases, they often mobilize the chat function to provide the written form of the vocabulary item. This study sets out to analyse how participants treat the vocabulary item as a ‘learnable’ (Majlesi and Broth, 2012) after its written form is visible in the chat, and thus how the chat function’s affordances contribute to the participants’ mutual understanding and orientation to language learning. Furthermore, I study how understanding and learning-related practices vary over time. Initial findings show that the chat function’s affordances help to 1) identify the word’s form as a first step in the process of understanding the meaning of the word, 2) understand spelling and pronunciation errors, 3) find new words, and that these practices diversify over time (Wagner et al., 2018). This study sheds light on how participants utilize technological resources to solve various vocabulary related problems within the multisemiotic ecology of video-mediated interaction (Arminen et al., 2016).

References

Arminen, I., Licoppe, C., & Spagnolli, A. (2016). Respecifying Mediated Interaction. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 49(4), 290–309. https://doi.org/10.1080/08351813.2016.1234614

Dewaele, J.-M. (2018). Why the Dichotomy ‘L1 Versus LX User’ is Better than ‘Native Versus Non-native Speaker’ Applied Linguistics, 39(2), 236–240. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amw055

Majlesi, A. R., & Broth, M. (2012). Emergent learnables in second language classroom interaction. Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, 1(3-4), 193–207. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lcsi.2012.08.004

Wagner, J., Pekarek Doehler, S. and González Martínez, E. (2018). Longitudinal Research on the Organization of Social Interaction: Current Developments and Methodological Challenges. In: Doehler, S.P., Wagner, J. and González Martínez, E. (Ed.), Longitudinal Studies on the Organization of Social Interaction (pp. 3-35). London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Biography

Jenny Gudmundsen is a Doctoral Research Fellow at MultiLing – Center for Multilingualism in Society Across the Lifespan. She holds an MA in Rhetorics and Communications. Before starting her PhD, she worked as a communication consultant at Gambit Hill+Knowlton Strategies, and has previously worked as a communication advisor at the Public Affairs division of the Royal Norwegian Air Force staff. Her research focuses on informal language learning at language cafés.

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Guest Lecture (Public): Language and Humanitarian Governmentality in a Refugee Camp on Lesvos Island

Birgül Yılmaz (British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, UCL Institute of Education) will discuss language and children's right to education in a refugee camp.

Time and place: Nov. 3, 2021 2:15 PM–3:15 PM, Zoom

Abstract

Separated from Turkey by a 10-kilometre channel, Lesvos island received 45% of the refugees who arrived in Europe in 2015. An agreement called the EU-Turkey Statement signed in March 2016 led to the containment of refugees in hotspots, camps and shelters. Through this statement, the so-called Balkan route has been closed and the refugees, including children and young people, have been immobilised in refugee camps. Drawing on a eight-month ethnography on Lesvos island, this lecture investigates how language teaching and learning become part of the immobilisation of the refugees in a camp that I call Eastside camp (all names used here are pseudonyms from here onwards) and the tensions that emerge when refugees are ‘stuck’ in the asylum procedures. To do this, I problematise the logics of humanitarian governmentality namely how the deployment of moral sentiments such as ‘compassion’, normalises children’s exclusion from public schools and push them towards non-formal education provided in the camps. In my analysis, I question the ambivalent techniques based on ‘compassion’, namely feelings for the suffering and misfortunes of others (Fassin, 2012), in ‘conducting’ the refugees’ conducts, i.e. the rationalisations and prescriptions of rules, and I introduce Foucault’s (2007) notion of ‘counter-conduct’(Urla, 2012), that is, complex layers of refusals, questioning and struggles that emerge as a reaction to the ways in which refugees are governed in a humanitarian setting. By using Fassin’s work on humanitarianism and Foucault’s notion of counter-conduct as my analytical tools in analysing how refugees are managed, I demonstrate how the logics of humanitarian governmentality obscured in discourses of suffering and misfortune entail legal, spatial and social immobility. In order to do this, I move away from the power/resistance dichotomy (Urla & Helepololei 2014) that underlies much of the sociolinguistics literature and instead focus on how subjects ‘struggle’ diagonally, namely the ways in which they move away from direct confrontations to create new forms of conducting themselves ‘otherwise’, which become evident in the struggle around language teaching and learning. By focusing on the entanglements occurring in language education, I demonstrate the contradictions of this type of governmentality (Tazzioli, 2020), which is underpinned by immobility, political economic, biopolitical and security choices and which, in return, denies refugee children’s legally enshrined right to education.

Biography

I am a British Academy Postdoctoral Researcher at UCL Institute of Education in the department of Culture, Communication and Media.

I hold a PhD in Linguistics from School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) University of London, an MRes in Language Discourse and Communication from King's College London and a BA in English and Linguistics from Queen Mary University of London.

Building on my research in refugee camps, my postdoctoral research project deals with refugees’ language practices and their language learning processes in “other” spaces such as squats and self-organised classes as part of their everyday struggle within urban social movements in Athens. My research interests are language and migration, language and humanitarian governmentality, critical/ discourse analysis, language and identity, intersections of language, gender, religion and social class.

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Wednesday Seminar: “I am from Islam and K-pop”: Refugee-background students’ identities and language identities in becoming

Aleksandra Olszewska (Postdoctoral Research Fellow, MultiLing) will discuss the language identities of refugee-background students in Poland.

Time and place: Oct. 27, 2021 2:15 PM–3:15 PM, HW421

Abstract

With the rise of anti-refugee narratives in Poland and worldwide, research on the complexity of refugee-background students’ (RBSs) identities and language identities remains an unexplored territory (Warriner & Bigelow, 2019). Also, RBSs tend to be portrayed in deficit ways, rather than seen for their strengths, agency, and multilingual repertoires (Shapiro et al., 2018). This study aimed to centralize and illuminate voices of four Chechen RBSs attending a public school in Poland, as well as to examine what their stories reveal about their identities and language identities. The conceptual framework of this qualitative study encompassed constructs of RBS identity (Shapiro et al., 2018; UNHCR, 1951), identity and language identity (Norton, 2000), and Refugee Critical Race Theory (RefugeeCrit) (Strekalova-Hughes et al., 2018). Drawing upon participatory, humanizing, and arts-based research approaches (Fine, 2017; Paris & Winn, 2014), including counter-storytelling (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002), data sources included fieldnotes, interviews, language self-portraits, handprints, and I Am From poems. Findings of this study demonstrated that RBSs’ identities and language identities are constructed through claiming, negotiating, and envisioning their identities while in a constant process of becoming (Norton, 2000), and are shaped by a dynamic interplay of majoritarian stories and counter-stories. The study has also shown that RBSs’ identities and language identities are multilayered, rich and in constant flux. Ultimately, work is necessary to oppose the essentialization of RBSs; to advocate for transformative policies and practices; and to pursue a more just world, wherein no human is considered illegal, and all individuals are respected and celebrated.

Biography

Aleksandra Olszewska obtained her Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction with a specialization in ESOL and Bilingual Education from University of Florida, USA. She is a former Fulbright fellow. Currently Aleksandra works as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Center for Multilingualism in Society across the Lifespan (MultiLing) at the University of Oslo and is part of the NorPol project focused on Polish migrants in Norway. Her research interests include linguistic justice, language policies and practices, teacher education for bilingual and immigrant-background students, humanizing research methods, and socially just pedagogies.

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Wednesday Seminar: The Elephant in the Room: Non-native speakers in plain language education

Johan L. Tønnesson (Professor, ILN) will discuss plain language in Norway with reference to people with non-Norwegian linguistic backgrounds.

Time and place: Oct. 20, 2021 2:15 PM–3:15 PM, HW421

Abstract

The International Plain Language Federation defines plain language this way: “A communication is in plain language if its wording, structure, and design are so clear that the intended audience can easily find what they need, understand what they find, and use that information.” In the B.A. programme, we have added an important component into the concept: Rhetorical citizenship, cf. PhD Ida Seljeseth’s trial lecture this year. However, citizens with non-Norwegian linguistic background is to a very low degree integrated in the scholarly discussion and the teaching in the field plain language in Norway. While it is impossible in Norwegian authorities’ practical communication activities to ignore that the population of today is highly multi-cultural and multilinguistic, I must admit that this topic is much of an elephant in our rooms for research, teaching and dissemination. In my lecture, I will invite Multiling to identify the elephant and contribute to the filling of this gap.

Biography

Johan L. Tønnesson (born 1956) is professor of sakprosa (subject-oriented prose) from 2005 and takes part in the researchers’ group Text and Rhetoric at ILN. As head of the B.A. programme Klart språk (Plain language), founded in 2009, he was recently presented in a short UiO film (with English subtitles). His two dissertations The Voices of Science (1998) and Text as a Score (2004) are about multi-vocality in historiographical texts. Editor-in-chief in the Nordic journal Sakprosa since its founding in 2009. Former editor of Apollon, project director in Norsk Form (centre for design, architecture and the built environmeng), project manager in NAVF (predecessor to RCN).

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Multilingualism, literacy, and wellbeing

How is knowledge produced, negotiated, and mobilized in multilingual settings? The four studies presented in this seminar explore multilingual and multimodal literacy practices from various theoretical and methodological perspectives, and in a range of social, political, socioeconomic, and historical contexts.

Time and place: Sep. 23, 2021 10:00 AM–12:00 PM, Zoom

This seminar investigates health literacy practices as invested with desires and hopes for sustainable career futures (Badhwar Valen-Sendstad), the capacity of art piece designs to co-construct knowledge about professional ice hockey (Pietikäinen), writing practices in Mexico and Nepal in support of Indigenous language reclamation (De Korne), as well as how language standardization processes of Kven in Northern Norway mediate action and render material results (Lane).

The seminar offers insights into the complex social processes that (re)produce and configure marginalized spaces, but also the novel, creative and hopeful literacy practices that are performed in struggle for legitimacy, new knowledges, improved status, and wellbeing.

Program

The full program and abstracts can be downloaded here.

10:00-10:25 – Ingvild Badhwar Valen-Sendstad: Health literacy as hopeful practice  

10:25-10:50 – Sari Pietikäinen: Assemblage, material literacy and knowledge design: new connections

10:50– 11:00 – Break

11:00-11:25 – Haley De Korne: “I Learned That My Name Is Spelled Wrong”: Lessons on Teaching Literacy for Indigenous Language Reclamation

11:25-11:50 – Pia Lane: The materiality of minority language standardisation

11:50-12:00 - Discussion 

Seminar presenters and abstracts:
 

Ingvild Badhwar Valen-Sendstad
Doctoral Research Fellow, MultiLing, University of Oslo

Title: Health literacy as hopeful practice  

In this talk, I trace one migrant jobseeker’s lived experiences at the interface of health, integration, and (un)employment in the Norwegian labor market. The talk presents a small story analysis (Georgakopoulou, 2015) anchored in ‘Yasmine’s’ ethnographic interviews. I discuss the relationship between health literacy as lived experience, somatic health literacy, and the social construct of sociolinguistic employability, that is the language practices that are deemed valuable in pursuit of sustainable employment. Specifically, I investigate how Yasmine’s health literacy practices influence her language investments (Darvin & Norton, 2015) in a particular sociopragmatic style of Norwegian, and how she imagines this style to bolster her chances of obtaining sustainable employment. I illustrate how Yasmine generates wiggle room (Ahmed, 2014) in her stories to configure hopeful strategies in the face of health challenges and social inequalities. My study builds on novel conceptualizations in the sociolinguistic of hope (Silva & Lee, 2021) and contributes to underexplored aspects of health literacy as social practice.

References

Ahmed, S. (2014, September 28). Wiggle Room. Feministkilljoys. https://feministkilljoys.com/2014/09/28/wiggle-room/

Darvin, R., & Norton, B. (2015). Identity and a Model of Investment in Applied Linguistics. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 35, 36–56. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0267190514000191

Georgakopoulou, A. (2015). Small Stories Research: Methods – Analysis – Outreach. In A. De Fina & A. Georgakopoulou (Eds.), Handbook of Narrative Analysis (pp. 255–271). Wiley-Blackwell. https://doi.org/http://eu.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-111845815X.html

Silva, D. N., & Lee, J. W. (2021). “Marielle, presente”: Metaleptic temporality and the enregisterment of hope in Rio de Janeiro. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 25(2), 179–197. https://doi.org/10.1111/josl.12450

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Sari Pietikäinen
Professor of Discourse Studies, University of Jyväskylä

Title:  Assemblage, material literacy and knowledge design: new connections

In this talk, I will discuss the capacity of speculative art pieces to produce knowledge based on deep ethnography on professional sports. Designing these art pieces can be seen as part of material literacy practices, resulting in an interactive art exhibition that invites the visitors to engage with the co-constructed knowledge about professional ice hockey as work. At the same time, the designs are assemblages (Deleuze ref, Pietikäinen 2021a, 2021b) bringing together the intertwined relationships of material, discursive, and affective aspects in hockey work. As an assemblage, knowledge designs open up to multiple interpretations. They do not produce a single essential or universal truth. Rather, they vibrate with the past, the present and future potentialities.

References

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Bloomsbury Academic.

Pietikäinen, S. (2021). Powered by assemblage: Language for multiplicity. International Journal of Sociology of Language, 2021(267–268), 235– 240. https://doi.org/10.1515/ijsl-2020-0074

Pietikäinen, S. (2021). Assemblage of art, discourse and ice hockey: Designing knowledge about work. Journal of Sociolinguistics. 2021; 00: 1-15. https://doi.org/10.1111/josl.12470

Art of Hockey virtual exhibition https://www.artofhockey.fi/

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Haley De Korne
Associate professor, MultiLing, University of Oslo

Title: “I Learned That My Name Is Spelled Wrong”: Lessons on Teaching Literacy for Indigenous Language Reclamation

Globally many minoritized communities are searching for ways to improve their status and to reclaim languages that have been marginalized by socioeconomic and political processes. These efforts often involve novel literacy practices. In this presentation, I draw on my ethnographic research in Mexico, with reference to comparative data from Nepal to ask, what are the opportunities and constraints of teaching writing in support of Indigenous language reclamation? Writing is simultaneously an attraction and a source of marginalization or discouragement for learners in both settings. Promoting and teaching writing creates opportunities such as raising the status, visibility, and longevity of Indigenous language education initiatives. Challenges include struggles for legitimacy among teachers and learners and the emergence of new hierarchies among dialects. Drawing on De Korne & Weinberg (2021), I discuss ways that language reclamation efforts can benefit from making the most of the material and social nature of writing while avoiding hard-line purism. I also reflect on the process of studying literacy practices through an ethnographic lens.

References

De Korne, H., & Weinberg, M. (2021). “I learned that my name is spelled wrong”: Lessons from Mexico and Nepal on teaching literacy for Indigenous language reclamation. Comparative Education Review, 65(2), 288–309. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/713317

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Pia Lane
Professor, MultiLing, University of Oslo

Title: The materiality of minority language standardisation

Developing a written standard for a minority language has consequences for the status of the language and for how speakers relate to the new standard. Speakers do not always accept and identify with the standard or might feel that their way of speaking has been left out or feel that they cannot live up to the new codified standard (Gal 2006, Lane 2015). In this presentation, I draw on different methods in order to analyse these complex processes. I will investigate the standardisation of Kven (a minority language in Northern Norway), and I aim to show how different methodological approaches may compliment data from sociolinguistic interviews. The material outcomes of standardisation will be brought to the fore through an analysis of the recent standardisation of Kven, a minoritised language spoken in Northern Norway. I draw on my experiences as a new speaker of Kven and participation in Kven language planning (Lane 2017) and analyse the standardisation of Kven as chains of social actions (Scollon 2001; Norris 2004), suggesting that the material outcomes of standardisation may be understood as frozen actions (Norris 2004). By applying the concept of frozen action to language standardisation, standardisation processes are analysed as mediated actions and material results of social actions performed in the past. Taking this as a starting point, I wish to show how including material objects in our analysis may yield a deeper analysis of complex social processes, such as standardisation.

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Wednesday Seminar: Language activism against polemical skepticism: Countering and concealing hierarchies of power and privilege

Unn Røyneland (Professor, Deputy Director of MultiLing) will discuss language activism, power, and the concept of language

Time and place: Sep. 8, 2021 2:15 PM–3:15 PM, Zoom (click to enter)

Abstract

In this talk I will present some of the main ideas of a co-authored paper in progress that will be published in a volume on language activism (to appear in Language Activism: The Role of Scholars in Linguistic Reform and Social Change, Cambridge University Press, 2022, with Bjørn T. Ramberg):

The idea that we may improve epistemic or political conditions by acting on language is attractive, but also elusive. The elusiveness may nurture skepticism; “changing language doesn’t change reality!”. This skeptical response draws on a misleading construal of the aims and mechanics of linguistic activism. When deployed in defense of the linguistic status quo, such skepticism becomes polemical, and typically serves to naturalize or conceal hierarchies of power and privilege. Hence, undermining this polemical skepticism toward linguistic activism may itself in many contexts be a valuable piece of linguistic activism.

In this paper, we focus on one potential source of support for polemical skepticism; the anti-essentialist critique of the notion of a language. We argue that this stance, and the bottom-up approach to activism that follows in its trail, is insufficient as a response to linguistically embedded social hierarchies and power inequalities in much the same way that a focus on individual freedom of choice falls short in response to the accumulating structural inequalities of free-market economies. By simply turning away from the complicated normative issues involved in top-down intervention, the anti-language approach to activism also pushes out of reach a level of social organization where hierarchies are instituted and maintained. Drawing on cases of standardization and norm regulation, we argue that effective linguistic activism requires us to overcome what we call the fear of structure, and rather face up to the essentialist presuppositions and normative dilemmas about language and meaning that top-down intervention allegedly faces.

Our argument draws on a distinction between two broad approaches to language activism: i) activism of enregisterment, exposing and responding to concrete marks of social power and hierarchy on linguistic practice; ii) activism of meaning, focusing on semantics and directed at conceptual change, in a manner familiar from current critical philosophy of language.

Biography

My current research concerns multilingual and multilectal practices on social media, dialect acquisition and use among migrants, dialect levelling, language attitudes and ideologies, language and embodiment, multiethnolectal speech styles among adolescents in multilingual, urban environments, language advocacy and language policy and planning. My recent publications include Language standardisation: Theory and Practice, special issue of Sociolinguistica 30 (2016), with Sue Wright and Pia Lane (eds.), Multilingual youth practices in Computer Mediated Communication (2018), with Cecelia Cutler (eds.), Migration and Dialect Acquisition in Europe, special issue of Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development (2020), with Peter Auer (eds.). I am one of the chief editors of the new online series at De Gruyter LME Linguistic Minorities in Europe Online. Recently I was involved in language standardization through the comprehensive orthographic revision of the Nynorsk written norm (Nynorsk 2011) and I headed the Norwegian Language Council's Expert Committee that was commissioned to identify the most important challenges for Norwegian language policy in the future Språk i Norge – kultur og infrastruktur (2018) ('Language in Norway – culture and infrastructure').

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Wednesday Seminar: Interdisciplinary ‘back and forth’: a shared ground for a new paradigm of phraseology

José Luis Rojas Díaz (PhD candidate, NHH Norwegian School of Economics, Department of Professional and Intercultural Communication) will present his research on phraseology and equivalence in translation.

Time: Sep. 1, 2021 2:15 PM–3:15 PM

Abstract

The notion of equivalence has been a matter of study and controversy in translation studies and translation theories for decades as asserted in the works by Halverson (1997), Leonardi (2000), and Panou (2013). Several other disciplines related to translation, (e.g., terminology, lexicography, and phraseology) have shown similar interest in the concept of equivalence. Furthermore, equivalence tends to be a conflicting notion when it is tested on a shared ground in which, phraseology, lexicography, terminology, and translation convey at the same time: for instance, when a translator (or another linguistic mediator) faces the challenge of translating a text including phraseology in language for specific purposes (henceforth LSP).

Regarding the relationship between lexicography and translation, there are three undeniable statements that could be made: (i) the importance of the role of dictionaries as working tools in interlingual translation, (ii) their love-hate relationship, and (iii) the impossibility to create a ‘complete’ lexicographic resource to be used by translators (Roberts, 1992, p. 49).

This presentation will shed lights regarding the study the equivalence of a subcategory of specialized phraseological units (henceforth SPUs) that for this study will be denominated as specialized idioms (henceforth SPIs). The study database was constructed with 109 SPI entries and 174 equivalents in Spanish and English extracted from a dictionary of commerce and economics.

To do so, this presentation offers (i) a summary on the state of the art of phraseology in general language and LSP, (ii) an overview regarding the notion of equivalence in translation, lexicography, terminology and phraseology, (iii) a characterization of SPIs through a series of linguistic analyses (morphosyntactic, lexicographic, and semantic) of the extracted SPI entries and equivalents from a dictionary, (iv) an analysis of translation techniques used in SPI equivalents based on corpus queries, and (v) evidences regarding how SPI equivalents are sub-registered in the chosen dictionary through the analysis of descriptive statistic in corpora.

References

Halverson, S. (1997). The concept of equivalence in translation Studies: Much Ado About Something. Target, 9(2), 207-233. https://doi.org/10.1075/target.9.2.02hal

Leonardi, V. (2000). Equivalence in translation: Between myth and reality. Translation Journal, 4(4). https://translationjournal.net/journal/14equiv.htm

Panou, D. (2013). Equivalence in Translation Theories: A Critical Evaluation. Theory and Practice in Language Studies, 3(1), 1-6. DOI:10.4304/tpls.3.1.1-6

Roberts, R. P. (1992). Translation Pedagogy: Strategies for Improving Dictionary Use. TTR, 5(1), 49-76. https://doi.org/10.7202/037106ar

Biography

José Luis holds an MA degree in Linguistics from the University of Antioquia (Colombia) and a BA degree in Translation (English - French - Spanish). He is currently a PhD Scholar at NHH Norwegian School of Economics (Norway) where he is currently working on his PhD dissertation on phraseology, terminology, and languages for specific purposes. He has worked as lecturer in the BA and MA translation programs at the University of Antioquia (Colombia) and the BA program and the Translation Accreditation Exam at NHH Norwegian School of Economics. His areas of interest include phraseology, lexicography, terminology, computer-assisted translation, video game localization, and corpus linguistics.

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Wednesday Seminar: Lived language learning experience of an Indonesian engineer in a Norwegian multinational oil company

Nuranindia Endah Arum (Doctoral Research Fellow at MultiLing) will give a talk on lived language learning experience of an Indonesian engineer in a Norwegian multinational oil company.

Time and place: May 26, 2021 2:15 PM–3:45 PM, Zoom

Abstract

While English is widely used as the working language in multinational companies, local language still plays an important role in the workplace in non-English speaking countries. This condition can cause difficulties for international employees who are not competent in the local language. In this seminar, I will present my work in progress and discuss preliminary results from an interview-based case study of an Indonesian female engineer who works in a multinational oil and gas company in Norway.

Drawing on Norton's theory of investments (Norton Peirce, 1995; Norton, 2013), I analyze the participant's lived language learning experience (Busch, 2015) by exploring the factors influencing her investments in learning the Norwegian language and how these affect her language learning trajectories . The findings from this case study suggest an entanglement between the actual language practices in the workplace and language learning investments. 

A key observation is that the linguistic market makes English less relevant in this multinational company and gives privilege to Norwegian. This therefore leads to a subtle pressure and expectation for the international employee to use Norwegian for work. While the local employees are willing to accommodate the new international colleague by using English, this willingness diminishes over time. This situation creates both challenges and opportunities in using Norwegian in the workplace: it is challenging for the international employee who does not possess sufficient skills in the language, but at the same time, it creates an opportunity and motivation to learn. Investing in learning and using Norwegian is thus seen as important in order to integrate both professionally and socially in this multinational workplace.

I will also discuss future research directions and possible challenges in data collection.

References

Busch, B. (2015). Expanding the notion of the linguistic repertoire: On the concept of Spracherleben - The lived experience of language. Applied Linguistics, 38 (3), 340-358.

Norton Peirce, B. (1995). Social Identity, Investment, and Language Learning, TESOL Quarterly, 29 (1), 9-31.

Norton, B. (2013). Identity and language learning: Extending the conversation. Multilingual matters.

Biography

Nuranindia Endah Arum is a Doctoral Research Fellow at MultiLing - Center for Multilingualism in Society across the Lifespan, University of Oslo. She holds an MA in Italian Studies and Linguistics (University of Bologna) and a BA in French Studies (University of Indonesia). She also has several years of experience teaching Italian, French, and Indonesian language. Her PhD project focuses on language practices and Norwegian language learning experience of Indonesians in Norwegian professional settings.

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Wednesday Seminar: Interaction in Norwegian between Polish L2-physicians and their L1 patients in specialized healthcare in Norway

Magdalena Solarek-Gliniewicz (Doctoral Research Fellow, MultiLing) will discuss her PhD research on communication between Polish physicians and their patients in Norway.

Time and place: May 12, 2021 2:15 PM–3:15 PM, Zoom

Abstract

My PhD project focuses on patterns in communication between Polish physicians using Norwegian as L2 and their (L1) Norwegian-speaking patients. Polish physicians have reported experiencing language barriers during their consultations and in order to improve the communication, they employ a range of strategies. This project investigates which communicative strategies physicians adopt by examining their conversations (within CA) and conducting qualitative interviews with the physicians.

Most of the previous studies conducted in Norway focused on the patient’s perspective in the consultation (Kale et al., 2018) and on interaction in primary healthcare in Norway (Czapka& Sagbakken, 2016; Stachowski & Rye, 2017). Some investigated challenges that international doctors meet when they start working in a foreign country. For example, Skjeggestad (2018) studied how international physicians deal with the new language situation in Norway and Kahlin et al. (2018) looked at how Polish physicians participated in Swedish language learning and how they used the language while working in Sweden.   

In my talk, I will present my research questions and possible hypotheses as a starting point for my work. Furthermore, I will introduce my plans for data collection and the choice of method. I will especially focus on the language requirements that Polish physicians need to fulfil to be able to work in the Norwegian specialized healthcare. For specialised physicians arriving to Norway from EU/EES countries, it is the employer’s responsibility to check if their knowledge of Norwegian is sufficient for patient consultations. Because my informants work in hospitals located in different parts of Norway, it is valuable to investigate what influences hospital authorities’ assessments of future employees’ command of Norwegian.  In my presentation, I will present in-progress results of my research on models for clinical communication used in Poland and in Norway. Typically, Polish patients are used to doctor-centered model of communication (Zembala, 2015), whereas patients in Norway often expect a patient-centred model of communication (Gulbrandsen & Finset, 2019; Lian, 2008). My aim is to compare how teaching clinical communication for medical students in Norway (Vågan & Aasland, 2011; Gude et al. 2021) and in Poland (Konopka et al., 2019) is organised and how the different communication models can influence Polish physicians when working at a Norwegian hospital.

References

Czapka, Elżbieta Anna & Sagbakken, Mette. (2016). Where to find those doctors?. A qualitative study on barriers and facilitators in access to and utilization of health care services by Polish migrants in Norway. BMC Health Services Research. doi: 16. 10.1186/s12913-016-1715-9.

Gude, T., Vaglum, P., Anvik, T., Bærheim, A., Fasmer, O.B., Grimstad, H., Holen, A. (2021).  Undervisning i klinisk kommunikasjon kan bli enda bedre. Tidsskriftet for Den norske legeforening. doi: 10.4035/tidsskr.20.0931

Gulbrandsen, P., Finset, A. (2019). Skreddersydde samtaler - en veileder i medisinsk kommunikasjon”. Oslo: Gyldendal Akademisk.

Kahlin, L., Tykesson, I., Romanitan, M.  (2018). Methods for Studying Migrant Doctors’ Transition to a New Language. In: Explorations in Ethnography, Language and Communication : Capturing Linguistic and Cultural Diversities / [ed] Hållsten, Stina & Nikolaidou, Zoe, Huddinge: Södertörns högskola, p. 101-125

Kale, E., Hjelde, K., Gele, A. (2018).  A scoping review study on mental health challenges of immigrants to Norway. The European Journal of Public Health. https://doi.org/10.1093/eurpub/cky048.210

Konopka M.N.,  Feleszka , W., Małecki, Ł. (2018). Komunikacja medyczna dla studentów i lekarzy. Kraków: Medycyna praktyczna.

Landmark, A. M. Dalby (2016). Negotiating patient involvement in treatment decision making. A conversation analytic study of Norwegian hospitals encounters. Phd thesis. Oslo: University of Oslo.

Lian, O.S. (2008). Pasienten som kunde. I A. Tjora (red). Den moderne pasienten. Oslo: Gyldendal Akademisk.

Stachowski, J & Rye, J. F. (2017). Transnasjonale helsepraksiser. Bruk av helsetjenester blant polske arbeidsinnvandrere i Norge. Nordisk Tidsskrift for Helseforskning 13 (1). doi:   https://doi.org/10.7557/14.4074

Vågan, A., Aasland, O. (2011). Legesentrert og pasientsentrert klinisk kommunikasjon blant leger utdannet før og etter Oslo96- reformen.iMichael 2011; 8; 317-28.

Zembala, A. (2015). Modele komunikacyjne w relacjach lekarz-pacjent. Zeszyty naukowe Towarzystwa Doktorantów Uniwersytetu Jagiellonskiego. Nauki Ścisłe,11 (2)/ 2015, 35-50.

Biography

Magdalena Solarek-Gliniewicz joined MultiLing in November 2020. Her PhD project focuses on communication between Polish doctors and Norwegian-speaking patients. She will research on language barriers Polish doctors encounter during their consultations, and try to find strategies and patterns they use and create in different hospitals all over the country. She is a part of Nor-Pol project, and she will use methods like CA and qualitative interviews.

Magdalena earned her Master’s degree in Norwegian Language Studies at the University of Adam Mickiewicz in Poznan, Poland and continued her education in Polish-Norwegian Interpretations in Public Sector at OsloMet. After her studies, she taught Norwegian on intensive courses for health personnel and worked as a lector of Norwegian at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Warsaw. In addition she has worked as a Polish-Norwegian interpreter at Oslo University Hospital.

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Wednesday Seminar: Multilingualism, versatile linguistic repertoires and translanguaging in the Casamance, Senegal: the complexity of realities

Miriam Weidl (Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Helsinki) will discuss versatile and mutable multilingualisms in Senegal

Time and place: May 5, 2021 2:15 PM–3:15 PM, Zoom

Abstract

Senegal, similar to other West African countries, is described as highly diverse and multilingual on a societal and individual level, which is visible in peoples’ everyday lives (Weidl, 2018). However, the high complexity of varied multilingualisms is neither represented in the country’s language policies, nor in many of the scientific publications on Senegal or neighboring countries (Di Carlo et al., 2019; Sall, 2009). One major issue therefore is the widespread understanding of multilingualism of the Global South, inspired by Western concepts, stacking several monolingualisms on top of each other (Léglise, 2017). However, a theoretical concept of several clearly delimited languages coexisting in the repertoires of multilingual speakers does not reflect their reality. Consequently, linguistic policies aiming to include multilingualism into institutional or educational sectors are unsuitable for the people they are created for and do, in certain areas, even trigger conflict.

In this talk, I will discuss versatile and mutable multilingualisms and give insights into the high linguistic and cultural diversity of Senegal that increases by taking a closer look at certain areas and by deviating from ‘standard’ language categories and becomes even more complex if we zoom into individuals, their backgrounds and social environments.

Based on empirical data collected in the Casamance since 2014 during the Crossroads project (www.soascrossroads.org) and the project LILIEMA (www.liliema.com), the manifoldness of multilingualism and translanguaging practices are presented and discussed as an integral part of peoples’ everyday lives (Canagarajah & Wurr, 2011; Goodchild & Weidl, 2018; Jørgensen et al., 2011; Lüpke et al., 2020). Data that was triangulated in analysis, showing actual instances of language use and participants’ individual repertoires in their private surroundings as well as a teaching-learning environment during LILIEMA multilingual literacy courses is presented in detail.

Thereby, I aim to contribute to a better understanding of multilingual practice and contexts through establishing a more in-depth description of manifold linguistic applications in an African highly diverse context. This might lead to a broader understanding of multilingualism, its facets, transformability and diversity and in turn provide information that in the long-run, has the potential to enrich clear strategies for further research and language policies.

References

Canagarajah, S., & Wurr, A. J. (2011). Multilingual Communication and Language Acquisition: New Research Directions. The Reading Matrix, 11(1), 1–15.

Di Carlo, P., Good, J., & Diba, R. O. (2019). Multilingualism in Rural Africa. 1–47. 

Goodchild, S., & Weidl, M. (2018). Translanguaging practices in the Casamance. Senegal Similar but different: two case studies. In A. Sherris & E. Adami (Eds.), Making signs, translanguaging ethnographies: Exploring urban, rural, and educational spaces. Multilingual Matters. 

Jørgensen, J. N., Karrebæk, M., Madsen, L. M., & Møller, J. S. (2011). Polylanguaging in Superdiversity. Diversities, 13(2), 23–37.  

Léglise, I. (2017). Multilinguisme et hétérogénéité des pratiques langagières. Nouveaux chantiers et enjeux du Global South. Langage et Société, 2–3(N° 160-161), 251–266. 

Lüpke, F., Biagui, A. C., Biai, L., Diatta, J., Mané, A. N., Sagna, J. F., & Weidl, M. (2020). LILIEMA: Language-independent literacies for inclusive education in multilingual areas. In Language and the sustainable development goals (pp. 1–20). British Council. 

Sall, A. O. (2009). Multilinguism, linguistic policy, and endangered languages in Senegal. Journal of Multicultural Discourses, 4(3), 313–330. 

Weidl, M. (2018). The role of Wolof in multilingual conversations in the Casamance: fluidity of linguistic repertoires. SOAS, University of London, PhD.

Biography

Miriam Weidl: I am a (socio)linguist with a background in African Studies and Anthropology, currently working as a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the University of Helsinki. My research is based in West-Africa, with a focus on the languages and cultures represented in southern Senegal. My interest is aimed at multilingualism and languaging, the use of multiple languages in different situations of life, the diversity of individuals linguistic repertoires and the alternation of language during conversations which is highly connected to people’s social realties, experiences, aims in conversation and even momentary mood. In 2018 I finished my PhD at SOAS, University of London as part of the Crossroads Team (soascrossroads.org) in which I was concerned with the role Wolof as one among many other languages in the village of Djibonker. Resulting from experiences gained during the Crossroads project, I am a founding member of the LILIEMA association (‘Language-independent literacies for inclusive education in multilingual areas’), which constitutes the basis of my postdoctoral research. Through LILIEMA we distribute a writing system suitable to read and write all the languages represented in individual repertoires, adapted to the speakers’ needs.

Currently I am investigating (trans)languaging practices and the connectedness of multilingual language use and social settings. Through in-depth qualitative ethnographic research I focus on a better description and understanding of multilingualism linguistic realities.

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Wednesday Seminar: “Criancinha feliz fra mamma” and “verdens beste pappa”: Affect in parent-child multilingual interactions

Rafael Lomeu Gomes (Postdoctoral Fellow, MultiLing) will discuss the role of affect in parent-child multilingual interactions in the home.

Time and place: Apr. 28, 2021 2:15 PM–3:15 PM, Zoom

Abstract

The broadening of scope of sociolinguistic approaches to family multilingualism in recent years has been characterised by a greater variety of research methods, the increasing employment of ethnographic approaches, and more diversity of geopolitical contexts, languages, and family configurations. Furthermore, some studies have tapped into discussions about the “affective turn”. Yet, oftentimes these studies overlook debates promoted by recent conceptualisations of language, such as Busch’s (2017) expanded notion of the linguistic repertoire. Drawing on this notion, in this presentation I examine the affective dimension of interactions of multilingual families in the construction of familial bonds as they accomplish mundane tasks in their everyday lives. More specifically, resulting from a three-year ethnographic project in Norway, this study sets out to better understand how members of two Brazilian-Norwegian families draw on their multilingual linguistic repertoires as they construct family ties. A discursive analytical approach is employed to examine primarily audio-recordings of interactions in the home made by one of the parents of each family (i.e. around 15 hours of recordings in total). The analysis demonstrates how certain linguistic features (e.g. terms of endearment and the “You are…” frame), combined with the use of the participants’ multilingual repertoire, accomplish three interrelated social actions. They (i) convey parental value-laden aspirations of child-rearing, (ii) position children according to expected social roles, and (iii) forge parent-child ties. Focusing on the affective dimension of parent-child interactions as they draw on their multilingual repertoires to construct familial bonds contributes to an underexplored area in family multilingualism studies

References

Busch, Brigitta. 2017. Expanding the notion of the linguistic repertoire: On the concept of Spracherleben — The lived experience of language. Applied Linguistics, 38(3), 340-358.

Biography

Rafael Lomeu Gomes is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at MultiLing—Center for Multilingualism in Society across the Lifespan, University of Oslo. He holds a PhD in sociolinguistics (University of Oslo), MA in linguistics (Queen Mary, University of London), and BA in social sciences (Pontífica Universidade Católica de São Paulo). His current research interests include multilingualism, digitally-mediated communication, and media discourse. In his latest research project, Rafael investigated the language practices and ideologies of Brazilian-Norwegian families raising their children multilingually in Norway. His research has been published in international, peer-reviewed journals such as Multilingual Margins, Multilingua, and Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development. Rafael has taught language-related courses (e.g. ‘Language Acquisition’, ‘Language Policy’, and ‘Multilingualism’) at bachelor’s and master’s levels.

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Wednesday Seminar (Public event): Creating new languages and performing new identities: Mongolian popular music in the post-socialist era

Dr Sender Dovchin will give a talk on creating new identities in Mongolian popular music in the post-socialist era 

Time and place: Apr. 7, 2021 12:00 PM–1:30 PM, Zoom

Before 1990, Mongolia was a socialist nation, the satellite of the Soviet Union. The Russian language and culture were the prevailing foreign dominance, while English and other Western cultural aspects were widely contested as the languages ​​and cultures of capitalist ideology. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Mongolia embraced a new democratic society in 1990, transforming itself peacefully from a socialist to a democratic country with a free-market economy. With this drastic transformation, Mongolia opened itself to the world, embracing linguistic and cultural diversity in all aspects of its society. The popularity of Russian language and culture has been replaced by English and followed by other global linguistic and cultural flows due to enhanced access to various new technologies. English and other Western linguistic and cultural modes and resources thus have become inextricable sociolinguistic realities of young people in new post-socialist Mongolia. Drawing on the musical practices of popular music artists in contemporary Mongolia such as the Hu, the Mongolian heavy metal band, and other representatives from hip-hop and Mongol pop genres, this paper addresses two main questions: (1) how new forms of local languages; and (2) how new forms of local identities are performed through the complex linguistic processes of relocalization. The study shows that post-socialist Mongolian popular music artists should be better understood as active and powerful popular culture producers as opposed to those prevalent discourses which position peripheral youth as passive recipients of global culture.

About the speaker

Dr. Sender Dovchin is a Senior Research Fellow at the School of Education, Curtin University. She is a Discovery Early Career Research Fellow (DECRA) awarded by an Australian Research Council. Previously, she was an Associate Professor at the University of Aizu, Japan. She has authored numerous articles in international top-tier peer-reviewed journals. Her single-authored monograph ‘Language, Media and Globalization in the Periphery’ was published in 2018 by Routledge; and ‘Language, Social Media and Ideologies’ was published by Springer in 2020. Her co-authored research monograph with Alastair Pennycook and Shaila Sultana, ‘Popular Culture, Voice, and Linguistic Diversity: Young Adults On- and Offline’ was published in 2017 by Palgrave-Macmillan.

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Wednesday Seminar: Visibilizing historical multilingualism: Feature variation in Standard German personal letters from the 19th century

Samantha M. Litty (Europa-Universität Flensburg / FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg) will discuss multilingualism in 19th Century German immigrant letters 

Time and place: Mar. 31, 2021 2:15 PM–3:15 PM, Zoom

Abstract

This talk uses personal letters from two collections of German immigrants to the American Midwest to introduce several dialectal and non-standard linguistic features found in the otherwise Standard German letters of 19th century letter writers. Langer (2011, 2012) has shown that multilingualism was the norm in 19th century northern Germany, with Low German as the customary day-to-day language and High German as the formal, distanced language, explaining that “all schooling, all books, and all newspapers, in short, everything done on paper, was done in Standard German”. The linguistic situation in the 19th century is, of course, tied to the political upheaval experienced throughout Schleswig-Holstein’s history which adds to the multilingual complexity with three languages that are virtually never written but the mother tongue of the vast majority of the population (South Jutish, Low German, Frisian) and two languages which are only used in formal and written discourse (Standard German, Standard Danish). As regional and dialectal features have been shown to appear in the otherwise Standard German personal letters of Northern Germans in the 19th century (Langer 2013; Litty 2020) and given this societal norm where Standard German was the language of writing, but dialects were the mode of communication for most people, I use these letters to visibilize previously ‘invisible’ languages and language practices (Langer & Havinga 2015). 

The majority of the data for this talk come from the letters of three women from Lower Saxony, Germany. Their letters were found in a personal collection held by a local historian and genealogist in Reedsburg, Wisconsin. All of which are addressed to Katharina Müller, who immigrated from Lower Saxony to Wisconsin in 1881. For each of the three writers considered here, analysis of their High German writings is indicative of their social backgrounds.

For this talk, I have identified four categories of non-standard or vernacular features: ‘oral features’, ‘Northern German’, ‘Low German, general’, and ‘Eastphalian Low German, specific’. By identifying these features my intent is to show that these forms were exhibited, often by more than one author, suggesting that specific features may be used to identify where a writer was from or was writing from. To contrast, I supplement these by the letter collection of Phillipp Schneider (Litty 2019), a German-American Civil War soldier and resident of Wisconsin since the age of 9, who wrote 45 letters form March 1864 to August 1865, totaling ca. 22,5000 words. Schneider was born in Baden and exhibits characteristics of this region in his writing.

By comparing the writings from northern and southern German writers broadly, I show how distinctions between the dialect regions are made and how they are potential springboards for deeper analysis in the future.  

References

Havinga, Anna, & Nils Langer (eds.). 2015. Invisible languages in the nineteenth century. Peter Lang.

Langer, Nils. 2011. Historical Sociolinguistics in Nineteenth‐Century Schleswig‐Holstein. German Life and Letters, 64.2. 169-187

Langer, Nils. 2012. Finding non-dominant languages in the nineteenth century–problems and potentials from historical sociolinguistics. In Rudolf Muhr (ed.), Non-dominant varieties of pluricentric languages: Getting the picture. Peter Lang.

Langer, Nils. 2013. Norddeutsches in holsteinischen Soldatenbriefen von 1848–50. Niederdeutsches Jahrbuch. 136. 73-95.

Litty, Samantha M. 2019. Letters home: German-American Civil War soldiers’ letters 1864-1865. In Joshua R. Brown (ed.), Heritage language ego-documents: From home, from away, and from below. Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics. 5(2). Article 3, 1-34.

Litty, Samantha M. 2020. Historical Sociolinguistic Contexts: Documenting Networks of German-American Letter Collections. Eleventh Annual Workshop on Immigrant Languages in the Americas (WILA11). University of North Carolina – Ashville.

Biography

Samantha M. Litty is an Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Europa-Universität Flensburg and the FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg (2019-2021). She holds a PhD in Germanic Linguistics from the University of Wisconsin – Madison. Her research focuses on language variation and change in the 19th century in the American Midwest and the German-Danish border region of the Southern Jutland Peninsula. She is the author of Letters home: German-American Civil War soldiers’ letters 1864-1865 (2019, Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics) and A turn of the century courtship: Obstruent variation in personal letters in the Upper Midwest (2017, Sociolinguistica). Other research interests include: heritage languages, historical sociolinguistics, and historical multilingualism.

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Wednesday Seminar: Writing systems in Contact

Brendan Weekes (Visiting Fellow, University of Cambridge) will discuss writing systems and multi-literacy.

Time and place: Mar. 24, 2021 2:15 PM–3:15 PM, Zoom

Abstract

The UN General Assembly declared 2019 as the Year of Endangered Languages resulting in the proclamation of the newly endorsed Decade of Action for Indigenous Languages (IDIL 2022-2032). According to UNESCO, at least 2500+ spoken languages are vulnerable or extinct.

Ten (Chinese, English, Spanish, Arabic, Hindi, Portuguese, Bengali, Russian, Japanese and French) are "linguistic hegemons" - each having at least 100 million speakers and accounting for over 51 percent of the global population. Half of these are written with an alphabet (including Cyrillic) and half are not. For the non-alphabetic group, native speakers read and write in a logographic (e.g. Chinese) or a syllabic writing system (e.g. Devanagari) or both (e.g. Japanese).

In the other nearly 6000 languages that are spoken by less than one million people, Latin, Arabic and Chinese writing systems dominate. Multi-literacy is a feature of education in Asia (Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore).

In the 21st century, access to social media and policies on better literacy will deliver more multi-literate speakers. Growth in multi-literacy brings new and old questions to the foreground. Multi-literacy is ancient (e.g. the Rosetta Stone) due to multilingual spoken language contact.

In the coming century, ‘digital citizenship’ will be a grand challenge as access to global networks becomes necessary for new opportunities and potentially produces barriers for others. Although documentation of multi-literate speakers is not news in linguistics (philology and sociolinguistics) it is not prominent in global education policy as yet, with programmes to increase literacy reserved for the “hegascripts" e.g. English.

Neglecting global diversity in writing systems in developing and developed countries risks inequalities if speakers of a minority language are required to become literate in a non-native language.

References

Gorban, P. (2016). The coding and decoding of the sign at Thomas A. Sebeok. International Journal of Communication Research, 6(1), 43-49.

Johannessen, C.M., & van Leeuwen, C. (2018). The Materiality of Writing: A Trace Making Perspective. Routledge, Taylor and Francis London and New York.

Johannessen, C.M., Longcamp, M., Stuart, S., Thibault, P.J., & Baber, C. (2021). The look of writing in reading. Graphetic empathy in making and perceiving graphic traces. Language Sciences, March (84), 101363.

Ramanujan, K. & Weekes, B.S. (2019). What is an Akshara? Joshi, M. & McBride, C. (Eds). Handbook of Literacy in Akshara Orthographies. Springer Press, pp 43-52.

Sebeok, T.A. (1984). Communication Measures to Bridge Ten Millennia, BMI/ONWI-532, prepared by Research Center for Language and Semiotic Studies, Indiana University, for Office of Nuclear Waste Isolation, Battelle Memorial Institute, Columbus, Ohio, USA.

Weekes, B.S. (2019). Multiliteracy in Contact and in Context: Reading and Writing along the Silk Road. Invited Keynote Presentation. University of Hyderabad Press.

Weekes, B.S. (2020). Literacy in contact and in context (UNESCO). Letrônica, 13(4), e37538-e37538.

Biography

Professor Weekes is Foundation Chair in Communication Science at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) and Director of the Laboratory for Communication Science also at HKU. Professor Weekes is an internationally recognized expert in the ­field of language and cognitive processing in speakers who have communication disorders as well as the application of cognitive neuroscience methods to the diagnosis and treatment of language impairment. He is on the editorial boards of Aphasiology, Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, Languages, Language Science, and Psicologia reflecting his interests in communication disorders and experimental psychology in different languages. He has also served on expert panels for the Australian Research Council, British Academy, BBSRC, the Economic and Social Research Council, MultiLing at the University of Oslo, Research Grants Council Hong Kong, Royal Society, UK Medical Research Council and the National Science Foundation, USA. He is a Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne and currently a Visitor in Experimental Psychology at the University of Cambridge and was Ambassador for UNESCO (2019).

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Guest Lecture (Public): Multilingualism, Normativity, and Hybridity: A Chronotopic-Scalar Approach

Dr Farzad Karimzad will give a talk on chronotopic-scalar approaches to multilingualism.

Time and place: Mar. 17, 2021 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Zoom

In this presentation, I will draw on my recent research on chronotopes and scales to discuss the issues of hybridity and (non-)discreteness of languages ​​in the study of multilingual discourse. While some applied linguistics scholars have introduced several new terms (e.g. translanguaging ) to replace code-switching, arguing for a shift away from characterization of multilingualism as the sum of several discrete languages ​​(see Canagarajah 2013), others reject the idea of Non-discreteness of codes, maintaining that these neologisms do not represent a major theoretical advance (MacSwan 2017; Auer 2019). I will argue for the utility of a chronotopic-scalar system of images and resolutions in addressing these controversies and presenting more accurate analyses of the complex nature of multilingual practices.

I will present different types of data from my broader ethnographic study of Iranian Azerbaijanis to lay out the different theoretical and analytical components of this sociolinguistic system and illustrate how multilingual discourse could be approached from this perspective. I will specifically discuss the significance of attending to chronotopic-scalar arrangements in multilingual language use - as they specifically relate to participants' ideological orientations and the availability and accessibility of linguistic / semiotic resources in their repertoires - and the utility of this approach in analyzing not only social actors' dynamic use of semiotic resources in meaning-making processes, but also their language ideologies and language-ideological practices, which rely heavily on the perceptions of languages ​​as discrete systems.

About the speaker

Farzad Karimzad is an Assistant Professor of Applied Linguistics in the Department of English at Salisbury University, USA. His research focuses on theorizing context and semiosis in relation to issues of normativity, mobility, and marginality, and the implications of these theories for sociolinguistic and anthropological studies of (multilingual) discourse and behavior. His recent work has been published in numerous journals such as the Journal of Sociolinguistics, Language in Society, Language and Communication, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, and Applied Linguistics. His new book (co-authored with Lydia Catedral), “Chronotopes and Migration: Language, Social Imagination, and Behavior”, published by Routledge is scheduled to be available in March 2021.

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Wednesday Seminar [Closed]: Multilingual students, mainly monolingual classroom: Beliefs and practices of a vocational program subject teacher

Mari J. Wikhaug Andersen (Doctoral Research Fellow at MultiLing) reports on initial results from her in-progress PhD project, "Translanguaging in the majority classroom: a study of teachers’ beliefs, practices and students’ linguistic citizenship."

Time and place: Mar. 10, 2021 2:15 PM–3:15 PM, Zoom [Closed event]

Abstract

In this talk, Andersen will present a preliminary analysis of teacher beliefs (e.g. Pajares, 1992) and language ideologies based on data from an in-depth interview with a teacher of a mainstream upper secondary vocational class. Drawing on Bourdieu’s (1986; 1991) theories of capital and the concept of linguistic market, she compares the teacher’s reported and observed practices and their explicit beliefs about the students’ and their own linguistic behavior in the classroom.

The preliminary analysis shows that while there are clear inconsistencies in the teacher’s statements, much of their thinking and practices correspond, and may be indicative of an underlying monoglot ideology (Silverstein, 1996; Blommaert, 2009). The teacher’s beliefs and practices are implicitly and explicitly linked to their understanding of the newly arrived multilingual students’ professional prospects and the social organization of the classroom.

In her talk, Andersen also touches on the recently implemented Core Curriculum (Ministry of Education and Research, 2017), in which the view of multilingualism as a resource is explicit and prevalent. She shows that while the Curriculum is expected to carry into the classroom, in the case of this classroom, it does not seem that the resource view has been adopted and implemented. These initial results are valuable in light of the recent changes to the Curriculum, as it demonstrates a mismatch between the goals of the reform and the current situation.

Andersen’s talk is a preparation for a conference paper, which is to be given later this month. The seminar participants are invited and encouraged to engage in a discussion of the data and the preliminary analysis after the talk.

References:

• Blommaert, J. (2009). Language, Asylum, and the National Order. Current Anthropology, 50(4), 415-441.
• Bourdieu, P. (1986). The Forms of Capital. In I. Szeman & T. Kaposy (Eds.), Cultural Theory: An Anthology (p. 81-93). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
• Bourdieu, P. (1991). Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge: Polity Press.
• Ministry of Education and Research. (2017). Core curriculum – values and principles for primary and secondary education. Retrieved from https://www.regjeringen.no/contentassets/53d21ea2bc3a4202b86b83cfe82da93e/core-curriculum.pdf
• Pajares, M. F. (1992). Teachers’ Beliefs and Educational Research: Cleaning Up a Messy Construct. Review of Educational Research, 62(3), 307-332.
• Silverstein, M. (1996). Monoglot ‘Standard’ in America: Standardization and Metaphors of Linguistic Hegemony. In R. K. S. Macaulay & D. Brenneis. The Matrix of Language: Contemporary Linguistic Anthropology. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Biography

Mari J. Wikhaug Andersen is a Doctoral Research Fellow at MultiLing – Center for Multilingualism in Society Across the Lifespan. She has completed the teacher training program at the University of Oslo, and holds an MA in Scandinavian Studies. Before starting her PhD, she taught Norwegian and English in upper secondary school and worked as a Research Assistant at MultiLing. Her research focuses on multilingualism in the classroom and language ideologies.

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Wednesday Seminar: Tracing language contact and multilingual resources in the writings of three nineteenth-century women migrants

Nora Dörnbrack (Doctoral Research Fellow, ILOS) will give a talk on her in-progress PhD project on historical language contact and multilingual practices in nineteenth-century migrants' private ego-documents 

Time and place: Mar. 3, 2021 2:15 PM–3:15 PM, Zoom

Abstract

This presentation will focus on how historical ego-documents, such as diaries, letters or notes, of migrant women can be utilized to explore multilingual resources and language contact during the Late Modern English period. My project thus combines recent research on the use of migrant ego-documents (see for example Dossena, 2008, 2016; Hickey, 2019) and discussions of British women’s multilingual resources (see further Nurmi and Pahta, 2012).

The data for this presentation are drawn from the private writings of three British women who migrated from Great Britain to North America during the nineteenth century: Mary Ann Wodrow Archbald (1762–1841), Winifred Gales (1761–1839) and Alice Hecker (material from 1861–1864). These three women shared the experience of day to day multilingual encounters, albeit in very different situations. Mary Ann Wodrow Archbald moved with her young family from a small Scottish island to a farm in rural New York State at the start of the nineteenth century, where she found the majority of her new neighbours to be Dutch-speaking immigrants. Winifred Gales, together with her husband and children, had to flee from England due to her husband’s activities in the printing business, first to Germany, where they lived for about a year, and later to the US. Finally, Alice Hecker migrated to the US, where she managed the family’s farm while her German husband, who had barely any English skills, was serving in the military.

All three women experienced language contact, albeit in different situations. According to Schendl (2012, p. 521), these prolonged multilingual encounters would suggest, that all three women developed multilingual resources over the course of their lifetime. If this suggestion holds true even in a context where the three women migrants moved to a country where their first language was the majority language, will be explored in this presentation. Furthermore, I will discuss if and in which form the women’s multilingual resources surface in the their writings, how we can trace the development of their language contact over time and if their different situations resulted in different multilingual practices in writing. I will reflect on my initial findings, challenges and opportunities of working with the above-mentioned material and possible roads ahead.

References

Dossena, Marina (2008). “‘Many strange and peculiar affairs:’ Description, narration and evaluation in Scottish emigrants’ letters of the 19th century.” In: Scottish Language 27, pp. 1–
18.

Dossena, Marina (2016). “Advice for prospectors (and others). Knowledge, dissemination, power and persuasion in Late Modern English emigrants’ guides and correspondence.” In: Current Trends in Historical Sociolinguistics. Ed. by Cinzia Russi. Warsaw: De Gruyter, pp. 67–80.

Hickey, Raymond (2019). Keeping in Touch. Emigrant letters across the English-speaking
world. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Nurmi, Arja and Päivi Pahta (2012). “Multilingual Practices in Women’s English Correspondence 1400 – 1800”. In: Language Mixing and Code-Switching in Writing. Approaches to Mixed-Language Written Discourse. Ed. by Mark Sebba, Shahrzad Mahootian, and Carla Jonsson. New York: Routledge, pp. 44–67.

Schendl, Herbert (2012). “Multilingualism, Code-switching, and Language Contact in Historical Sociolinguistics”. In: The Handbook of Historical Sociolinguistics. Ed. by Juan Manuel Hernández-Campoy and Juan Camilo Conde-Silvestre. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 520–533.

Biography

Nora Dörnbrack is a Doctoral Research Fellow in English historical linguistics at the Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages, University of Oslo. Her research focuses on ego-documents of British women migrants and their linguistic resources with the aim of contributing to a ‘language history from below’. She is especially interested in historical multilingualism, language contact and longitudinal intra-writer variation. Nora completed her BA in English and American studies and Scandinavian studies at the University of Greifswald, Germany, and her MA in Scandinavian linguistics at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). Before starting her PhD at the University of Oslo, she worked as a Research Assistant at the Department of Language and Literature, NTNU.

2020

Wednesday Seminar: Indexing “health literate” stances: health literacy brokering, legitimacy, and access

Ingvild Badhwar Valen-Sendstad (Doctoral Research Fellow, MultiLing) will give a talk on her in-progress PhD project on multilingual women's health literacy practices in institutional settings. 

Time and place: Dec. 16, 2020 2:15 PM–3:15 PM, Zoom

Abstract

Some women with minoritized backgrounds experience diminished health status, partial exclusion from the labor market, and long sick leaves (e.g. Umblijs, 2020). Recent research proposes a link between health literacy and wellbeing (e.g. Gele et al., 2016). In 2019, the Norwegian Ministry of Health and Care Services published a political strategy promulgating initiatives to enhance the Norwegian population’s health literacy. My PhD project draws on ethnographic methods and a critical sociolinguistic framing to investigate what constitutes “good” health literacy practices in linguistically diverse health and work interactions at the Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration (NAV).

In this seminar, I present a comparative case study of two women on long-term sick leave who have learned Norwegian later in life. The analysis is three-pronged: First, I analyze how ‘Suda’ and ‘Maria’ practice their health literacy. Secondly, I examine which different forms of capital (e.g. Bourdieu, 1977) they mobilize to access NAV. I investigate in particular how they construct collaborative practices with their husbands as health literacy brokers (e.g. Kraft, 2020) to access information, guidance, and social benefits. Then I deploy conceptual tools from interactional stance analysis (e.g. Jaffe, 2009) to analyze how the women take on epistemic stances to perform “health literate” identities. Additionally, I examine how their health literacy practices are interactionally legitimized by NAV employees.

The analysis draws on recordings and ethnographic participant observations from social interactions between the women and NAV employees, as well as semi-structured interviews with all four participants subsequent to their NAV meetings. The overarching goal of the analysis is to tease out some of the ways that management of health literacy practices and stances come to regulate Suda and Maria’s access to social welfare services.

Organizer

David Albert Natvig and Seyed Hadi Mirvahedi

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Wednesday Seminar: Traces of language learning over time: A longitudinal Conversation Analysis of informal second language conversations

Jenny Gudmundsen (Doctoral Research Fellow, MultiLing) will give a talk on her in-progress PhD project about informal language learning at language cafés. 

Time and place: Dec. 9, 2020 2:15 PM–3:15 PM, Zoom

Abstract

Because of distancing during the Covid-19 pandemic, language cafés moved to video-mediated settings to continue informal language training for language learners. This talk zooms in on video recordings of naturally occurring interactions of second language (L2) and first language Norwegian speakers at digital language cafés. Using longitudinal Conversation Analysis (CA), I analyze how participants utilize technological resources such as the mobile phone and chat function in vocabulary-oriented sequences in video-mediated L2 interactions. For this seminar, I will present the theoretical and methodological framework of the project, show some of my initial findings and discuss some of the challenges and opportunities for further directions.

The data for this study are part of an ongoing longitudinal collection. Thus, I also analyze how the participants’ use of multimodal resources in similar sequences varies over time (Wagner et al., 2018). Alongside video-recordings of the naturally occurring interactions, I conduct short interviews with the participants after each session at the language café. In this way, I get a glimpse of the participants’ immediate reflections and perspectives on their own understanding and learning. 

One finding is the participants’ orientation to the chat as a relevant resource in the co-construction of identifying linguistic items in vocabulary-oriented sequences. Four examples illustrate how the L2 speaker’s development of the use of chat in learning-related sequences intertwines with his development of interactional competence.

Another phenomenon of interest is what I propose to call video-mediated mobile-showing activities (Raclaw, Robles and DiDomenico, 2016, Licoppe, 2017). More specifically, it is when a participant presents a mobile phone to the web camera as an object of joint attention in a video-mediated setting, and uses it to share text, visual aspects or sound with co-participants. I argue that the participants’ orientation to video-mediated showing activities is crucial in the co-constructed work of identifying the referent.

The study contributes to the growing field of development of L2 interactional competence (IC) in video-mediated interaction (e.g. Balaman, 2016), language learning outside of classroom settings (Hellermann et al., 2019) and «the multimodal turn» in second language acquisition (SLA) research (Majlesi & Markee, 2019).

Organizer

David Albert Natvig and Seyed Hadi Mirvahedi

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Guest lecture: How Positive Psychology can counter the deficit perspective in foreign language teaching

Jean-Marc Dewaele, professor of Applied Linguistics and Multilingualism at Birkbeck, University of London, will give a guest lecture on Positive Psychology in Foreign Language Teaching.

The lecture will be followed by a closed, informal workshop for the MultiLing researchers who will talk about their emotion-related research with Prof. Jean-Marc Dewaele.

Time and place: Dec. 8, 2020 10:00 AM–11:15 AM, Zoom

Abstract

The dichotomy “Native (NS) versus Non Native Speakers (NNS)” is common in applied linguistics and foreign language teaching. It reflects and perpetuates the myth of the linguistic superiority of the so-called “NS” and the banishment of the “NNS” to eternal linguistic and social limbo (Dewaele, 2018; Dewaele, Bak & Ortega, to appear; Dewaele, Mercer, Talbot & von Blanckenburg, 2020). The insistance on learners (and teachers) reaching an unattainablely high level in their foreign language creates stress, causes silence  and resentment and leads to demotivation. Rather than appreciating what is already known, such a deficit view blames learners and users for failing. 

Positive Psychology can help foreign language teachers focus on what goes right in their students’ learning.  It does not imply that they ignore what not quite right but by integrating the positive and the negative, they will be able to boost enjoyment and help students manage their anxiety (Dewaele et al., 2019a, b), resulting in better performance.  Crucially, teachers need to transmit language skills but also build up learners’ grit and perseverance, strengths, hope, optimism and courage (MacIntyre, Gregersen & Mercer, 2019) while regulating their own emotions (Gkonou, Dewaele & King, 2020).

Organizer

Yesim Sevinc

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Wednesday Seminar: Multilingualism triangulated in practice and analysis: a journey from communicative events through languages to “ways of speaking”

Dr Samantha Goodchild (Postdoctoral Fellow, MultiLing) will give a talk on analysing multilingual linguistic practices whilst incorporating various perspectives.

Time and place: Dec. 2, 2020 2:15 PM–3:15 PM, Zoom

Abstract

Multilingualism and multilingual communication are inherently complex practices. One challenge of research on multilingualism is how to adequately describe multilingual linguistic practices. Incorporating various perspectives can help the researcher question assumptions about established scales of comparison (Gal 2016). After conducting ethnographic based fieldwork in Essyl, a small village in the Casamance region of southern Senegal, West Africa, I concluded that in order to attempt a holistic understanding of multilingualism there, rather than starting with a priori defined codes, or named languages, it is necessary to have communicative events and the people involved at the forefront for analysis. Using the “triangulation method” (Goodchild 2018; Weidl 2018; Weidl & Goodchild In preparation) is one way to achieve various perspectives on the data and analysis.

Therefore, in this seminar, I will start by presenting some examples taken from extracts of observed naturalistic language data. I will demonstrate how to use the triangulation method on the data, starting with the participant’s perspective, and an observers’ point of view, then finishing with the researcher’s take on the data. By starting with analysis on the micro, i.e., personal scale and working towards the macro, or societal, context, I will explain how integrating numerous intersecting scale-levels is just as necessary as including differing points of view. This is because personal experiences are highly likely to be influenced by, for example, language policy and legacies of research. In conclusion, I put forward that we should start analysis with the situated-ness of people in interactions. Whilst retaining the concept of languages as an important construct for social, identity and space -making purposes, I argue, along with other scholars working on multilingual linguistic practices in the Senegambian context including the Casamance (e.g. Juffermans 2015; Ndecky 2011; Nunez 2015), that the (trans)languaging approach (García & Li Wei 2014; Jørgensen et al. 2011) is to be preferred for analysing flexible “ways of speaking” in Essyl, Senegal.

Biography

Samantha Goodchild is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at MultiLing – Center for Multilingualism in Society Across the Lifespan. She has a PhD in Linguistics from SOAS, University of London where she researched the practices and perceptions of multilingualism in Essyl, a village in Senegal. She completed an MA in Language Documentation and Description at SOAS, University of London and holds a BA (Hons) in Modern Language Studies from the University of Nottingham. Her research focuses on the relationship between multilingualism and spatiality. 

Organizer

David Albert Natvig and Seyed Hadi Mirvahedi

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Wednesday Seminar: Linguistic and semiotic resources in the social practice of mourning ceremonies: The case of Shiite Muslims in Iran

Dr Dariush Izadi will give a talk on the social practice of mourning rituals

Time and place: Dec. 2, 2020 11:00 AM–12:30 PM, Zoom

Funeral and mourning rites capture so many aspects of the Iranian traditional and religious rituals and provide members of society with cultural tools of lamenting the dead. These mourning rituals and expressions of grief and solace warrant a systematic adjustment to human loss rituals. The death of a family member, for example, is not simply a biological event mourned by the bereaved relatives. Rather, that death arouses moral and social obligations that are communicated through socio-culturally and linguistically determined funeral practices. Following Durkheim (1915/1995), rituals should not primarily be viewed as expressions and communications of religious experiences and notions, but as expressions of “social” experiences, ie of communal life and common ideas.

The current study presents cultural and societal considerations in connection with social space, linguistic interactions and, social action and semiotic resources of rituals used in the social practice of mourning ceremonies for Shiite Muslims in the city of Nur, located on the Caspian Sea in Mazandaran Province of northern Iran. The paper relies on a mediated discourse analysis approach (Scollon, 2001) as a theoretical model from which to develop a semiotic analysis of the linguistic / non-linguistic practices and mediational means that appear in the mourning events and death notices under scrutiny.

To this end, I shall draw upon death notices and a corpus (recorded interactions of mourning rituals and obituaries) personally collected at the deceased's and at funerals, where relatives and friends typically gather to mourn the deceased. The paper demonstrates that while mourning rituals are culturally and religiously framed in Shiite Muslims, to those contexts of communication, one must include the social space, the discourse cycle, the trajectory of the material resource (mediational tools) appropriated for the purposes of mourning, the trajectory of individual social actor (habitus) - their bodies, their physical appearances, their movements, and ways of doing and even ways of crying (produced endogenously) and the trajectory of text.

The study concludes that a mediated discourse analysis of the social practices embedded in the mourning events in question and the historical and cultural context that underpin such events provides a finer understanding of specific social practices and actions and local material contexts.

About the speaker

Dariush Izadi holds a PhD in Sociolinguistics from Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia and teaches Language and Linguistics Research Methods, Sociolinguistics, Discourse Analysis and TESOL Units at Western Sydney University. In his work, he applies mediated discourse and nexus analysis to investigate practices and methods through which participants accomplished their social actions in social settings. His research interests include Mediated discourse analysis, multimodal discourse analysis, linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, human geography, conversation analysis and interactional sociolinguistics. 

Organizer

Seyed Hadi Mirvahedi

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Wednesday Seminar: Exploring multilingualism in mainstream vocational classes (during a pandemic) – access, methods and pilot data

Mari J. Wikhaug Andersen (Doctoral Research Fellow, MultiLing) will give a talk on her in-progress PhD project, "Translanguaging in the majority classroom: a study of teachers’ beliefs, practices and students’ linguistic citizenship."

Time and place: Nov. 25, 2020 2:15 PM–3:15 PM, Zoom

Abstract

What do teachers of non-language subjects know about translanguaging in the majority classroom context, and what are their beliefs about translanguaging pedagogy and practices? What do the classroom practices of multilingual minority students look like, and what about their teachers’ practices in the classroom? How do the teachers’ practices in linguistically diverse classrooms interplay with their knowledge and beliefs about multilingualism and multilingual practices?

In my PhD project, I investigate questions such as the ones above. The study is based on a theoretical framework consisting of a selection of different, yet connected and partly overlapping theories originating in the fields of linguistics, psychology, sociology and pedagogy. Translanguaging pedagogy (García & Li Wei, 2014) is a central lens, as are theories related to knowledge, beliefs and attitudes, and the distinction between such concepts (e.g. Garrett, 2010; Pajares, 1992). Moreover, the backdrop of the study is informed by notions of social and cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1986), as well as perspectives related to multicultural pedagogy (as described in Van der Kooij, 2014), integration and assimilation (e.g. Spernes, 2012). Last, but not least, the concept of linguistic citizenship (Stroud, 2001; Williams & Stroud 2015) will be relevant in the analyses of student perspectives and classroom asymmetries and hierarchies.

The view of multilingualism as a resource and as valuable in itself is expressed in several Norwegian national terms of reference (e.g. NOU 2010: 7; Ministry of Education and Research, 2007). The new core curriculum, implemented in the fall of 2020, states that “(…) All pupils shall experience that being proficient in a number of languages is a resource, both in school and society at large.” (Ministry of Education and Research, 2017:7)  My study investigates multilingual classrooms during the first year of implementation of the new national curriculum.

The focal participants in the study are multilingual minority students with short time of residency in Norway (also known as newly arrived immigrants or recent immigrants) who attend mainstream classes in vocational study programs – and their program subject teachers. The data collection, in which I adopt a micro-ethnographic (Bryman, 2016, p. 424) and linguistic ethnographic approach (Copland & Creese, 2015), will result in a varied dataset and the study of several cases.

This fall I have carried out a pilot fieldwork at an upper secondary school outside Oslo. In October 2020, I visited three different student groups and their teachers for three weeks. I conducted open, unstructured non-participant and participant observations in all three classes. All observation sequences were video recorded. I carried out semi-structured (small) group interviews with twelve students, and a number of informal, unstructured interviews with one of the teachers. Now, due to the recently implemented infection prevention measures, I am considering ways to adapt my data collection procedures.

The aim of this seminar is threefold: First, to present the project in its original form, then to present the pilot (with an emphasis on access, methods, example data), and lastly to discuss my options going forward.

Organizer

David Albert Natvig and Seyed Hadi Mirvahedi

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Wednesday Seminar: What can interactional sociolinguistics bring to the family language policy research table?

Seyed Hadi Mirvahedi (Postdoctoral fellow at MultiLing) will give a talk on analyzing language practices in the family through interactional sociolinguistics.

Time: Nov. 11, 2020 2:15 PM–3:45 PM

Abstract

Since King, Fogle, & Logan-Terry's (2008) paper titled family language policy , the family language policy (FLP) scholarship has regularly drawn upon Spolsky's (2004, 2009) tripartite conceptualization of language policy to investigate families' language ideology , language practices , and language management. While the language ideology component of FLP has been studied as a 'social construct' (Curdt-Christiansen, 2016, p. 695) and a forceful 'interpretive filter in the relationship of language and society' that feeds all the language policy-related decisions (Woolard & Schieffelin, 1994, p. 62), FLP research has turned its focus to language socialization at home for two main reasons. 

Firstly, as King and Fogle (2017, p. 322) argue, FLP is often “unarticulated, fluid and negotiated moment by moment” necessitating examining not only the “explicit” (Shohamy, 2006) and “overt” (Schiffman, 1996) decisions of the “language managers” (Spolsky, 2009, p. 259), i.e. parents, but also the “invisible” dimension of FLP (Curdt-Christiansen, 2018). 

Secondly, given that irrespective of the linguistic ideologies of the parents, it is language practices in the family that will have the utmost impact on the children's linguistic development (De Houwer, 2007). In this light, language practices are considered to be the “practiced” (Bonacina-Pugh, 2012), and hence the “real” language policy (Spolsky, 2009, p. 4) of the family.

In this seminar, drawing on findings from my research on Malay and Tamil families in Singapore, I would argue that as language socialization studies in the context of home focus on the question of through and in what languages ​​family members socialize each other, they oftentimes fail to provide an explanation for such language practices at home. That is, they fail to analyze language practices in the family in relation to the social structures in which they happen. 

I would then go on to suggest and demonstrate that applying approaches and understandings from Interactional Sociolinguistics to language practices at home allows us to bring the analysis of social structure into connection with analysis of social (inter) action, what Fairclough (2000) considers the strength of the concept of practice. 

Organizer

David Albert Natvig and Seyed Hadi Mirvahedi

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(Virtual) Wednesday Seminar: Collaborative qualitative research in times of pandemics: An experiment with autobiographical reports from the field via Zoom

Independent researcher Dr. Elsa Lechner will discuss collaborative ways to conduct research during a pandemic.

Time and place: Oct. 28, 2020 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Zoom

Abstract

This seminar will focus on a collaborative proposition for conducting qualitative research in a moment of international confinement through digital interactions, being based on autobiographical field reports to be sent by participants beforehand. The experiment draws from previous experiences in group work online, i.e. two workshops held in May/June 2020 with researchers from different countries interested in biographical approaches, and will implement a collaborative framework of interaction between Elsa Lechner and the participants from beginning to end as a way to enhance the possibilities of doing fieldwork online.  

Before the seminar, participants will be asked to send the speaker a short autobiographical text (1-3 pages) about their reflections/questions/experiences regarding their respective fieldwork tentatives. During the first half an hour of the seminar Elsa Lechner will present the theoretical and practical contours of the proposition, to be followed by the reading of the autobiographical testimonies. These should conduct to a moment of voicing the resonances between the different accounts/persons in action. I will orchestrate the voices guided by the larger partition on collaboration versus competition, emotional literacy and sensibility.

The goal of the seminar is to experiment in loco the collaborative reading that facilitates a new kind of human interaction online for the purpose of further research work. Participants will be familiarized with the techniques of collaborative reading, resonances, and connections between thinking and feeling the work to be done.

Biography

Elsa Lechner holds a PhD in Social Anthropology (EHESS - École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales 2003, Paris, France) and has conducted a research career about migrations and biographical studies until recently. She was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Brown and Rutgers-Newark Universities (2014/15), an auxiliary and Principal Investigator at the Centre for Social Studies-University of Coimbra (2009-2019), where she has developed research about Portuguese emigration, as well as immigrants and refugees in Portugal.

Organizer

David Albert Natvig and Seyed Hadi Mirvahedi

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(Virtual) Wednesday Seminar: New Speakers in Norway: Zooming in and zooming out on the use of Russian

Olga Solovova (Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow, MultiLing) will discuss preliminary findings of her MSCA project "New Speakers in Northern Norway."

Time and place: Oct. 21, 2020 2:15 PM–3:15 PM, Zoom

Abstract

New Speakers in Northern Norway: zooming in and out on the use of Russian

This seminar will outline some preliminary findings of the MSCA research project “New Speakers in Northern Norway” (2018-2020) that looked into the use of Russian language in the tripartite borderland between Norway, Finland and Russia. Departing from the concept of “new speakers” (Robert 2009; O’Rourke and Ramallo 2011), the presentation will address the extent to which the different categories of new speakers have become reflected in the research project data. Used “as a lens through which to look specifically at speakers themselves, their trajectories and experiences” (Pujolar and O’Rourke 2018:13), the concept helps focus on how the use of written and spoken Russian gets inscribed into the landscape, history, geopolitics and political economy of the multilingual region.

Language choices and educational opportunities, identity challenges and imaginations for the future, shared in research participants’ diaries, portraits and interviews, are all shaped by the symbolic or geographical proximity of the border. As we zoom in and out of the borderland map, we may begin to grasp how community belonging and repertoires can be experienced in more ‘liquid’ ways, in a Baumanian sense.

Organizer

David Albert Natvig and Seyed Hadi Mirvahedi

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(Virtual) Wednesday Seminar: Invented spelling of German 4th graders in French: Insights into spelling solutions of multilinguals

Constanze Weth, Associate Professor for Multilingual Education at the University of Luxembourg, will give a talk on French spelling patterns of German fourth graders with French as Foreign language.

Time and place: June 10, 2020 2:15 PM–3:15 PM, Zoom

Abstract

The purpose of this presentation is to gain insights into cross-language transfer in vowel spelling in French by German 4thgraders with French as a foreign language. Transfer in vowel spelling is difficult to detect because the relation between a vowel and its grapheme is often ambiguous within a writing system and therefore the interpretation of transfer across writing systems is complex.

The talk presents to perspectives on the learner writings collected based on a dictation: Interviews of the children about their writing (Weth 2010), and a fine-grained measure to the differences in spelling (Weth & Wollschläger 2020). The last study  differentiates between phonologically and graphematically joint vs. unshared vowel graphemes in French and German and the contribution of each category to transfer. To reach this aim, the vowels of the target language French are differentiated into three categories: French vowels sharing (or not) overlap with the German phoneme and (or) grapheme. Instead of testing orthographic knowledge as in applying the orthographic norm correctly, it uses the model of the “graphematic solution space” (Neef 2015) that takes into account spelling that is graphematically licensed within the involved writing system. 

Furthermore, the analysis distinguished between poor and good German spellers to get insights on the relation of the pupils’ competence in the German and French spelling. Results showed an influence of the phonological and graphematic overlap in the spelling patterns, but also inconsistencies with both writing systems. The findings will be contrasted by the children’s perspective on their writing. Altogether, the findings challenge statistical learning in multilingual contexts as the produced graphotactic patterns are rather ‘French-like’ and ‘German-like’ than French or German. 

Organizer

Ingebjørg Tonne, Kristin Vold Lexander and Yesim Sevinc

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WEBINAR: Anxiety, Mindsets and Family Language Pressure

Yesim Sevinc, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, MultiLing, will give a talk entitled "Mindsets and family language pressure: Language or anxiety transmission across generations".

Time and place: Apr. 15, 2020 2:15 PM–3:15 PM, Webinar in Zoom

Abstract

In this talk I will present my recent work bringing together research on Family Language Policy (FLP) and Psychology of Language Learning (PLL).

I will address language anxiety and monolingual mindsets not only as they relate to family language use, but also to divergent social, cultural, and emotional domains of FLP decisions. I will discuss associations between language practices within the family, beliefs about multilingualism and language ability (e.g., monolingual mindsets), family relations, and emotions, with a specific emphasis on anxiety. 

Anxiety and mindsets

Based on interview data from two Turkish families in the Netherlands with high levels of language anxiety, this paper demonstrates how anxiety plays a central and unavoidable role in FLP, influencing family language practices unfavorably. Furthermore, it illustrates how parental anxiety about monolingual language norms among first- and second-generation immigrants affects children’s language use and development. The transmission of anxiety across generations can be prevalent in multilingual, transcultural families due to ‘aggressive monolingualism’ or ‘monolingual mindsets’, negatively influencing multilingual language practices in and outside the family. 

Anxiety and stress in regard to monolingual mindsets influence family communication and bonding as well as immigrants’ social interaction both in the host and so-called home country. FLP, when it is built on monolingual mindsets, pressure and anxiety, therefore, has not only linguistic but also social and psychological costs for individuals, families, and society.

Organizer

Yesim Sevinc

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Wednesday Seminar: Language switching and script mixing: multilingual landscapes of medieval Scandinavia

Alessandro Palumbo (Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow, ILN) will present his current project entitled "Language switching and script mixing: multilingual landscapes of medieval Scandinavia".

Time and place: Mar. 4, 2020 1:15 PM–2:15 PM, Rom 421, Henrik Wergelands hus

Abstract

In a recently started project, I investigate phenomena of bilingualism and biscriptalism attested in epigraphic sources from medieval Scandinavia. Until the end of the eleventh century, the Scandinavian written culture was dominated by the local vernacular and the runes. Around this time, the introduction of Latin and the Roman alphabet started a four-century-long period of coexistence and mutual influence between the two languages and scripts.

This encounter of written cultures is most evident in inscriptions where both languages and alphabets are used together, oftentimes in public and well thought-out texts. The choices made in such texts, as regards the language(s), script(s), spelling conventions and visual composition can give us important cues about the development of literacy in medieval Scandinavia as well as about the cultural and ideological processes behind it.

The present project aims to elucidate these bilingual and biscriptal texts from a sociolinguistic and multimodal perspective, drawing on modern developments in the fields of written multilingualism and linguistic landscape studies. In my talk, I wish to discuss the project’s theoretical and methodological framework. Are medieval bilingual and biscriptal texts comparable to modern ones? Can analytical tools developed to study modern written multilingualism be applied to historical sources? What are the challenges and possibilities of such an approach?

Organizer

Yesim Sevinc

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Wednesday Seminar: "The Great Change" and the Shift from Norwegian to English in Ulen, Minnesota

David Albert Natvig (Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow, MultiLing) will give a talk on language shift and community structure in a Norwegian-American community in the United States.

Time and place: Feb. 19, 2020 1:15 PM–2:15 PM, Rom 421, Henrik Wergelands hus

Abstract

This talk considers this shift from Norwegian to English in Ulen, MN from the perspective of changes in the local community structure. It  follows previous work on language shift in bilingual communities (Lucht 2007; Salmons 2005a, 2005b; Wilkerson and Salmons 2008, 2012; Frey 2013; Brown 2018, in press), all of which draw on Warren’s (1972) analysis of community structures based on “horizontal” and “vertical” patterns. That is, institutions that tend to be internally or externally oriented, respectively. Accordingly, we argue, community-wide language shift to a (national) majority language occurs as a result of horizontally organized structures changing to more vertical ones.

Here, I outline the verticalization theory of language shift in more detail and as an example show how vertical changes in community patterns drove the loss of Norwegian in Ulen. I draw on interviews with present-day community members and Norwegian speakers and United States Federal Census materials from 1910 to 1950. By all accounts, Ulen maintained Norwegian-English bilingualism from its incorporation in 1886 until the mid 20th century.

However, with new jobs and infrastructure from New Deal programs following the Great Depression and more specialized and industrial agricultural practices, the community came to rely on extra-community systems, e.g., the Federal Government and state/national farming economies, for previously local functions. These outward-orienting processes rapidly impacted local social patterns that previously supported the use and transmission of Norwegian as these gave way to national structures, where English was and is the default mode of communication.    

Organizer

David Albert Natvig and Yesim Sevinc

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Wednesday (Tuesday!) Seminar: The processing of verb-object metaphors: a test between competing theories of comprehension

Camilo Rodriguez Ronderos (PhD Fellow at the Humboldt University of Berlin) will give a talk on the topic of metaphor comprehension, reporting the results from two eye-tracking visual world studies.

Time and place: Jan. 21, 2020 10:15 AM–11:15 AM, Rom 421, Henrik Wergelands hus

Abstract

Are metaphors processed as category statements or as indirect comparisons? The current work addresses this fundamental question of metaphor comprehension by investigating how metaphors that appear in object positions of German transitive verbs are processed differentially as a function of verb tense. Results of two Eye-Tracking Visual World study are discussed in light of competing psycholinguistic and pragmatic theories.

Biography

Camilo is currently finishing his PhD in psycholinguistics at the Humboldt University in Berlin under the supervision of Pia Knoeferle. 

Organizer

Franziska Köder and Yesim Sevinc

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Wednesday Seminar: Socio-linguistic Mutations and Cultural Transformations in Postcolonial Africa: The Case of Senegal

Samba Diop (Researcher at MultiLing) will give a talk entitled "Socio-linguistic Mutations and Cultural Transformations in Postcolonial Africa: The Case of Senegal".

Time and place: Jan. 15, 2020 2:15 PM–3:15 PM, Rom 421, Henrik Wergelands hus

Abstract

In this presentation, I expand on the main lines of argumentation I had discussed in a paper recently published by the French scholarly journal Cités. I observe that Senegal in particular (and Africa in general) is currently experiencing deep paradigmatic shifts; this situation is undergirded by a combination of several factors: societal structural changes (gender shifts for example), the overarching presence of new tools of technology (mobile telephone and Internet for example), modernity and globalization, economic modifications, rapid urbanization, the receding French and European colonial memory/heritage, the idea of the Nation, linguistic changes, etc.

More specifically, I will provide concrete examples, the most salient one being linked to the fact that the French language in Senegal is experiencing notable changes for it is being increasingly mixed with local languages such as the Wolof language, thus producing a new linguistic breed referred to as Franwolof; the same linguistic mix obtains in other African countries. We are also in presence of a myriad of languages and ethnicities.

Of importance is the fact that African societies being fundamentally built on oral cultures, the advent of writing and Western education has produced a new nuanced and complex cultural context to which one must add the ongoing electronic age; hence, these contemporary societies are considered as being in transition. In this presentation, I will attempt to untie the knots tied around this complex problematic as described above.

Biography

Samba Diop is currently a Researcher at Multiling, University of Oslo.

He holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California at Berkeley. He was a Research Fellow at SOAS/University of London (2005-8). He is a founding Faculty member of the University of The Gambia (2000-1). He has taught at the University of Oslo (ILOS). He is a Founding Faculty member of Kwara State University (Ilorin, Nigeria) in 2009 where he held a Professorship in French.

Organizer

Yesim Sevinc and Kristin Vold Lexander

2019

Wednesday Seminar: Multilingual children with ADHD: Better attention, better communication?

Franziska Köder (Researcher at MultiLing) will present initial plans for her forthcoming project on multilingual children with ADHD, currently in preparation.

Time and place: Dec. 11, 2019 2:15 PM–3:45 PM, Rom 421, Henrik Wergelands hus

Abstract

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is one of the most frequent neurodevelopmental disorders, characterised by inattention, hyperactivity and impulsivity. Children with ADHD frequently have language difficulties, especially in the domain of pragmatics. So far, it is unclear whether being multilingual intensifies ADHD symptoms and pragmatic difficulties or, on the contrary, could have positive effects on children’s attention and communication skills in line with previous research on multilingual development.

The main objective of this project is to provide novel insights into how ADHD and multilingualism interact in child development. Research on this topic could also have a societal impact as it could contribute to better diagnostic tools and intervention programs specifically targeted at multilingual children with ADHD. I will present plans for several studies investigating multilingual children’s (and adults’) attention and communication skills, using a variety of methods such as questionnaires, behavioural tests and eye-tracking. 

Organizer

Yesim Sevinc

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Wednesday Seminar: The impact of multilingualism on inhibition, switching, and disengagement of attention: Evidence from healthy young speakers

Valantis Fyndanis (Researcher at MultiLing) will give a talk on the impact of multilingualism on inhibition, switching, and disengagement of attention.

Time and place: Dec. 11, 2019 2:15 PM–3:45 PM, Rom 421, Henrik Wergelands hus

Abstract

In this talk, I will present an exploratory study recently published by Boumeester, Michel, and Fyndanis (2019). This study focused on sequential bi-/multilinguals (specifically, nonimmigrant young Dutch native speakers who learned at least one foreign language (FL) at or after the age of 5) and investigated the impact of proficiency-based and amount-of-use-based degrees of multilingualism in different modalities on inhibition, switching, and disengagement of attention.

Fifty-four participants completed a comprehensive background questionnaire, a nonverbal fluid intelligence task, a Flanker task, and the Trail Making Test. Correlational and regression analyses considering multilingualism related variables and other non-linguistic variables that may contribute to cognitive abilities (e.g., education, socioeconomic status, physical activity, playing video games) revealed that only proficiency-based degrees of multilingualism impacted cognitive abilities. Particularly, mean FL writing proficiency affected inhibition (i.e., significant positive flanker effect) and L2 listening proficiency influenced disengagement of attention (i.e., significant negative sequential congruency effect).

Our findings suggest that only those speakers who have reached a certain proficiency threshold in more than one FL show a cognitive advantage, which, in our participants, emerged in inhibition only. Furthermore, FL proficiency in the writing and listening modalities mattered most.

Organizer

Yesim Sevinc

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Wednesday (Tuesday!) Seminar: Early perception of lexical tones by non-tone-learning infants

René Kager, Professor of Phonology and Language Acquisition at Utrecht University, will give a talk on early perception of lexical tones.

Time and place: Nov. 19, 2019 11:00 AM–12:00 PM, Rom 421, Henrik Wergelands hus

Abstract

Infants start with a general sensitivity to speech sounds. Initially they can discriminate a wide range of phonetic contrasts that do not exist in their native language. Between 6 and 10 months of age, infants’ discrimination of non-native contrasts declines, while their discrimination of native contrasts increases. This process is called perceptual attunement (PA). Most previous work on PA has focused on consonants or vowels, but a rapidly growing body of studies considers PA for lexical tone. 

Languages may contrast tones at different levels. For intonation, tone is contrastive at the utterance level. For lexical tone, tones contrast at the word level (only in tone languages). Crucially, intonation and lexical tone are both marked by variation in pitch (fundamental frequency, F0), which raises the issue how infants learn to disentangle pitch contrasts at the word level from pitch at the utterance level (Kager, 2018). 

Neonates are universally sensitive to pitch contours (Nazzi et al., 1998). Yet as early as 4–6 months, differences in tone perception are observed between infants acquiring a tone language and infants who are not (Yeung et al., 2013). Tone-learning infants retain their initial ability to discriminate tone, whereas infants learning a non-tone language lose their discrimination around 6-9 months (Mattock & Burnham, 2006; Mattock et al., 2008; Yeung et al., 2013; Liu & Kager, 2014), their use of pitch for word recognition by 10 months (Singh et al., 2004; Singh, 2008; Singh et al., 2008) and their ability to learn tone-to-word associations by 18 months (Quam & Swingley, 2010; Hay et al., 2015; Liu & Kager, 2018).

Research at the BabyLab Utrecht in collaboration with Liquan Liu and Ao Chen has investigated PA for lexical tone by tracking the development of tone perception in Dutch non-tone-learning (NTL) infants during the two years of life. We are considering questions such as the following: How does sensitivity to tone develop after 9 months? Do NTL infants permanently lose their sensitivity to tone, while not losing their sensitivity to intonation? How irreversible are the effects of tonal PA? How is tonal PA related to developing knowledge of intonation? How does phonetic salience of pitch contrasts affect tonal PA? How does tonal PA affect word learning ability? How does bilingualism affect NTL infants’ tone perception ability? How are pitch perception and musical perception related in NTL infants? Is pitch perception in NTL infants affected by cognitive maturation as well as exposure? In this talk I will present an overview the results of recent studies (2014-2018) which addressed these questions. 

Our results converge to show that the acoustic sensitivity and phonological sensitivity to non-native tones slowly dissociate from the second year of life onward. Infants’ discrimination of a non-native tone contrast shows a U-shaped pattern, with an increase of tone discrimination early in the second year of life. Bilingual NTL infants show a pattern of facilitation: their sensitivity to tones is enhanced and re-emerges earlier as compared to monolinguals. We also found evidence that tone perception is  subject to cognitive maturation, independently of exposure. Regarding word learning, infants’ ability to use the same tone contrast shows a declining pattern, in monolinguals and bilingual infants alike. In sum, halfway their second year of life, NTL infants’ acoustic sensitivity to pitch variation increases, yet the linguistic (phonological) function lost. 

Biography

René Kager is Professor of Phonology and Language Acquisition at Utrecht University. Currently, he is a PI in the Consortium on Individual Development (NWO).

Organizer

Liquan Li and Yesim Sevinc

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Wednesday Seminar: The development of subject position in Dutch-dominant heritage speakers of Spanish: From age 9 to adulthood​

PhD Fellow Elisabet García González (MultiLing) will give a talk on the results of her MA thesis, which is part of a larger project investigating different age groups of heritage speakers of Spanish in The Netherlands, as well as age-matched monolinguals.

Time and place: Nov. 13, 2019 2:15 PM–3:45 PM, Rom 421, Henrik Wergelands hus

Abstract

This exploratory study investigates the knowledge of word order in intransitive sentences by heritage speakers of Spanish of different age groups: 9-year-olds, 13-year-olds and adults. The inclusion of school-age children and adolescents offers a much needed perspective on the the limited body of research in heritage language literature that widely focuses on adults or preschool children. The results from a judgment task reveal that child- and adolescent heritage speakers do not entirely resemble monolingual age-matched children in the acquisition of subjects in Spanish, nor do they assimilate adult heritage speakers. The findings suggest that several different processes simultaneously affect the acquisition of word order in heritage speakers including reduced input in the heritage language, schooling and cross-linguistic influence from the majority language.

Organizer

Yesim Sevinc

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Wednesday (Tuesday!) Seminar: Football in the diaspora: Diverse semiotic resources in the construction of transnational identities

Prof. Marilyn Martin-Jones (MOSAIC Group for Research on Multilingualism, University of Birmingham, UK) will give a talk on research of a sociolinguistic and ethnographic nature on language, migration and identity, that she has been conducting with Estêvão Cabral, in the UK, since 2014.

Time and place: Nov. 5, 2019 10:15 AM–11:30 AM, Rom 421, Henrik Wergelands hus

Abstract

In this talk, I will draw on research of a sociolinguistic and ethnographic nature on language, migration and identity, that I have been conducting with Estêvão Cabral, in the UK, since 2014. This research has been carried out with migrant workers from South East Asia – young men and women from the multilingual nation of Timor-Leste, where Portuguese is an official language with Tetum (the local lingua franca).

Thus far, our ethnographic work with these young Timorese has thrown three points into sharp focus:

• Firstly, the importance of taking account of the historical specificity of migration movements, of the particular south/north postcolonial entanglements involved and of the migration trajectories of different groups;
• secondly, the value of adopting a dual focus on mobility and on the situated processes and agentive practices involved in mooring in the new place of residence (e.g. in local life world activities such as sport, beyond education and the workplace); and
• thirdly, the need to pay close attention to the hybrid, multimodal and discursive practices of different groups as a means of building an understanding of the ways in which mooring activities unfold and come to be imbued with social meaning by those groups.

Biography

Marilyn Martin-Jones is Emeritus Professor and former Director of the MOSAIC Centre for Research on Multilingualism. She has been involved in research on bilingualism and multilingualism in different regions of Britain for thirty years. She has undertaken three broad types of research: (1.) research on the use of multilingual resources in face-to-face interaction; (2.) research on multilingual literacy and the uses of texts in bilingual and multilingual settings; (3.) ethnographic research related to the processes involved in the translation of language policies into classroom practice. 

Her research has been primarily sociolinguistic and ethnographic in nature and has been based in different research sites: in urban and rural settings, in community contexts as well as in schools, colleges and classrooms. She has a particular interest in multilingualism and gender and in the ways in which language and literacy practices contribute to the construction of identities in local life worlds, in institutional settings and in trans-local contexts. 

Organizer

Haley De Korne and Yesim Sevinc

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Wednesday Seminar: Contact, variation, and phonetic-phonological change in Norwegian-American Speech

David Albert Natvig (Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow, MultiLing) will give a practice talk on contact effects in the sound patterns of American Norwegian bilinguals.

Time and place: Oct. 30, 2019 2:15 PM–3:45 PM, Rom 421, Henrik Wergelands hus

Abstract

In an upcoming workshop, Language Variation and Change in Diaspora Communities, I will discuss two examples of contact effects in the sound patterns of American Norwegian bilinguals: the transfer of the English-like approximant [ɹ] into Norwegian, and the variable lack of a surface distinction of /s~z/ in English. Data from present-day American Norwegian speakers, from recordings stored in the Corpus of American Nordic Speech (Johannessen 2015), indicate varied, yet structured, bilateral transfer between Norwegian and English (Natvig 2019; Salmons forthcoming).

However, Einar Haugen’s recordings of American Norwegian from the 1940s and analyses of the English of American-Norwegian communities since the 1930s (Simley 1930; Haugen 1969; Allen 1973–1979: vol. 1: 138; Moen 1991; Salmons forthcoming) reveal the same and similar sound patterns over time and among different generations of speakers.

What appear to be clean examples of bilingual influence on individuals’ phonological and phonetic systems may in fact be natively learned structures and alternations resulting from generations of community-wide multilingualism. Accordingly, these case studies clarify the relationship between phonetic variation and phonological structure over time in sustained contact situations. 

Organizer

Yesim Sevinc

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Wednesday Seminar: A multilingual perspective on Languages for Specific Purposes: ESP, "anglais de spécialité", and the characterization of professional domains

Séverine Wozniak, Assistant Professor at the University of Grenoble Alpes, will give a talk on English for Specific Purposes in different professional domains.

Time and place: Oct. 24, 2019 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, MultiLing meeting room, HW 421

This paper comes within the framework of the characterization of specialized professional domains from a multilingual perspective in applied linguistics, more specifically with reference to English for Specific Purposes (ESP) research and its French counterpart. It focuses on the work of French researchers in the field of “anglais de spécialité” (ASP), and the French approach to ESP studies, which Resche prefers to speak of in terms of “Specialized Varieties of English” (SVE) which she defines as follows:

Unlike ESP research, SVE research is not primarily focused on teaching and meeting learners’ needs, and can even be conducted without teaching in mind. A major difference is also that ESP practitioners seem to take only the synchronic axis into consideration, while SVE researchers are also increasingly interested in the insights afforded by a diachronic approach. As language specialists, researchers in SVE naturally rely on language as a gateway to a specific domain, but language as such is not the sole object of research: beyond language, researchers investigate the domain’s origins, history, culture, features, heroes and principal players, as well as their particular discursive habits. (Resche 2013: 42-43)

Given these divergences, the question arises as to how ESP and SVE research can combine to help shape our knowledge of professional domains? In order to answer this question, we first deal with the fundamental notions of professions and professional identity. We also take into account the three functions which help to characterize specialized domains as described by Petit (2010: 10): the regulatory function (the organization of the institutional functioning and management of a given domain), the operative function (the implementation of the various actions constitutive of a given domain) and the training function (the design and development of training programs designed to develop the various domain actors’ professional skills).

In this perspective, we next go on to look at the relevance of ethnography as a support discipline for ESP and ASP research, and the valuable insights it affords researchers with regard to the actual nature of professional expertise. In this context we examine the central role of fieldwork in ESP and ASP research and introduce a model which seeks to characterize specialized professional domains in the light of ethnographic studies, the purpose of which is key to our discipline, as underlined by Isani:

In terms of our discipline, if the purpose is to focus on text-linguistics from a lexico-grammatical perspective, a machine-mediated in vitro approach suffices adequately; if, on the other hand, the purpose is to study language as a form of human interaction in all the complexity of its context of situation, the in vivo approach practiced by ethnographers certainly allows for deeper insights and a fuller picture. (Isani 2014: 30)

To conclude, we present an application of this research, as represented by our commitment to the European Language for Work network, and contribution to the “Language for Work: Tools for Professional Development” (2016-2019) project, initiated and funded by the European Center for Modern Languages (CELV/ECML) in Graz (Austria). The research work carried out within the network since 2012, with the organization of several seminars and interactive workshops, has foregrounded the issue of the linguistic integration of adult migrants and a wider reflection on the definition of professional language skills.

About the speaker

Dr. Séverine Wozniak is an assistant professor in English for Specific Purposes and has taught economic (EAP) and business (EOP) English for over 20 years at Grenoble Faculty of Economics (France). Her primary research interests lie in the areas of applied linguistics and include discourse analysis, language for specific purposes, ethnographic research methods in a specialized context and the description of specialized varieties of English.

Organizer

Elizabeth Lanza and Olga Solovova

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Wednesday Seminar: Where is more benefit? Influence of multi speaker variability for learning novel consonants, vowels and pitch-accents

Time and place: Oct. 16, 2019 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Rom 421, Henrik Wergelands hus

Abstract

Learning a second language involves learning a new sound system. Depending on the native language, some speech sounds might be easier to learn to distinguish, while others might more difficult. Most of the studies primarily focused on how learners acquired new words based on segmental properties (consonants and vowels) of the languages. However, for a variety of language learning new consonant and vowel categories are not enough; the use of pitch differences and tones is essential for distinguishing between different words. Learning novel words and phonological categories can be enhanced by presenting a variation and variability in the linguistic input.

In this presentation, I will present first ideas about a learning experiment with Norwegian speech sounds, involving consonantal differences (/t/ vs. /ʈ/), vocalic differences (/y/ vs. /ʉ/), length differences (short vs. long vowels) and different pitch accents (East Norwegian Tone 1 vs. Tone 2). Beside testing adults’ perceptual sensitivity to these non-native contrasts, I would add two different conditions: one single speaker and one multispeaker condition to investigate the possible benefit of this additional variability and if at all they equally benefit across all the different non-native speech contrasts. Since this is work in progress, I would be very grateful for suggestions, and recommendations.

Biography

Antonia Götz is a PhD student from the University of Potsdam, Germany, in the research unit Crossing the Borders: The interplay of language, cognition, and the brain in early human development. In her PhD, she focuses on the perceptual reorganization process of German-learning infants, more precisely how infants’ perceptual sensitivity to lexical tones, and vowels develops with increasing age. Götz is visiting MultiLing in the fall semester of 2019.

Organizer

Yesim Sevinc

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Guest lecture: Identity, Investment, and Digital Storytelling for a Multilingual Future

Professor Bonny Norton will give a guest lecture Wednesday, September 18. The lecture is titled "Identity, Investment, and Digital Storytelling for a Multilingual Future" and is open to everyone.

Time and place: Sep. 18, 2019 1:15 PM–2:30 PM, Henrik Wergelands hus, room 421

Abstract

The world has changed since I published my early work on identity, investment, and language learning in the mid 1990s. Because of advancements in digital technology, there are new relations of power at micro and macro levels, and digital literacy has become essential in “claiming the right to speak.”  As language learners navigate these changing times, they need to negotiate new identities, investments, and imagined futures (Norton, 2013). Working with Ron Darvin, I have responded to new linguistic landscapes by developing an expanded model of investment that integrates identity, ideology, and linguistic capital in a comprehensive framework (Darvin & Norton, 2015).

In this presentation, I will demonstrate that while there are structures that may limit a language learner’s investment, the model illustrates how learners can draw on language and literacy practices that enhance possibility. Drawing on my recent research on digital storytelling in both wealthy and poorly resourced global communities, I will discuss the ways in which digital storytelling can harness the linguistic capital of young learners and their parents in homes, schools, and communities in the interests of a more equitable multilingual future across global sites. Key open access resources are Storybooks Canada, and Global Storybooks.

About the lecturer

Dr. Bonny Norton (FRSC) is a Professor and Distinguished University Scholar in the Department of Language and Literacy Education, University of British Columbia, Canada. Her primary research interests are identity and language learning, digital literacy, and international development. She and her team are developing the open access Global Storybooks portal to help promote multilingual literacy for children and youth worldwide. Dr. Norton is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the American Educational Research Association.

Organizer

Toril Opsahl and Anne Golden

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Wednesday Seminar: Sámi language education in Sápmi: From language policy to language practice

Kristina Belancic, a PhD student at the Department of Language Studies and Vaartoe at the University of Umeå, will give a talk on Sámi language education in Sápmi.  

Time and place: Sep. 11, 2019 2:45 PM–4:00 PM, MultiLing Meeting Room 421

My project "Sámi language education in Sámi schools in Sweden" is a qualitative study about indigenous children’s language use. In particular, I worked with two Sámi schools in Sweden where I have gathered the data for this project through 23 semi-structured interviews and over 50 hours of classroom observations. In addition, I draw on the questionnaire data gathered from 2012 as part of Literacy in Sapmi: multilingualism, revitalization and literacy development in the global North project, where I analyzed the data with a focus on Sámi children’s language use. To complete the project, I examined the learning outcomes in the syllabi for Sami and Swedish.

Language use is a key word in my thesis and therefore I focus on language use from different perspectives, highlighting what frameworks Sámi schools offer for the Sámi language learner. The thesis aims to identify Sámi children’s different pillars for language use and seeks to answer four research questions:

• How does the Sámi National Curriculum support Sámi children’s access to knowledge in and about Sámi and Swedish?
• How Sámi children’s attitudes influence the use of their own language in everyday life?
• Which language practices do Sámi children identify for language use?
• How play as an activity in Sámi schools supports language use?

Since my thesis is a collection of four articles focusing, the research questions are based on them.

In the seminar, I would like to raise the question about a suitable theoretical framework. Specifically, I would like to discuss how different theoretical approaches can frame my PhD work.

Bio

I am a PhD student, in my last year, in the field of language teaching and learning at the Department of Language Studies and Vaartoe at the University of Umeå, Sweden. My PhD research focuses on Sámi children’s language use in the Sámi educational context in Sweden. In particular my work examines Sámi children’s different ways for language use from both the macro-level and micro-level.

Organizer

Olga Solovova

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Wednesday Seminar: Emotions in the proactive bilingual brain: Evidence from electrophysiology

Rafał Jończyk, Assistant Professor in the Department of English Pragmatics at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań (Poland), will give a talk on emotions and the bilingual brain.  

Time and place: Sep. 11, 2019 1:15 PM–2:30 PM, MultiLing Meeting Room 421

I am fascinated by how our mind perceives and interprets the pervasive emotional cues that are part and parcel of social interaction. As a linguist, I have been particularly interested in the interplay between language and emotion. While there is rather consistent evidence demonstrating facilitatory processing of emotional relative to neutral language in monolingual speakers, we still know relatively little about language-emotion interactions in speakers of more than one language. May it be the case that emotional content carries different weight in our first and second language(s) If so, could it also modulate our anticipation and memory of emotional events?

In this talk, I will build on existing introspective, decision-making, and neurocognitive research on bilingualism and emotion which suggests that, in certain contexts, bilingual individuals may be less affected by negative information when it is presented in their second language. Following a review of studies in the field, I will turn to a discussion of two electrophysiological experiments conducted by our research team that measured neural responses to emotional sentences (experiment 1) and anticipation of upcoming emotional events (experiment 2) in Polish–English bilinguals. Both experiments provide neurophysiological evidence pointing to attenuated emotional anticipation of and reaction to negative information in the second language. Towards the end of my talk, I will also touch upon two undergoing projects that explore (1) the neurophysiology of emotional memory in bilingualism and (2) the interplay between emotion, bilingualism, and creativity.

Bio

Dr. Rafał Jończyk is an assistant professor in the Department of English Pragmatics at the Faculty of English, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland. His primary research interests include the interaction between bilingualism and emotion, affective pragmatics, neurophysiology of creativity as well as methods in electrophysiological data analysis. 

Organizer

Paweł Urbanik

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Wednesday Seminar: Substrate 1, SLA nil: the case of -t/d deletion in Palauan English

David Britain, a professor and chair of Modern English Linguistics at the University of Bern, Switzerland, will give a talk on -t/d deletion in Palauan English (with Kazuko Matsumoto, the University of Tokyo). 

Time and place: Sep. 4, 2019 3:15 PM–4:00 PM, MultiLing Meeting Room 421

In research on so-called ‘New’ or ‘World’  Englishes, there has long been a debate about whether substrate influences or principles of second language acquisition most account for the ultimate structures of these new varieties. Research on –t/d deletion in coda clusters (found to some extent in all Englishes) (e.g. [bes] for ‘best’ and [praiz] for ‘prized’) in New Englishes has traditionally not been able to distinguish between substrate L1 and SLA influence, since the substrate varieties in question (e.g. Cantonese in work on Hong Kong English) avoid consonant clusters, and SLA research would encourage us to believe that simple CVCV structures tend to be favoured over more complex syllable shapes. Here we investigate a ‘new’ variety of English, that of the Republic of Palau, a former US colony in the Western Pacific. We argue that for this variety it is possible to distinguish substrate influence from the SLA preference for CVCV.

A variationist investigation of Palauan English stratified for age, gender, education and time spent in the US, found that the linguistic constraint profile of deletion was similar to that of L1 varieties but, perhaps unexpectedly, the social and language proficiency profiling of variation was overturned. ‘Middle class’, well-educated Palauans, who had travelled regularly to the US were more likely to delete –t/d (i.e. behave more non-standardly) than working class, less well-educated, less well-travelled Palauans. We attempt in the presentation to explain why this might be.

Organizer

Kellie Gonçalves, Olga Solovova

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Ist’apxam (Listen!): Hearing Aymara Hip Hop in El Alto, Bolivia

Karl Swinehart, (PhD) Assistant Professor at the University of Louisville, will give a talk on the role of music in processes of Indigenous language revitalization in highland Bolivia.

Time and place: Sep. 4, 2019 2:15 PM–3:15 PM, Henrik Wergelands Hus MultiLing Meeting Room 421

Abstract

In this talk I examine music of Aymara rappers from the city of El Alto, Bolivia to consider questions concerning Indigenous language revitalization, music endangerment, and language ideologies of race and region in a majority Indigenous corner of the Andes. Aymara is among the handful of Indigenous languages of the Americas with more than a million speakers, with any where between two and three million speakers depending on how one counts a speaker. Despite its many speakers, trends towards language shift to Spanish persist among younger generations of Aymara Bolivia. The largest number of Aymara Bolivians by far live in the La Paz metropolitan region, including El Alto where they constitute the majority of the population. 

For some decades now, hip hop has become a seemingly universal musical genre with local scenes in nearly every nation on the globe. As an arena of cultural production, global hip hop also exemplifies the tensions between homogenization and heterogenization within contexts of advanced capitalism. As a musical genre with verbal art at its core, it has also become a vehicle across diverse Indigenous and minority language contexts for the buttressing of linguistic vitality against language shift towards dominant and colonial languages. Scholars of Indigenous hip hop have noted how hip hop has served as a means of positive self-expression among Indigenous youth and as a vehicle for countering stereotypes of Indigenous culture as anti-modern. In the Bolivian context, I argue that, by resisting the “whitening” effect of urban residence and Spanish language dominance through the use of Aymara language and dress, and also through embodying a musical genre understood as proximal to Blackness, hip hop, Aymara artists likeNación Rap and others not only transform the genre, but, in the process of doing so, they also counter semiotic ideologies tying Aymara language to the countryside and older generations. In examining the professional trajectories of two Aymara rappers I consider the opportunities musical performance, and hip hop in particular, present for speakers of Indigenous languages to position themselves as Indigenous language media professionals.

About the lecturer

Karl Swinehart is an assistant professor of social semiotics and coordinator of the Linguistics program in the Department of Comparative Humanities at the University of Louisville in Louisville, Kentucky, USA. He most recently co-edited a special issue of Signs and Society, “When Time Matters.” His research addresses linguistic diversity and popular culture, particularly in Bolivia where he has conducted ethnographic research with Indigenous language media professionals and educators since 2006.

Organizer

Haley De Korne

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Guest lecture: Mirage and paradoxes of creolization in the French Antilles

Professor Lambert-Felix Prudent will give a guest lecture Friday, August 23. The lecture is titled "Mirage and paradoxes of creolization in the French Antilles".

Time and place: Aug. 23, 2019 1:15 PM–2:30 PM, Eilert Sunds hus, Aud 5

About the lecturer

Lambert-Felix Prudent is currently professor in Linguistics at Université des Antilles and Former director of ESPE (Ecole Supérieure de Professorat et d’Education) in Guadeloupe. His studies relate to the Creole languages in general, their genesis and their development in relation to the standard languages they live alongside. He has been Editor-in-chief of Révue Etudes creoles and he is the author of several books and articles on the Creole languages and on the teaching of Creoles and Creole literatures.

Organizer

Anne Golden and Guri Bordal Steien

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Interpreting and turn-taking in multilingual interaction

Professor Christian Licoppe (Department of Social Science at Telecom ParisTech), professor Jan Svennevig (MultiLing) and PhD student Jessica P B Hansen (MultiLing) will give presentations on the topic of interpreting and turn-taking in multilingual interaction. The seminar is open for everyone.

Time and place: June 11, 2019 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Henrik Wergelands hus, room 421

'Chunking': voice, power and turn-taking in multi-lingual, consecutively interpreted courtroom proceedings with video links

by Christian Licoppe 

In this paper we describe sequential problems which appear in asylum court proceedings when an asylum seeker launches into an expansive story-like response, which has to be done in successive chunks for the sake of consecutive interpreting. We show that when the interpreter finishes his/her rendition of such a partial stretch of talk, the floor may either be given back to the asylum seeker (for him/her to go on with his/her answer or story, and thus be able to express his/her ‘voice’) or seized by the judge to ask another question, thereby emphasizing the latter’s ‘control’ over the proceedings.

Using video recordings of actual hearings (with asylum seekers appearing remotely through a video link) and conversation analysis, we show how the interpreter’s embodied activity and the way it displays his/her understanding of the response-so-far are crucial factors in the way turn-taking is collaboratively managed at such junctures, and therefore in the way the proceedings may lean more towards ‘voice’ or ‘control’.

Such embodied, turn-taking-oriented behavior is obliquely affected by the technology in the sense that in cases when the interpreter is located at a distance from the asylum seeker, the former has fewer resources to influence the turn-taking process. Therefore, although he/she may want to give the floor back to the asylum seeker, there is a greater chance that the judge may seize it him/herself, thereby making the video-mediated proceedings in such a configuration lean slightly more towards ‘control’ than ‘voice’.

Decomposing turns to enhance understanding by L2 speakers

by Jan Svennevig

This presentation shows how multi-unit turns may be designed to facilitate the establishment of mutual understanding in an incremental way. In addressing L2 speakers, L1 speakers decompose their multi-unit turns into smaller chunks and present them one at a time, in ‘installments’.

They leave a pause in between each installment, thereby inviting the recipient to provide acknowledgements along the way, or, alternatively, to initiate repair at an early stage. The practice may be used pre-emptively, to prevent potential problems of understanding from arising, or in response to an indication of an understanding problem by the recipient.

Managing interpreting within other participants’ turn space

By Jessica P B Hansen and Jan Svennevig

In interpreted interaction, long multi-unit turns pose a specific interactional problem, as the interpreter will need to intervene into the turn space of the current speaker in order to render what has been said up until that point. This presentation explores the multimodal organization of practices employed by medical professionals and interpreters in order to manage the temporary suspension of the medical professionals’ longer turn-in-progress.

We explore at what point during medical professionals’ ongoing multi-unit turns interpreting is made relevant, how this is done and by whom. We argue that this is not simply the case of splitting a longer contribution, such as an explanation or instruction, into several single turns, but a temporary suspension of the ongoing turn in order for the interpreter to interpret. This in turn shows how interpreting is an activity oriented to and co-organized by participants other than the interpreter.

The seminar is open for everyone. It is organized in connection with PhD student Jessica P B Hansen’s midway assessment.

Organizer

Jessica P B Hansen

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Wednesday Seminar: Do you think Norwegians are less polite than the Japanese? A case of making requests

Nazuki Kobayashi from the Department of Foreign Languages at the University of Bergen, Norway, will give a talk on communication styles in Norwegian and Japanese

Time and place: June 6, 2019 3:15 PM–4:30 PM, Henrik Wergelands Hus, MultiLing Meeting Room 421

Norwegians are generally perceived to prefer direct and explicit communication and it is characterized by expressions such as “rett på sak” (to the point) and “å kalle en spade for en spade” (to call a spade a spade). On the other hand, Japanese communication is traditionally described as vague and indirect. The Japanese value “ishin denshin” (heart-to-heart communication, understanding each other without talking). We have even a saying, “Ichi o kiite juu o shiru” (Hearing one and understanding ten).

My PhD project examines whether these communication styles apply when Norwegian students and Japanese counterparts make a request in their respective L1 in diverse situations. Based on the data collected from nine request situations, I will present how request are made by these two groups.

Bio

Nazuki Kobayashi is a PhD candidate at the Department of Foreign Languages, the University of Bergen.

Organizer

Olga Solovova

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Wednesday Seminar: A Sociocognitive Cross-Sectional Study of Metasyntactic Awareness and Cross-Linguistic Influence in French-Norwegian Bilingual Children in Oslo

Sébastien Lucas (MA), from Laboratoire Dynamique du Langage in Situ, University of Rouen, Normandy, France and affiliated to MultiLing, will give a talk on the link between cross-linguistic influence in bilingualism between French and Norwegian, metasyntactic awareness, and family language ideology and practices.

Time and place: June 5, 2019 2:30 PM–4:00 PM, Henrik Wergelands Hus, MultiLing Meeting Room 421

Recent studies on second language acquisition and bi/multilingualism have shown evidence of cross-linguistic influence when assessing metalinguistic awareness. Syntactic transfers related to word order patterns between two languages have been well-documented. However, to date no research has investigated that link between French and Norwegian, and bilingual family language policy.

In a sociocognitive, Bilingual First Language Acquisition framework, using a mixed method research design, this cross-sectional research aims to investigate the link between cross-linguistic influence in bilingualism between French and Norwegian, metasyntactic awareness, and family language planning and practices. Firstly, French-Norwegian bilingual children in the 5th grade (n=33) and French children living in France (n=30) judged French sentences in a reading grammaticality judgement. Two specific Norwegian grammatical features were found to be potential sources of ungrammaticality:  verb placement or use of preposition in prepositional verb. Secondly, Judgment strategies and corrections were collected in semi-structured interviews of some French-Norwegian bilingual children (n=14). Thirdly, parents (n=66) were asked to answer a sociolinguistic questionnaire informing about their attitude towards code-mixing and their corrective feedback.

Results obtained from reading grammatically judgement task show high scores and no significant differences between French-Norwegian bilingual and French monolingual groups for grammatical/ungrammatical verb-placement related sentences. By contrast, monolingual group outperformed significantly their bilingual peers when the ungrammaticality came from preposition use. Thus, it suggests the existence of syntactic cross-linguistic transfer only when prepositions are involved. Moreover, qualitative analysis of metalinguistic discourse suggests metasyntactic skills, cross-linguistic awareness through explicit comparison between both languages, cross-linguistic influence from Norwegian to French, and controlled activation/inhibition of languages. Finally, questionnaires show attention towards code-mixing, explicit planning, and use of explicit corrective strategies.

Findings contribute to our understanding of the link between cross-linguistic awareness, metasyntactic awareness in childhood bilingualism and family language planning and practices as well as of cross-linguistic transfer during reading comprehension task.

Bio

Sébastien Lucas is a PhD candidate at the DYLIS research center, Université de Rouen Normandie, France. 

Lucas is also a participant in the project Language Contact and Language Change across Three Generations in Turkish Families in Norway and France, a joint research project between MultiLing and Université de Rouen Normandie.

Organizer

Olga Solovova

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Wednesday Seminar: When more isn’t better: Institutional support and Indian languages in Singapore

Ritu Jain (PhD), lecturer from the  Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, will give a talk on the unexpected outcomes of institutional support for the immigrant minority languages among the Indian community in Singapore.

Time and place: May 15, 2019 2:15 PM–3:30 PM, Henrik Wergelands Hus, MultiLing Meeting Room 421

The bilingual policy of Singapore is explicitly shaped by the binary ideologies of ‘profit and pride’ where English is promoted for its global, socioeconomic value while the mother tongue is deemed critical for grounding individuals to community and cultural identity. Using this rationale, the bilingual education policy mandates all school students study English and the institutionally defined community mother tongue: Mandarin for the Chinese, Malay for the Malays, and Tamil for the Indians. While pupils from the Chinese and Malay communities are denied a choice, the linguistic complexity of the Indian demographic has earned students of the community flexibility in choice of the second language in education. They can opt for one of the three official ethnic languages or one of the five non-official Indian languages (Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Punjabi, and Urdu) offered via community schools. Contrary to expectations, increasing number of Indians prefer Hindi over alternatives.

Against this background, this presentation explores if provision of institutional support necessarily facilitates acquisition, maintenance and transmission of immigrant minority/heritage languages. It draws on data from census and school enrolment as well as semi-structured interviews with 29 families from various Indian language backgrounds who have opted for Hindi as the mandatory ‘mother tongue/L2’ subject for their children in school. Analysis of interview data indicates that this subversion can be traced to the ideologies among the family language managers, starkly in contradiction to those informing state education policies. Choices of languages in education among parents are shaped by pragmatic rather than identitarian judgements.  Findings reveal that such decisions are mediated through parental experiences (educational, social, and professional), migration trajectories, and residency status as much as by evaluation of policy options in previous, current, and aspirational sites for transnational populations. The presentation concludes with suggestions on managing and accommodating competing ideologies in language policies.

Bio

Ritu Jain teaches at the Language and Communication Centre at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Her research interest lies at the intersection of family and state language management. Specifically, she has examined the impact of policies on the languages of transnational Indians in Singapore. She is currently editing a volume on the languages of Singapore for the Routledge series, Multilingual Asia.

Organizer

Pawel Urbanik

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Wednesday Seminar: “Everything is dangerous”: Exploring Research on Agency and Language Learning

Elizabeth Miller, Associate Professor from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, will give a talk on agency and language learning. 

Time and place: Apr. 10, 2019 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Henrik Wergelands Hus, MultiLing Meeting Room 421

• Why did agency come to be regarded as a fundamental construct in language learning (and, more recently, language teaching) research only in the 2000s and 2010s?
• Is it even possible to research and analyze such a “hypothetical construct” (Mercer 2012)?
• How might it come to be a “dangerous” (cf. Foucault, 1997) focus of research for applied linguists?

This presentation will address these questions through drawing on the author’s research with adult immigrant small business owners in the U.S. who learned English informally, primarily in non-classroom contexts. To that end, it will briefly examine the shifts or expansions in theory and methodology and the increasing transdisciplinarity in applied linguistics research in the mid-1990s and early 2000s that helped to mobilize research on language learner agency.

It will then introduce narrative accounts of language learning by adult immigrants that demonstrate how agency can be understood and analyzed as relational articulation rather than individual capacity.

And, finally, it will explore the interrelationship of agency and responsibility in light of research on neoliberal responsibilization, ending on a cautionary note regarding the “moral commitments” (Davies, 1991) that constitute our understanding of agency in language learning and pointing to its "dangerous" potential.

Bio

Elizabeth R. Miller (Ph.D. University of Wisconsin-Madison) is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in the U.S. Her research has focused on concepts such as identity, agency, ideology, and power relations in relation to language learning among adult immigrants in the U.S. More recently, she has focused on the relationship of agency and emotions in language teacher practice. Her work can be found in numerous journals and edited books. 

Organizer

Anne Golden, Pawel Urbanik

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Working group seminar: Multilingualism in African contexts: language practices and language management

Time and place: Apr. 3, 2019 1:00 PM–5:00 PM, Henrik Wergelands hus, room 421

The Wednesday Seminar on the 3rd of April became an afternoon workshop event, due to the presence of Nathaniel Gernez (Laboratoire d'Ethnologie et de Sociologie Comparative, CNRS), who received a grant from the Norwegian University Center in Paris for a research stay in Oslo, and Rachel Watson (SOAS), who came to Oslo to collaborate in a writing project with MultiLing postdoctoral fellow Kristin Vold Lexander. These scholars presented their research on multilingualism in Kenya and Senegal, respectively.

They were joined by Vivian Shoo (Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences) presenting her on-going research on CMC in Tanzania, Kristin Vold Lexander (MultiLing) presenting her on-going work on CMC among Senegalese families in Norway, Janne Bondi Johannessen (MultiLing) presenting a Norad-funded project on linguistic research in collaboration with two universities in Ethiopia, and Elizabeth Lanza (MultiLing) presenting long-term collaborative research with Addis Ababa University on linguistic landscapes in Ethiopia.

The participants discussed common challenges and on-going trends in their projects, including shifting between focusing on linguistic form and communicative fluidity, context-dependent language hierarchies, processes of urbanization, and the complex power-dynamics of conducting both independent and collaborative research across borders.

Organizer

Kristin Vold Lexander and Haley De Korne

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Wednesday Seminar: Micro-variation in Multilingual Situations: The importance of linguistic proximity and property-by-property acquisition

Marit Westergaard, professor from UiT The Arctic University of Norway and NTNU Norwegian University of Science and Technology, will give a talk on crosslinguistic influence in L2 and L3 acquisition, arguing for the importance of structural similarity and property-by-property acquisition.

Time and place: Feb. 20, 2019 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Henrik Wergelands Hus, MultiLing Meeting Room 421

In this talk I will first (briefly) introduce the micro-cue model of L1 acquisition and support it with data from child language, focusing on cases where there is micro-variation in the input (Westergaard 2009, 2014). Findings show that children are sensitive to fine distinctions in syntax and information structure from early on and that they are conservative learners, generally making errors of omission rather than commission (Snyder 2007). I will then sketch a research program investigating to what extent similar processes can be found in L2A and multilingual situations more generally. Considerable data show that adult L2 learners are not conservative, thus happy to make much larger generalizations than L1 children.

Nevertheless, transfer/crosslinguistic influence can be argued to be selective, dependent on micro-variation in the L1. This is related to the idea put forward in Amaral & Roeper (2014) that transfer may only affect “simple rules”. In my interpretation, this means that transfer is local, applying property-by-property in small domains. This also resonates with recent proposals for L3 acquisition, the Scalpel Model (Slabakova 2016) and the Linguistic Proximity Model (Westergaard et al. 2016). I will then discuss L3A more specifically and argue that it is time for this field to shift the focus from the order of acquisition (L1 vs. L2) to more abstract linguistic structures of the three languages involved. Thus, L3A can be extended to the study of bilingual populations learning a third language, which is an increasingly common situation. I focus on the Linguistic Proximity Model, which argues that all languages remain active at all times and that cross-linguistic influence in L3A could be from either or both of the previously learned languages, provided there is some structural similarity between them. Furthermore, the model argues for incremental step-by-step learning and no special status of the initial stage(s).

Organizer

Janne Bondi Johannessen, Pawel Urbanik

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Wednesday Seminar: Trovoada de Ideias - Linguistic and Social Inclusion of International Students from Portuguese Speaking African Countries (PALOP) in Portuguese Higher Education

Ana Raquel Matias, a researcher working at the intersection between sociology of migration and sociology of language at the Centre for Research and Studies in Sociology, University Institute in Lisbon, Portugal (ISCTE-IUL) will give a talk on the linguistic and social inclusion of international students from African countries in Portuguese universities.

Time and place: Feb. 19, 2019 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Henrik Wergelands Hus, MultiLing Meeting Room 421

This presentation aims to discuss the contextual and theoretical assumptions of the project Trovoada de Ideias – Linguistic and Social Inclusion of Students from Portuguese-Speaking African Countries (PALOP) in Portuguese Higher Education*, an ongoing action research on Portuguese language teaching in a specific emerging context. It aims to contribute to a better understanding of the internationalisation processes within the Portuguese higher education, here seen as one of the key channels for the internationalisation of the Portuguese language and, specifically, for the historical presence of international PALOP students in Portugal. By adopting a multidimensional inclusion approach (linguistic, cultural and social), the ultimate aim is to contribute to a deeper knowledge of the factors of (in)comprehension between students fluent in different norms of Portuguese and the university host community in Portugal, thereby enhancing the success of learning and the integration of international African students within the academic community in Portugal.This project is coordinated by Ana Raquel Matias (CIES-IUL; ISCTE-IUL) and Paulo Feytor Pinto (CELGA/ILTEC; APEDI)

Bio

Ana Raquel Matias is currently an integrated researcher at the Centre for Research and Studies in Sociology (CIES-IUL; ISCTE-IUL). During her research experience, since 2003, she specialized in the intersection between sociology of migration and sociology of language, comparing policies on immigration, language integration and education, while focusing on adults and children of immigrant and African background. 

Organizer

Olga Solovova

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Wednesday Seminar: Nordic borderlands: scapes and scopes

Olga Solovova, Marie Curie postdoctoral research fellow from the University of Oslo (MultiLing), will give a talk on semiotic landscapes in the Northern Norway borderland.

Time and place: Jan. 23, 2019 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Henrik Wergelands Hus, Møterom 536

Northern Norway, set in a history of long-standing cross-border trade, cooperation and cultural encounters, is one of the key regions for delving into the complexity of multilingual phenomena. Kirkenes, the largest town in Finnmark, situated in the borderland between three states (Norway, Finland and Russia) and home to speakers of Norwegian, Sami, Kven, Russian and other languages, offers a unique lens into the multilayered practices and discourses of the region.                                          

The historically embedded complexity of practices and discourses results in material outcomes such as signage in the streets, roads and other public spaces across Kirkenes. This seminar will present some preliminary findings emerging from a pilot fieldwork in the area that identify and map some of the most significant discourses in action. Drawing from research in cultural geography, sociology of mobility and philosophy, concepts of ‘border’ and ‘landscape’ will be re-examined in search of an interdisciplinary framework for a study of the role of Russian language in the flows and networks of the multilingual economy of Northern Norway.

Organizer

Pawel Urbanik, Olga Solovova

2018

Wednesday Seminar: Legal recognition of signed languages in Norway and Sweden

Hilde Haualand, an associate professor in social anthropology, specializing in deaf studies at the Oslo Metropolitan University, will give a talk on legal recognition of signed languages.

Time and place: Nov. 28, 2018 2:00 PM–4:00 PM, Henrik Wergelands Hus, MultiLing Meeting Room 421

The presentation discusses the different contexts of the legal recognition accorded to signed languages in Sweden and Norway. Factors other than formal legislation seem to be more influential when the status of signed languages and signed language ideologies are discussed in the two countries. By comparing the legal recognition of Swedish Sign Language (SSL) and Norwegian Sign Language (NTS), and language planning activities in the two countries, it seems that NTS has enjoyed a stronger legal status as compared to SSL for two decades, but that legal recognition is not necessarily reflected in how people discuss the status of a specific signed language. 

This somewhat contradicts the story about Sweden as the first country in the world that accorded recognition to deaf peoples’ bilingualism and as a haven for people who use signed language. The paper presents a short history of the milestones in legislation (and the official recognition status) of signed languages in Sweden and Norway, and highlights some similarities and differences. Data focused upon include written documents like legal texts, deaf associations’ periodicals, etc. and interviews with former activists in the deaf communities in Norway and Sweden. 

Note! The talk will be in Norwegian sign language, and will be interpreted into Norwegian.

Organizer

Leena Maria Heikkola and Jessica Pedersen Belisle Hansen

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Wednesday seminar: Codeswitching and Translanguaging: A Multilingual Perspective

Jeff MacSwan, Professor at The University of Maryland, will give a lecture on codeswitching and translanguaging. 

Time and place: Nov. 21, 2018 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Henrik Wergelands Hus, MultiLing Meeting Room 421

Translanguaging is a new term in language education.  Like holistic bilingualism, it supports a heteroglossic language ideology. Some translanguaging scholars have questioned the existence of discrete languages, concluding that multilingualism itself does not exist. Furthermore, this work has charged traditional codeswitching scholars with embracing and supporting a monoglossic language ideology.

I argue that the political use of language names can and should be distinguished from the social and structural idealizations used to study linguistic diversity, favoring what I call an Integrated Multilingual Model of individual bilingualism, contrasted with the Unitary Model and Dual Competence Model. I further distinguish grammars from linguistic repertoires, arguing that bilinguals, like everybody, have a single linguistic repertoire but a richly diverse mental grammar.

I call the viewpoint developed here a multilingual perspective on translanguaging, which supports a heteroglossic language ideology as well as traditional basic scientific research on bilingualism, such as codeswitching.

The talk will be based on MacSwan's article A Multilingual Perspective on Translanguaging, published in the American Educational Research Journal. 

Organizer

Leena Maria Heikkola, Pawel Urbanik and Elizabeth Lanza

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Wednesday Seminar: With bilingual eyes. Throwing away the “ideal” participant (or: is my data collection reliable?)

Hanna Solberg Andresen, a doctoral candidate at MultiLing, will give a talk on methodological issues regarding participant selection.

Time and place: Nov. 14, 2018 1:15 PM–3:00 PM, Henrik Wergelands Hus, MultiLing Meeting Room 421

In my PhD I work on the conceptualization of motion events in English-Norwegian bilingual children (age 7-8). A set of 60 video-clips is used to elicit verbal data, eye-tracking data and memory data. In this presentation I will discuss aspects of the data collection, especially those related to the question of reliability and replicability. As Mertins (2016:19) points out when it comes to the comparability of the experimental settings, “it is very important to keep the experimental protocol across individual recordings as consistent as possible and to minimize variations in the experimental procedure, incl. the instruction and interaction between participants and investigator” (my emphasis).

But working with children is different from collecting data from adults, and some children need more encouragement than others to endure the whole session. How much variation in the instruction/interaction can be tolerated? Recruiting the right participants is a long process, and hence the participants are very valuable (“not an endless pool of participants”, chf. Mertins 2016:24). What do you do in cases where you will be loosing data because the child “falls out” (loss of eye gaze/verbal data)? To what degree does extra promting influence the results (in my case the eye-tracking data (attention to endpoints) and linguistic data (mentioning of endpoints))? And what if the alternative is breakdown?

I will show some examples of the “ideal” vs. the “close to breakdown”-participant and discuss whether the latter will have to be excluded or if it’s possible somehow to keep him/her (or do we only want “ideal” participants?) – alternatively how to decide on the flexibility vs consistency of the experimental protocol and how to avoid breakdowns. I welcome a discussion on how to find a solution to this challenge.

Organizer

Leena Maria Heikkola

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Wednesday Seminar: Visual methods in researching practices and identities

Anne Pitkänen-Huhta, a professor and vice dean responsible for education at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, will give a talk on visual methods in studying practices and identities.

Time and place: Nov. 13, 2018 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Henrik Wergelands Hus, MultiLing Meeting Room 421

In this presentation, I will focus on visual methods (e.g. photographs, drawings, collages) in researching language and literacy practices, and identities. Visual methods are increasingly used in research that tries to capture the subjective experiences of language users, language learners, or language teachers, often with the aim of awareness raising and emancipation.

It is assumed and expected that visuals offer research participants an alternative way (to verbal means) to express their experiences and feelings and to reflect on their language and literacy practices, identities or multilingual repertoires. In recent years, research on language learning has been criticised for its lack of attention to the individuals doing the learning (e.g. Kramsch 2009) and for its monolingual bias (e.g. May 2011, Douglas Fir group 2016).

In this talk, I will show how visual methods can be used to respond to this critique. I will first give a brief overview of what visual methods are and then illustrate their use through data from projects that have examined multilingual language and literacy practices of young people and children and the professional identity development of student teachers.

Organizer

Leena Maria Heikkola and Anne Golden

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Wednesday Seminar: The loss of a regional language in the Netherlands. Why toddlers give up their regional language (Limburgish) after entering preschool

Leonie Cornips, a professor and chair of “Language culture in Limburg” at the Maastricht University, The Netherlands, will give a talk on Limburgish and language loss.

Time and place: Oct. 18, 2018 4:15 PM–5:30 PM, Henrik Wergelands Hus, MultiLing Meeting Room 421

This paper addresses the question of why toddlers in the province of Dutch Limburg between the ages of two and four, may give up their regional language, i.e., Limburgish, as their home language after entering preschool even when both parents speak only Limburgish at home. The following interplay of factors is held responsible.

• First, language ideologies inform educational practices in preschool by which Dutch is considered to be the appropriate medium for transferring new knowledge whereas Limburgish is regarded as an intimate language needed for emotional support.
• Second, teacher-child, and peer interactions show the negative effects of speaking Limburgish; the child’s utterance will be repeated in Dutch by the teacher and her narrative will be interrupted by Dutch dominant peers.

These language socialization practices in preschool and influential peer interactions have a profound effect on language choice by toddlers who are still in the midst of their linguistic, cognitive, social, and biological development.​

Organizer

Leena Maria Heikkola and Pia Lane

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Wednesday Seminar: Didactic strategies for metalinguistic awareness and critical literacy among students in Mexico

Flor María Ordoñez Vilches, a doctoral candidate at the Autonomous Benito Juárez University of Oaxaca, Mexico. She will give a talk on Metalinguistic awareness and critical literacy.

Time and place: Oct. 17, 2018 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Henrik Wergelands Hus, MultiLing Meeting Room 421

I will present the preliminary plan for my doctoral thesis, which emerged from interaction in the classroom with students in the Bachelor of Language Teaching at the Faculty of Languages,  Autonomous “Benito Juárez”  University of Oaxaca, Mexico. Within the fields of critical media literacy, traditional literacy and language teaching, my research questions are:

• What didactic strategies can be useful in teaching metalinguistic awareness in order to allow the students to develop critical thinking skills to achieve different ways of expression?
• How to integrate these results so that they are applied both in the academic field and in personal life?

The fundamental purpose is to develop multiple strategies with students from different teaching/learning styles, to achieve communication, reflection and analysis. This action-research work will be carried out in a metalinguistic workshop, in the classroom, at the Faculty of Languages. It will be focused on language functions, syntax and semantics specifically. The purpose will be to identify the function that each person gives to the language, learn grammar and some Spanish standards.

Finally, we will study semantics to analyze different meanings that will help to compare the same object seen from different languages or perspectives. The planned methodology for the realization of this research will be presented. I comment about the process and activities that I have done until this moment, including more about the interests of the students and some strategies proposed by them. At the same time, I mention other important projects that will be proposed to continue with this research.

In summary, the What of the project is presented here, How…is the task to be completed, and I will welcome feedback and discussion.

Organizer

Leena Maria Heikkola and Haley De Korne

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Wednesday Seminar: Taiwanese-Texans: Orientation of Language and Cultural Identity

Erica Brozovsky, a Sociolinguistic Researcher at the University of Texas at Austin, USA, will give a talk on Taiwanese-Texans and their language and cultural identity.

Time and place: Oct. 3, 2018 2:00 PM–3:45 PM, Henrik Wergelands Hus, MultiLing Meeting Room 421

The goal of the ongoing sociolinguistics project is to study Taiwanese Americans in Texas (or Taiwanese Texans) in two veins: to explore how they align themselves with the various identities and social groups associated with their national, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds, and to examine how language is used in the construction of these identity alignments. 

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Seminar: Multilingual and Intercultural Education – Theory and practice from Latin America and Norway

This seminar aims to strengthen connections among Norwegian and Latin American scholars of multilingual and intercultural education, and is supported by the Norwegian Latin America Research Network. 

Time and place: Sep. 27, 2018 9:30 AM–Sep. 28, 2018 4:00 PM, 12th floor, Niels Treschows hus

How to provide quality education in linguistically and culturally diverse classrooms is not a simple task, and remains a concern for educators and scholars around the world. In Norway there is growing interest in multilingual and intercultural education among both scholars and practitioners, while in Latin America these areas have long been prominent in educational research and practice. This seminar aims to strengthen connections among Norwegian and Latin American scholars of multilingual and intercultural education who are working to respond to these concerns.

The seminar participants will address the following questions from different perspectives:

• What is the historical trajectory of multilingual and/ or intercultural education in your context?
• What approaches, challenges, and successes characterize the provision of multilingual and/ or intercultural education in your context?
• How can our work as scholars contribute most effectively to enhancing the quality of education in our changing societies?

The seminar is organized by the Center for Multilingualism in Society across the Lifespan, with support from the Norwegian Latin America Research Network. 

Program

Day 1: Thursday 27th September, 2018

• Welcome and introduction to the seminar 
  Elizabeth Lanza, Haley De Korne, and Unn Røyneland,  MultiLing Center, University of Oslo
• Languages and Interculturality in Brazil: From the indigenous to the international
  Lynn Mario T. Menezes de Souza, Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil
• Creole as a living regional language : A discipline to be created in Guadeloupe? Mirna Bolus, Université des Antilles, Guadelupe
• Multilingual Education in Mexico: A History of Coloniality and Resistance
  Vilma Huerta Cordova, Edwin N. León Jiménez and Mario E. López-Gopar, Autonomous Benito Juárez University of Oaxaca, Mexico
• Old categories in new times: Reflections on Intercultural Bilingual Education in the Andes
  Virginia Zavala Cisneros, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú
• How to be ‘cloud people’ in this changing world
  Victor Cata Vásquez Castillejos, Juchitán, Oaxaca, México

Day 2: Friday 28th September 2018

• The education of indigenous language teachers in the National Pedagogical University, Mexico
  María Soledad Pérez López, Universidad Pedagógica Nacional, México
• Multilingual education and indigenous citizenship: Perspectives from Sápmi
  Åse Mette Johansen, University of Tromsø
• Multilingual meetings in the Norwegian classroom – Experiences from multilingual preservice teachers
  Ingri Dommersnes Jølbo, Oslo Metropolitan University
• Panel discussion: Multilingualism & interculturalism in teacher education:  Approaches & challenges
  • Anne Golden (chair) (MultiLing Center, University of Oslo)
  • Verónica Pájaro (Innland Norway University of Applied Sciences)
  • Joke Dewilde (Faculty of Education, University of Oslo)
  • Guro Nore Fløgstad (University of Southeast Norway)
  • Ingebjørg Tonne (MultiLing Center, University of Oslo)
  • Guri Bordal Steien (Innland Norway University of Applied Sciences)
• Discussions & Summaries (Spanish, English, French groups): Impact & dissemination of scholarship

Organizer

Haley De Korne, Unn Røyneland and Anne Golden

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Wednesday Seminar: To [r] is to be rural: the phonological construction of the countryside in southern England

David Britain, a professor and chair of English Linguistics at the University of Bern, Switzerland, will give a talk on rhoticity being iconically rural in the context of Southern England.

Time and place: Sep. 5, 2018 2:15 PM–3:45 PM, Henrik Wergelands Hus, MultiLing Meeting Room 421

In 2011, Michael Woods argued that “‘rurality is … a social construct … an imagined entity that is brought into being by particular discourses of rurality that are produced, reproduced and contested by academics, the media, policy-makers, rural lobby groups and ordinary individuals. The rural is therefore a ‘category of thought’” (2011:9). In this paper, I show how, through a circuit of the emergence, circulation and reproduction of ideological discourses (Phillips, Fish and Agg 2001), Southern English rurality is constructed and reproduced through the strategic deployment in TV, in film, in song and in other media of rhoticity, the realisation of non-prevocalic /r/ in words such as ‘farm’ and ‘car’.

Rhoticity is a rather rapidly obsolescing phonological characteristic of the English rural South-West (and, appears today to be more robustly preserved in the area’s larger urban areas, such as Bristol). In other areas of the rural South of England, such as East Anglia, it died out well over a century ago (Ellis 1889). Despite the waning use of rhoticity in the South-West, however, comedians, film-makers, and dramatists still routinely recruit rhoticity to phonologically construct the peripheral ‘South-West’. Characters that we are urged to read as from this area, especially old ones in pastoral occupations, especially those without a long formal education, are routinely portrayed with rhotic accents. These deployments are, furthermore, also deeply classed – the rhotic are blue-collared, not white.

The ideological circuit has led to the association of rhoticity as being iconically rural. Rhoticity has, therefore, been deployed to construct *any* such older, less educated rural character, wherever they come from in the south of England and whether or not their character comes from a part of England where rhoticity can still be found. Examples from TV drama, comedy, film, and the internet will be used to demonstrate how a recessive consonant is put to work to construct and disseminate ideologies of the countryside, ideologies which erase rural linguistic diversity. Such constructions of rurality as these, broadcast regularly into people’s living rooms, strongly shape how people ‘see’, and, ‘hear’, the countryside, despite contestations from academics and from those in the rural South itself.

Organizer

Leena Maria Heikkola and Kellie Goncalves

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Wednesday Seminar: Metaphorical dimensions of language purism: From embodiment to discourse

Višnja Čičin-Šain, doctoral fellow from the Department of Literature at University of Oslo, ILOS, will give a talk on metaphorical dimensions of language purism in Croatian, post-Yugoslav context.

Time and place: Aug. 22, 2018 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Henrik Wergelands Hus, MultiLing Meeting Room 421

Abstract

• What factors influence language attitudes and, in particular, puristic and exclusionary ones? 
• To what extent are metaphors like dirty foreignisms, language contamination, and language cleansing manifestations of deeper underlying conceptual links between the domains of dirtiness and cleanliness, and language attitudes?

In a psycholinguistic experimental study, I inquire into the embodied aspects of language purism and investigate the effects of priming to physical dirtiness on the acceptability of foreign linguistic input. I suggest that a dirty prime should render word acceptability more severe by way of linguistically unacceptable is a dirty conceptual link.

On the basis of the results, I will argue that puristic emotions are dually grounded. The acceptability of foreign elements is shaped first and foremost by national sentiments and social, contextual concerns, but also by embodiment and embodied metaphorical relations: the domain of dirtiness in the service of symbolic rejection.

In this study, the metaphorical dimensions of language purism are explored from the perspective of a Croatian, post-Yugoslav context, reflecting sociolinguistic concerns of that particular linguistic and socio-geographical area.

Organizer

Ekaterina Kuzmina

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MultiLing seminar on sign language and interpreting

MultiLing, in partnership with NTNU, welcomes you to a seminar focused on signed language linguistics and interpreting research.

The seminar will be held in English, American Sign Language, and Norwegian Sign Language.

Time and place: June 4, 2018 1:00 PM–June 5, 2018 5:00 PM, P.A. Munchs hus, seminar room 360

On June 4 and 5 there will be a seminar on sign language, organized by Janne Bondi Johannessen, professor at MultiLing and the Norwegian leader of the project Linguistic Capacity Building in Ethiopia, and Jessica Pedersen Belisle Hansen, sign language interpreter and PhD-candidate at MultiLing, as well as Rolf Piene Halvorsen and Lindsay Ferrara, both at NTNU.

There will be talks by four PhD candidates in sign language, who are on a research stay from Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia, by PhD candidates from OsloMet, and by the Norwegian supervisors at NTNU. All talks and discussions will be interpreted to and from American sign language and English, by interpreters especially flown in from England for the occasion. The talks will give the audience much new knowledge about various aspects of Ethiopian Sign Language as well as about the research of the other speakers.

Program

Monday, June 4th

• Rolf Piene Halvorsen, NBHP and NTNU: Blink, indexing and direction, making a story different in Norwegian Sign Language
• Camilla Sandrud, Nord University: The good interpreter: Deaf women's perspectives on GP consultations with interpreters. A qualitative study on health, sign language, interpretation and education.
• Abey Tesfaye, Addis Ababa University: Demands presented in Ethiopian Sign Language interpreting
• Jessica Hansen, UiO: Now you see it, now you don’t: Choosing perspectives for video recording video-mediated interpreted hospital interaction

Tuesday, June 5th

• Pawlos Kassu, Addis Ababa University: Is aspect marking process in sign languages inflectional, derivational, or gestural? The case of Ethiopian Sign Language
• Vibeke Bø, OsloMet: Interpreting depiction: A cognitive-functional approach
• Adargachew Deneke Demissie, Addis Ababa University: Basic handshapes in Ethiopian Sign Language
• Woinshet Girma, Addis Abba University: Polysemy of Ethiopian Sign Language
• Benjamin Anible, HVL (with Lynn Hou and Ryan Lepic): When looks count: The function and distribution of look-at in American Sign Language
• Kristian Skedsmo, OsloMet: Other-initiated repair in Norwegian Sign Language conversation

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Guest lecture: Language and literacy networks revealed through childhood bilingualism

Ioulia Kovelman, associate professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, will give a talk on how insights given by bilingual children can inform our understanding of both universal and language-specific mechanisms in the neurobiology of language development.

Time and place: May 29, 2018 2:30 PM–4:00 PM, Henrik Wergelands Hus, MultiLing Meeting Room 421

Abstract

Learning to read changes the mind and brain. In my research I harness the study of this change to understand the impact of bilingualism on language and neural plasticity. 

Learning to read builds upon and interacts with children’s spoken language competence. First, I will argue that early and systematic bilingual exposure yields timely acquisition of each of the bilinguals’ languages as well as language-specific neural representations. We will then turn our attention to literacy. Monolingual evidence suggests that cross-linguistic differences in learning to read stem from, and are reinforced by, differences in the underlying spoken language structure. Does this mean that young bilinguals form dual, monolingual-like systems for each of their languages when learning to read? Our investigation of Spanish-English and Chinese-English bilinguals (children ages 6–12) suggests that the answer is both yes and no. Bilingual children do develop literacy systems and neurodevelopmental trajectories that are largely comparable to monolingual speakers of their two languages.

However, there is also evidence that young readers may transfer literacy skills across their languages, suggesting that the two language systems have both shared and discrete resources. I will conclude this presentation by critical evaluation of how the study of bilingualism informs our understanding of both universal and language-specific mechanisms in the neurobiology of language development.

Organizer

Leena Maria Heikkola and Pernille Hansen

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Wednesday Seminar: Can the notion of indexicality illuminate the analysis of multilingual practices?

Kristin Vold Lexander, postdoctoral fellow at MultiLing, and Rafael Lomeu, doctoral fellow at MultiLing, invite everyone to a roundtable discussion regarding the use of the notion of indexicality in analysing multilingual practices.

Time and place: May 2, 2018 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Henrik Wergelands Hus, MultiLing Meeting Room 421

Abstract

Indexicality, "the property of linguistic elements to index certain non-linguistic entities" (Lacoste et al. 2014), involves the creation of semiotic links between linguistic forms and social meanings (Ochs 1992). It is based on Peirce’s index, and was introduced and developed by Silverstein in a number of papers (1976, 2003, 2017 and others, see also Ochs 1992). From this concept, indexical order has been developed as an analytical tool to "relate the micro-social to the macro-social frames of analysis of any sociolinguistic phenomenon" (Silverstein 2003). Different orders are thus distinguished, specifying and limiting the social signification of particular linguistic means. The tool has been applied in works on for instance style (Eckert 2008, Bucholtz 2009) and enregisterment of dialect (Johnstone et al. 2006), to analyse how the social meaning of specific language practices change over time.

The concept of orders of indexicality proposed by Blommaert (2007) regards the social stratification of language practices and has been used to analyse, for instance, linguistic landscape (Lanza and Woldemariam 2014). This Wednesday seminar will consist of an introduction to the notion of indexicality followed by a roundtable discussion of examples of data from our current research projects. The aim is to gain more insight on the one hand into the utility of the indexicality notion and on the other into the multilingual practices that we study.

Organizer

Ekaterina Kuzmina

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Wednesday Seminar: Young Mozambican adults' discursive strategies at border crossings

Torun Reite, doctoral research fellow from the Department of Romance Studies and Classics at Stockholm University, will give a talk on spatial and linguistic strategies for discursive border-crossing of young Mozambican adults.

Time and place: Apr. 25, 2018 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Henrik Wergelands Hus, MultiLing Meeting Room 421

Abstract

Drawing on perspectives from border studies that have emerged within geography and related fields (Kramsch & Zierhofer, 2005; Wilson & Donnan, 2012) and positioned within the sociolinguistics of mobility (Kerfoot & Hyltenstam, 2017; Coupland et al., 2016; Blommaert & Dong, 2010), my study focuses on young Mozambican adults and the discursive strategies they adopt to cross spatial borders. The study adopts different lenses, and engages in an interdisciplinary dialogue between sociolinguistics and border studies and displays both the loci of perceived borders and the discursive strategies adopted to enhance cross-border mobility in a post-colonial setting of hegemonic socio-spatial stratification.

The method and material include interviews, ethnographic observation and metalinguistic discourses from focus group discussions of 24 young Mozambican adults aged 18-26 (17 men and 12 women). The participants consist of networks of friends that socialize on a daily basis.

Results show distinct discursive strategies adopted when facing borders perceived as un-traversable and for border-crossings associated with some degree of mobility. When borders are perceived as un-traversable, results demonstrate how individuals discursively adopt strategies of self-invisibilization (Muni Toke, 2017). In these cases, spatial (b)orders are embodied, enacted and discursively reproduced thus underpinning their resilience. In contrast, for borders perceived as partly permeable, results show examples of re(b)ordering and space production (Lefebvre, 1991) or translanguaging space (Li Wei, 2014)

Organizer

Ekaterina Kuzmina

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Wednesday Seminar: Metalinguistic functioning in French-Norwegian children in reading comprehension

Sébastien Lucas, doctoral research fellow from the DYLIS research center at the Université de Rouen Normandie, will give a talk on how French-Norwegian children use metalinguistic knowledge in reading comprehension.

Time and place: Apr. 19, 2018 2:30 PM–4:00 PM, Henrik Wergelands Hus, MultiLing Meeting Room 421

Abstract

I examine how French-Norwegian bilingual children reflect consciously upon the syntax of French sentences with the aim to bridge the gap between psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics about metalinguistic skills and awareness. In my research, I explore how family language policies and practices can influence the way bilingual children reflect upon the language and try to connect it with (meta)syntactic transfer between languages. I further explore the use of metalanguage by children in metalinguistic discourse. After 1,5 years, this talk will give me the opportunity to present how my work has progressed, especially the theoretical framework I want to develop, the research design I created and the data collecting I conducted.

Organizer

Ekaterina Kuzmina

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Wednesday Seminar: Dialect syntax in Scandinavia and America: Research infrastructure and research results

Janne Bondi Johannessen, professor at MultiLing and Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies, University of Oslo, will give a talk on infrastructure for dialect syntax research and on the heritage speakers of Scandinavian languages who moved to North America in 1825–1925.

Time and place: Apr. 4, 2018 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Henrik Wergelands Hus, MultiLing Meeting Room 421

Abstract

Dialect syntax has been the focus of much research in the Nordic countries over the last years. Common, cross-linguistic projects have resulted in lasting web-based research infrastructures, such as the Nordic Dialect Corpus (Johannessen et al. 2009), the Nordic Syntax Database (Lindstad et al. 2009), and the Corpus of Nordic American Speech (CANS). The corpora were created in order to obtain naturalistic, spontaneous speech, which meant that the interviews had to be performed in a careful way towards this goal. But gathering data is not always easy, and I will show examples where we sometimes failed, and why.

The Nordic Syntax Database contains sentence evaluations by many of the same people as those in the database. The sentences were carefully selected to obtain syntactic isoglosses. I will show some results and also discuss some challenges during the development of the database. I will briefly demonstrate some results in an open access journal (NALS, Nordic Atlas of Language Structures) with main results. The Nordic countries had a large immigration to North America in 1825-1925. Though the immigrants often settled near people from their own area in Scandinavia, we don’t find the same dialects as at home.

The Scandinavian heritage languages have developed away from their homeland language, due to the context in which they are minority languages next to a dominant majority language. I will illustrate this with research on word order conducted by myself and Ida Larsson (Larsson & Johannessen 2015a,b), and discuss how this could be explained in terms of incomplete acquisition.

Organizer

Ekaterina Kuzmina

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Clinical Forum: Neurocognitive approaches to bilingualism and language learning

Minna Lehtonen, professor at MultiLing and Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies, will give a talk on neurocognitive approaches to bilingualism and online processing of morphology by L2 learners.

Time and place: Mar. 21, 2018 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Henrik Wergelands Hus, MultiLing Meeting Room 421

Abstract

Early acquisition and use of two or more languages have been associated with several neurocognitive effects. For example, bilingualism-related changes have been observed in structural measures of the brain. Bilinguals have also been reported to show an advantage to monolinguals in executive functions. This benefit has been hypothesized to stem from life-long experience of bilingual language use and control, such as frequent switching between the languages, but it has also been highly disputed.

Furthermore, balanced bilinguals have been suggested to show a disadvantage in tasks involving lexical access, assumedly as a result of less exposure to and input in each individual language when compared to monolinguals. I will present studies that shed light on these questions by using various behavioral, neurocognitive, and meta-analytic methods.

The second part of my talk will focus on morphological processing. Learning morphological aspects of the Finnish language can be challenging for L2 learners. Our research investigates online processing of morphologically complex words, and we also aim to develop a mobile application that aids in learning these features of the language.

Organizer

Leena Maria Heikkola and Pernille Hansen

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Wednesday Seminar: Norwegian/English cognate knowledge among students: A didactics perspective

Kimberly Marie Skjelde, Doctoral research fellow from the University of Bergen, will give a talk on how Norwegian-English cognates can be defined.

Time and place: Mar. 14, 2018 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Henrik Wergelands Hus, MultiLing Meeting Room 421

Abstract

The overriding aim of my PhD project is to examine to what extent L1 speakers of Norwegian show knowledge of Norwegian/English cognates found in general academic vocabulary. The project applies a mix-methods research design to classroom environments. Participants will be students at the high school and university level.

A main part of the research project so far has been to outline principles for defining words that may be considered Norwegian/English cognates. This process will be the focus of my presentation. Central to the principles applied in my project have been semantic, orthographic, phonetic and etymological aspects of Norwegian/English word pairs. I will present the considerations I have made regarding these aspects of cognates and will be very interested in your thoughts and ideas related to the subject of defining cognates between these two languages.

Organizer

Ekaterina Kuzmina

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Wednesday Seminar: From one conversation to one hundred: Applying findings of conversation analytic research

Elizabeth Stokoe, professor of Social Interaction at Loughborough University (United Kingdom), will give a talk on how many of the things we think we know about talk that actually based on stereotypes rather than being based on evidence.

Time and place: Feb. 14, 2018 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Henrik Wergelands Hus, MultiLing Meeting Room 421
 

Abstract

In this lecture, I will describe my work in conversation analysis, and my research on the science of interaction across different settings. I will show how conversation analysts identify interactional practices that change the outcomes of encounters. I will explain how my research underpins the development of the Conversation Analytic Role-play Method, a research-based training method that challenges the assumptions of traditional communication training, role-play and simulation. Overall, I will show that and how many of the things we think we know about talk are stereotypes rather than evidence-based; how caricatures can damage institutional practices, and so why we need to talk about talk!

Organizer

Ekaterina Kuzmina

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Wednesday Seminar: Processes underlying language development and rate of English language acquisition in bilingual 5-6 year-olds in South Africa

Michelle White, doctoral research fellow at Stellenbosch University, South Africa, will give a talk about the psychological processes that underly the the learning of English in multilingual South African children. Welcome!

Time and place: Jan. 24, 2018 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Henrik Wergelands Hus, MultiLing Meeting Room 421

Abstract

This study tracks the development of English language skills and working memory skills, which underlie language acquisition amongst bilingual English Language Learners in their first year of school.

South Africa, with its 11 official languages is linguistically and culturally diverse, yet English continues to be the preferred language of learning and teaching. However, many South African children have little English knowledge upon entering school. The differing levels of English proficiency at school entry together with a large range of native languages in one classroom pose multiple teaching challenges, especially because a certain level of proficiency in English is required to perform well academically in an English-medium school.

Participants are typically developing 5- and 6-year-olds from a single English-medium school but who have a native language other than English. The longitudinal study assessed children at three points of testing: at the beginning, the middle and the end of the school year.

Organizer

Ekaterina Kuzmina

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Wednesday Seminar: Computational linguistics and NLP: How far are they from generic linguistics?

Andrey Kutuzov, Doctoral research fellow at Research Group for Language Technology, will give a talk on computational linguistics and NLP and their relationships with generic linguistics.

Time and place: Jan. 17, 2018 3:15 PM–4:30 PM, Henrik Wergelands Hus, MultiLing Meeting Room 421

The recent decade saw ever-increasing interest towards linguistics, as large IT companies started to invade language technologies market. However, this type of 'linguistics' is different from the generic 'language science' found in traditional textbooks. It is deeply influenced by statistical methods, machine learning and overall cares a lot about practical applications and empirical evaluation. In this talk, I will outline this 'natural language processing' or 'computational linguistics' field of science as it exists today, with some results of my own research (in diachronic semantics) as examples.

Organizer

Ekaterina Kuzmina

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2017

Wednesday Seminar: South Cape boorlinge and inkommers: looking local, sounding local, and the embodiment of place and belonging in (in)mobility

Yolandi Ribbens-Klein will give a talk examining the indexicality of Afrikaans rhotic variation, place and belonging. The talk is open to all!

Time and place: Nov. 8, 2017 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Henrik Wergelands Hus MultiLing Meeting Room 421

Ribbens-Klein is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow within Professor Rajend Mesthrie’s South African Research Chairs Initiative (SARChI; National Research Foundation) project ‘Language, Migration and Social Change’ in the School of African & Gender Studies, Anthropology & Linguistics, University of Cape Town, where she conducts sociophonetic analyses of rhotic variation in the speech of Afrikaans-English bilinguals.

Abstract

In the context of geographic mobility, in-migration can contribute to changing, and sometimes conflicting dynamics amongst establish residents (i.e. locals) and newcomers. In this presentation, I will explore how locals and newcomers discursively construct place identities in terms of ideologies of locality and belonging.

Modan (2007), and other sociolinguistic scholars such as Becker (2009), use the term place identity to refer to an aspect of social identity tied to locality. Furthermore, the sense of belonging to a specific place can be regarded as the embodiment of locality. Deumert (2014:18) states that the phenomenological notion of embodiment highlights ‘the way in which material objects become part of our bodily memory’ (see Bucholtz and Hall’s [2016] discussion of embodied sociolinguistics).

The materiality I focus on is places or localities, where the embodiment of place relates to people’s lived experience, how they express being ‘(not) from here’, as well as the kinds of freedom and restrictions that places can have on the movement and location of bodies. Embodiment therefore involves notions of mobility and immobility.

As argued by Blommaert (2010), a sociolinguistics of mobility considers how the movement of people involves the movement of different semiotic resources. I argue that (im)mobility per se is a semiotic resource, particularly seen in the notion of being a local or established resident, versus a newcomer.

The presentation will focus on how the embodiment of place – looking local and sounding local – is expressed in interviews conducted in 2011 with residents from a peri-urban, Afrikaans-dominant town called Houtiniquadorp (located in South Africa’s South Cape region). In Houtiniquadorp, the residents created emic place identities that involve historic struggles to belong, resistance to newcomers, and discourses of authenticity.

Residents refer to themselves and others as boorlinge or inkommers. Boorlinge (lit. ‘bornlings’, cf. ‘earthlings’; translated as ‘locals’) refers to established, and largely non-mobile, Houtiniquadorpers who can trace their ancestral connection to the place through several generations. The relational opposite of boorlinge are inkommers (lit. ‘incomers’; translated as ‘newcomers’), which include recent arrivals, and residents who might have been living in the town since a young age, but were not born there, or whose parents were not born there.

Discourse analyses of interview narratives show, among other things, that boorlinge expressed a sense of visually recognising boorling bodies, through the way they walk, talk and behave. Crime and substance abuse were linked to discourses about troubled neighbourhoods and the inkommers living there. Some inkommers also described their experiences of being silent or peripheral bodies, where boorlinge deny them the right to speak about local matters.

The argument is made that in-migration contributed to how residents position themselves and others as authentic or marginal Houtiniquadorpers, and in the process created various embodied place identities. The discussion moves towards conceptualising (in)migration as an object of discourse, rather than a straightforward analytical concept.

Organizer

Haley De Korne and Ekatarina Kuzmina

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Wednesday Seminar: Eye-tracking in linguistics: Focus on the Visual World Paradigm

Natalia Mitrofanova, researcher at the Language Acquisition, Variation and Attrition Research group at the University of Tromsø, will share her expertise on various aspects of mono- and multilingual acquisition in children and adults. All are welcome to attend!

Time and place: Nov. 1, 2017 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Henrik Wergelands Hus, MultiLing Meeting Room 421

The main goals of my talk are the following: (i) to present you with the main characteristics of eye-tracking methods used in linguistics, (ii) to get you acquainted with the Visual World Paradigm (VWP), (iii) to discuss general design issues, measurements, and analysis, (iv) to present a number of eye-tracking case studies conducted at the UiT Lab, and (v) to discuss how eye-tracking can be integrated in your own research projects.

I will start by discussing the history of eye-tracking research in linguistics, and laying out the main characteristics of the Visual World Paradigm. As examples, I will use classical works as well as studies conducted at the LAVA Lab at the UiT by our group (with focus on predictive processing of grammatical case and prepositions by children and adults). Finally, we will discuss how eye-tracking can be employed in the research conducted within your group, considering the specific research questions, target populations, languages involved etc.

Organizer

Haley De Korne and Ekaterina Kuzmina

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Wednesday Seminar: Cognitive fatigue and language in Multiple Sclerosis

Leena Maria Heikkola will discuss how cognitive fatigue, a typical symptom of Multiple Sclerosis (MS), affects the language of persons with MS. Open to all!

Time and place: Oct. 25, 2017 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Henrik Wergelands Hus MultiLing Meeting Room 421

Language disorders in MS have not been studied extensively from a linguistic point of view. Moreover, the effects of cognitive fatigue, i.e. the deterioration of cognitive performance during sustained activity), on language in MS has not been studied at all.

In my talk I will discuss, whether and how cognitive fatigue affects language in Multiple Sclerosis (MS).  I will discuss the possible effects of cognitive fatigue based on neuropsychological and linguistic data. The linguistic data consists of semispontaneous oral narratives, namely Frog Stories. The language of persons with MS will be analyzed both quantitatively as fluency, and qualitatively as coherence.

In conclusion, I will present data pointing to effects of cognitive fatigue on language in MS.

The talk is based on my PhD study.

Organizer

Haley De Korne and Ekatarina Kuzmina

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Wednesday Seminar: Disseminating research with research participants & other stakeholders

Haley De Korne, Kamilla Kraft, and Elina Kangas will share their experiences and facilitate a discussion on challenges and strategies regarding sharing research results back to the people who have participated in the research. All are welcome to attend!

Time and place: Oct. 18, 2017 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Henrik Wergelands Hus MultiLing Meeting Room 421

Sharing and disseminating research can be a challenge, whether we are communicating with the press, with policy makers, or with our research participants themselves. 

The responsability to disseminate research can take many forms, from academic publishing, to talking to the popular press, to working with policy makers. In this seminar we will discuss approaches to disseminating research results among the immediate stakeholders who have informed the research.

We will share our varied experiences and attempts to achieve effective outreach among stakeholders, including issues which we find especially challenging and some strategies which we feel are promising. We encourage researchers to attend with their own experiences in mind, and to join in the discussion and brainstorming of possible future strategies. For those engaged in on-going research, this is an opportunity to think together about what future outreach opportunities are possible.  

Organizer

Haley De Korne

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Wednesday seminar / Guest lecture: Language and Cognition - some psycholinguistic insights

Barbara Mertins, professor in psycholinguistics at the Technische Universität Dortmund, will present a critical review of the effects of language on cognition.

Time and place: Sep. 13, 2017 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Henrik Wergelands Hus MultiLing Meeting Room 421

The evidence that language, specifically grammar, affects the way we perceive, organize and talk about the world around us is mounting.

In my talk I will critically review and discuss a number of behavioral and experimental studies showing effects of language on cognition.

In addition, I will address the scope of such effects and make some remarks on how foreign language and bilingual speakers think in two languages.

In conclusion I will present recent data pointing to cognitive advantages of the bilingual mind.

Organizer

Haley De Korne and Hanna Solberg Andresen

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Is bilingualism actually the key factor for the bilingual cognitive advantage?

Neuropsychologist Rune Nielsen (Rigshospitalet/University of Copenhagen) will present his research on bilingual cognitive advantages. The lecture is open to everyone. Welcome!

Time and place: Sep. 5, 2017 11:15 AM–1:00 PM, Henrik Wergelands hus 421

Abstract

In the previous decade bilingualism research has reported both cognitive disadvantages and advantages of bilingualism. These cognitive disadvantages and advantages are reported to occur across the lifespan in populations ranging from children to older adults (in particular research from Bialystok and coworkers in the last part of the 2000's).

Research on adult bilinguals report two major trends: bilingualism is associated with better executive control, including switching and inhibition, whereas verbal skills in each language is generally found to be weaker than those of monolingual speakers of each language. Although these early reports of cognitive advantages of bilingualism are generally supported by functional magnetic resonance imaging studies confirming that frontal systems involved in executive control are recruited by bilinguals during language switching, more recent studies in aging adults using better matched groups have typically been unable to replicate the findings of a bilingual advantage in executive control.

Consequently, the proposed bilingual advantage remains controversial and the early studies have been criticized for suffering from a host of theoretical and methodological shortcomings. It has been suggested that the bilingual advantage may in fact be due to hidden demographic factors that tend to be differentially distributed among bilingual and monolingual study populations, rather than bilingualism per se. The impact of cultural factors on cognitive processes and how this may relate to the proposed bilingual cognitive advantage will be discussed from the position of cross-cultural neuropsychology and a study of older adult bi-/multilingual Turkish immigrants in Copenhagen.

Organizer

Anne Marie Landmark

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Working Memory and Sentence and Discourse Comprehension

Professor of Neurology David Caplan (Harvard Medical School/Massachussetts General Hospital) will share his research and insights with us at this week's Wednesday seminar. The lecture is open to everyone. Welcome!

Time and place: June 7, 2017 2:00 PM–4:00 PM, Henrik Wergelands hus, meeting room 536

Working memory (WM) is a short-duration, limited capacity memory system that is thought to support the need for storage and retrieval of information in a wide variety of cognitive tasks.

Comprehension of sentences and discourse is one task that requires storing and retrieving information. The role of WM in sentence comprehension would be manifested by disproportionate increases in processing time at points of memory load in individuals with lower WM (individual differences data) and in disproportionate increases in processing time at points of memory load under a memory load concurrent condition (interference data). I shall review experiments that show that neither of these phenomena are found.

This leads to the view that the memory requirements of sentence and discourse comprehension are met by a memory system other than WM. I shall discuss alternatives to WM that could play this role. I shall discuss other functions, closely related to comprehension, where WM may play a role.

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Multilingualism and forensic linguistics: What do linguists do as forensic experts?

The most recent addition to MultiLing's core team, Research Professor Aneta Pavlenko, will be addressing the hot topic of forensic linguistics — language and the law. Open lecture.

Time and place: June 6, 2017 10:15 AM–11:30 AM, Henrik Wergelands hus 421

Applied linguists are often asked about the relevance of their research for the ‘real world’. What exactly do we apply linguistics to? What difference, if any, do we make?

In this talk, I will discuss forensic linguistics as an area where scholars of multilingualism are increasingly making a difference through both research and expert testimony.

Drawing on my own experience as forensic consultant and on my recent research on comprehension of legal language by non-native speakers of English, I will discuss methods used to analyze language as evidence, ethical and practical issues faced by linguists in the courtroom, and ways in which we can affect public policy and raise awareness of linguistic inequalities.

I will end by discussing the Guidelines for communicating rights to non-native speakers of English in Australia, England and Wales, and the USA. 

About Aneta Pavlenko

Aneta Pavlenko, Ph.D. is Research Professor at the Center for Multilingualism in Society across the Lifespan at the University of Oslo and Past President of the American Association for Applied Linguistics. Her research focuses on the relationship between bilingualism, cognition, and emotions. She has also done work in forensic linguistics, sociolinguistics, and language policy. 

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What you don't know can hurt you: How a language you barely speak affects the one you do

Professor of Linguistics Maria Polinsky (University of Maryland) will be sharing her research and insights with us at guest lecture this week. The lecture is open to everyone. Welcome!

Time and place: Mar. 22, 2017 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, P. A. Munchs hus, Seminarrom 360

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Performing the exemplary speaker: multimodal enregisterment in German ethnic comedy

Jannis Androutsopoulos, Professor at the University of Hamburg and Professor II at MultiLing, will be presenting his work at this week's Wednesday seminar. The lecture is open to everyone. Welcome!

Time and place: Mar. 1, 2017 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Henrik Wergelands hus, MultiLing meeting room 421

In this lecture I present video-clips by four German ethnic comedians who disseminate their independently produced ethnic comedy on YouTube: Tiger, Jilet Ayse, Jokah Tululu, and Ömsen. I examine their performances by drawing on social semiotics (van Leeuwen 2005), enregisterment theory (Agha 2003, Johnstone 2011), the notion of embodied sociolinguistics (Bucholtz/Hall 2016), research on heteroglossia in performance (Jaffe et al. 2015), and research on the discursive construction of (multi-)ethnolects (Androutsopoulos 2011).

Ethnic comedy performance deploys a range of semiotic indexicals to construct exemplary speakers (Agha 2003) from various ethnic milieus. Besides linguistic heterogeneity, they draw on representations of the speaking body and social space as well as post-production techniques.

I examine these performances in terms of the stylistic choices, language-ideological distinctions and ethno-cultural stereotypes by which exemplary “Foreigners”, “Turks”, “Africans” and “Germans” are constructed, and thereby locate the place of multilingual resources in the comedians’ repertoires.

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What counts as evidence in Applied Linguistics (and related fields)

Professor Kees de Bot (University of Pannonia) will give a talk at this week's Wednesday Seminar. The lecture is open to everyone. Welcome!

Time and place: Feb. 8, 2017 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Henrik Wergelands hus, MultiLing meeting room 421

In different areas of research there may be different views on what counts as evidence. At the moment evidence-based (which implies a quantitative approach) is the norm, and there are rankings of methods and paradigms with respect to the weight of the evidence they deliver. 

In this presentation, which is mainly a state-of-play of my thinking about these issues, I will argue that there are no absolute norms for evidence. Inspired by the American philosopher of science Peter Achinstein, who wrote 'The Book of Evidence' (2001) and provides a clear view of what counts as evidence. He distinguishes a number of steps or requirements:

• There is a Hypothesis H and something that might be evidence e for H
• H needs to have content validity: it should be conceptually sound and open to change
• The way the evidence e is collected has to meet the highest standards 
• The link between H and e should be plausible
• Some facts are evidence that a specific assumption is true
• The validity of evidence is individual, situational and objective
• Information becomes evidence when it gives the evaluator 'good reasons to believe' that e is evidence for H

A number of current controversial topics will be used to clarify Achinstein's approach. You are welcome to disagree.

What counts as evidence for different subfields and paradigms in applied linguistics?

A distinction needs to be made between 'evidence' and 'proof'. In the social sciences and the humanities the primary criterion of evaluation of scientific theory is evidence, not proof. Evidence can prove a theory wrong, by establishing facts that are inconsistent with the theory. In contrast, evidence cannot prove a theory correct because other, still to be explored evidence, may be inconsistent with the theory. 

Evidence comes in many forms. What types of evidence are there? Who are to evaluate these data, and does the same type of data count in different traditions? Is some type of evidence or data 'harder' than other data? Is there evidence that counts for all fields, some type of universal evidence? Evidence is only relevant when it relates a priory to a theory, and so the quality of evidence is partly dependent on the theory it is linked to.

Organizer

Anne Marie Landmark Dalby and Judith Purkarthofer

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Semantic and Conceptual Transfer

Professor Scott Jarvis, professor in Linguistics at Ohio University, will hold a guest lecture at MultiLing. The lecture is open to everyone. Welcome!

Time and place: Feb. 1, 2017 10:15 AM–12:00 PM, Sophus Bugge, seminarrom 5

The influence of one language on language learners’, bilinguals’, and multilinguals’ use of another language is often most noticeable in the areas of phonology and morphosyntax, but crosslinguistic influence also tends to be pervasive—even if it is less conspicuous—in the area of meaning. Meaning is a multifaceted phenomenon, however, and meaning transfer (i.e., crosslinguistic influence involving meaning) can originate from different levels of mental representation.

We can distinguish between two broad types of meaning transfer: semantic transfer and conceptual transfer. The former involves linguistic representations (mappings between form and meaning), whereas the latter involves representations of experience in both long-term and working memory. Researchers who are new to this area of research often confuse conceptual transfer with semantic transfer. The purpose of this lecture is therefore to help clarify the differences between them. A further purpose is to describe some of the methods and methodological principles that can be used to investigate these areas of meaning transfer.

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Still a long way to go!

Professor Marjolijn Verspoor (Groningen University) will hold a guest lecture at MultiLing. The lecture is open to everyone. Welcome!

Time and place: Jan. 30, 2017 9:30 AM–11:00 AM, Henrik Wergelands hus, meeting room 536

Language teachers often think that grammar teaching is the most important: If you know the grammatical rules, you master the language! In this paper, Verspoor argues that focusing on grammar is not the most effective strategy.

Language is not a complex system driven by systematic rules, but a complex, dynamic, self-oranizing system that is meant to convey meaning. Grammar is just epiphenomenal. To express meaning, language users often use similar expressions over and over again, and some of these have regularities that are similar to rules, which linguists dexcribe as such. However, they do not form the basis of language. Therefore, it is better to spend time in class on spoken and written language authentic materials in which chunks and conventionalized ways of saying things (CWOSTs) such as "you have come a long way" occur naturally and frequently.

2016

Public Wednesday Seminar: Multilingualism at Warruwi Community (Australia): perspectives on a complex whole

Visiting researcher Ruth Singer, University of Melbourne, will give a lecture at this week's Wednesday seminar. The lecture is open to everyone. Welcome!

Time and place: Nov. 2, 2016 3:30 PM–5:00 PM, Henrik Wergelands hus, MultiLing meeting room 421

At Warruwi Community around ten Indigenous languages from five different language families are used among only 350 people. It is unclear why there are so many languages still spoken at Warruwi because elsewhere in Australia linguistic diversity has sharply declined. A range of methods and theoretical frameworks have been used to investigate this question over the past 5 years. These include linguistic biography interviews and multimodal tasks with children and adults; video-making with young people; recordings of naturalistic conversation, digital ethnography and participant observation. The research has involved collaboration with field-based researchers, musicologists, anthropologists and other linguists. This talk will look at which methods and ideas have helped to shed light on the broader picture of language use at Warruwi. At various stages in the research it has been necessary to modify or abandon established ideas taken from existing work on multilingualism. These decisions highlight how language use at Warruwi differs from contexts more often studied in research on multilingualism.

Organizer

Judith Purkarthofer and Anne Marie Landmark Dalby

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Filler-gap dependencies across the lifespan

Associate Professor Mike Putnam from Penn State University is visiting MultiLing and he will present his work for us. The lecture is open to everyone. Welcome!

Time and place: Sep. 23, 2016 2:15 PM, Henrik Wergelands hus, MultiLing meeting room 421

Abstact

In this talk I take a closer look at constructions known as filler-gap dependencies in bi- and multilingual communities across the lifespan, paying particular attention to the status of the grammar with regard to these constructions in a multilingual speech community in southwestern Kansas (Plautdietsch-English-Spanish). Based on experimental data from fieldwork conducted earlier this summer, here I investigate the properties of long-distance dependencies in matrix, embedded, and long-distance context of individuals from this community with varying degrees of proficiency in these grammars. Through this presentation I address topics such as the relationship between long-distance dependencies in L1 heritage grammars vs. L2 grammars as well as the potential conflict of simultaneously-activated grammars. 

About Michael T. Putnam 

Mike Putnam is an Associate Professor of German & Linguistics at Penn State University who specializes in the grammar of multilinguals across the lifespan, in particular, the (morpho)syntax-semantic interface of global varieties of heritage Germanic speakers. He is also the director of the Language Contact & Change lab group at Penn State University. 

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Apartheid landscapes: ‘small stories’ in the talk of UWC students

Senior Lecturer Zannie Bock (University of the Western Cape, South-Africa)  will hold a guest lecture at MultiLing. The lecture is open to everyone. Welcome!

Time and place: Sep. 15, 2016 3:15 PM–4:30 PM, Henrik Wergelands hus, MultiLing meeting room 421

Abstract 

Apartheid, as a system of racial segregation, was underpinned by a raft of discriminatory laws which affected every aspect of life in South Africa, including the rights of people to reside, work, socialise in and move through racially demarcated spaces. One of the effects of this was to fundamentally shape South Africans’ conception of and relationship to physical and social spaces. 

In this paper, I explore how the spatiality of apartheid remains a structuring ‘motif’ in the way University of the Western Cape students perceive and talk about place and space, despite that fact that the apartheid laws were removed from the statute books in 1994. I illustrate my argument with data collected in focus group interviews at the University of the Western Cape between 2009 and 2014.

Using a focus on narrative, in particular ‘small stories’ (cf. Bamberg & Georgakopoulou 2008), this paper explores how these participants’ stories provide insight into how they ‘remember’ apartheid, not as a system of legalised oppression, but as a mental landscape bounded in space and time and associated with meanings which both perpetuate and  destabilise old apartheid geographies. 

The paper also reflects on the new voices that have swept across South African campuses, and their challenge to ‘white spaces’.  It concludes by arguing that a small stories lens provides a valued counter narrative to the master narratives which circulate, and that attention to these brings into focus the complexity of racial ‘entanglements’ in post apartheid South Africa. 

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Multilingual Singapore: multilingual society, bilingual individuals?

The linguistic situation in Singapore has undergone dramatic changes in its 50 years of history.  A number of linguistic issues have arisen as a result of active language planning policies, including a rapid shift in the languages used by Singaporeans to English only and the demise of the Chinese vernaculars. Learn more at this open lecture!

Time and place: June 8, 2016 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Henrik Wergelands hus, MultiLing meeting room 421

With active language planning policies in force since its independence as a nation, the linguistic situation in Singapore has undergone dramatic changes in its 50 years of history.  A number of linguistic issues have arisen as a result of these policies. These include a rapid shift in the languages used by Singaporeans to English only and the demise of the Chinese vernaculars.

This presentation will describe the language policies, planning and implementation in Singapore and discuss the impact of such policies. Reference is made to ongoing research on the attitudes and use of the varieties of English; on the maintenance and shift of the non-English official languages of Singapore; and the marginalization of elderly Chinese Singaporeans. This presentation draws data from three separate studies. The attitudinal data from an ongoing subjective-reaction study of Singaporeans from different socio-economic background using the Match-Guise technique; while the investigation of the non-English varieties was carried out using in-depth interviews and the statistical analysis of data obtained through questionnaires.

The results show a marginalization of elderly Chinese Singaporeans who do not speak English or Mandarin. The results also show that the Chinese vernaculars have almost all disappeared, with Mandarin becoming the de-facto mother tongue of the Chinese community. For Singaporean Malays the Malay language is still unrivaled in interactions with senior members of the community. However, English is making inroads everywhere else and this is particularly significant for young Malay adults (18-24 years), young women and people of high socio-economic and educational status. This leads to the conclusion that domains that were traditionally considered safe havens for Malay in Singapore are slowly being eroded.

All these studies indicate a linguistically dynamic community that is very sensitive to government-led initiatives and globalization forces.

About Francesco Cavallaro

Francesco Cavallaro (external link) is an Associate Professor in the Division of Linguistics and Multilingual Studies at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His research interests are in sociolinguistics and the social aspects of bilingualism, especially of minority groups in multilingual contexts.

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'Feeling the language you speak’. Language and emotion in multilingual contexts

The view that language mediates the world of emotion is widely accepted. In this talk, Ng Bee Chin (NTU, Singapore) addresses the issue of how bilinguals or multilinguals negotiate the emotional worlds of the different languages they speak. Welcome to this open lecture!

Time and place: May 23, 2016 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Henrik Wergelands hus, MultiLing meeting room 421

The view that language mediates the world of emotion has been robustly supported in both observations and empirical investigations. The issue of how bilinguals or multilinguals negotiate the emotional worlds of the different languages they speak is beginning to receive attention though the bulk of the studies focus mainly on crosslinguistic comparisons or on monolinguals.

There is sufficient evidence, however, to point to bilinguals shifting their sociocultural views and expectations when the language they use changes. This is hardly surprising but what remains to be explored is precisely how these views change and whether these changes can be predicted by our current knowledge of emotion research about existing languages.

In this talk I will present the findings from my current study of an emotion corpus in Mandarin Chinese as well as a crosslinguistic comparison of four emotion domains (Anger, Pride, Guilt and Shame). The four groups compared were Mandarin Chinese monolinguals, English monolinguals and two groups of English-Chinese bilinguals with different level of language dominance in Singapore. The participants answered a questionnaire that was customised by researchers in the Swiss Centre for Affective Sciences for six UN designated languages.

The findings indicate strong language effects and despite fairly homogenous cultural experience, language use and exposure play a big role in shaping Singaporean bilinguals’ use and understanding of emotion words. This key aspect of the findings challenges the common practice to see same language pair bilinguals as a homogenous bilingual group.

About Ng Bee Chin

Ng Bee Chin works mainly in the area of bilingualism and multilingualism with a focus on the impact of language contact on individuals and the community they live in. Her research approach is to explore both cognitive and social aspects of language acquisition and use. 

She currently works in the Division of Linguistics and Multilingual Studies in Nanyang Technological University. She is also the Associate Dean of Graduate Studies in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences.

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Reconstructing Sociolinguistic Variation in the Russian Language Empire: Multilingualism and Non-standard Russian Contact Varieties

Guest lecture by visiting scholar Lenore Grenoble (University of Chicago, USA). Open to everyone.

Time and place: May 10, 2016 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, MultiLing Meeting Room

Lenore Grenoble (Photo: uchicago.edu)

Summary

This talk studies the intersection of two problems: reconstructing the effects of language contact and reconstructing the linguistic system of any particular language, focusing on methodologies and issues involved in reconstructing language contact situations and the effects of contact from existing documentation. For contact linguistics, it is critical but often very challenging to determine which changes are specifically due to language contact and which can be explained as language-internal change.  At the same time, historical linguistics centers on determining linguistic regularity in reconstruction, but ignores variation and sociocultural use, and treats language as a self-contained entity spoken in only monolingual settings. Linguistic research today shows that sociolinguistic variation and language contact are the norm, not aberrations. This highlights the need for a different approach to historical reconstruction—not the reconstruction of an idealized grammar, but of the social context of linguistic use. Both diachronic and synchronic linguistics need to account for the sociohistorical conditions of language use, how factors such as contact have contribute to a language’s development and, more broadly, when and how speakers in a population invoke different aspects of their language.

The goal for a socially anchored approach to historical linguistics is thus to reconstruct not only which features actually existed in a language when it was robustly spoken, but which subsets of the population used it, and its role social interaction. How do we reconstruct the rich variation of multilingual settings from records that do not document it? 

In this talk I illustrate the challenges and possibilities with two contact varieties of Russian, Chinese-Pidgin Russian (CPR) and Odessan Russian (OdR). Viewed as substandard varieties (although OdR has covert prestige), both lack solid linguistic documentation. CPR emerged in the 1700s from trade contacts on the Chinese-Russian border. The earliest records of any kind come from travelogues written by Russians who journeyed to Chinese side of the contact zone, and accounts later surface as literary dialect in Russian fiction.  OdR a dialect spoken in Ukraine beginning around 1880 until the 1970s, when most of its speakers emigrated, serves as the prime case study. As a major seaport, Odessa was the hub of social and economic activity and multilingualism: OdR grew out of intensive language contact and thus differs from most other regional varieties of Russian specifically by virtue of being a contact variety. It exhibits substrate influences from Yiddish, Ukrainian, and Polish, as well as lexical borrowing from other languages, including French, Greek, and Turkic. There is considerable evidence that certain features spread outside this community. Today, the language is very salient in the Russian cultural imagination: a representation of it continues to appear in film and TV, as well as in social interaction, where it is often used to index a certain type of character. By and large, the dialect is regarded as “low class” even by present-day speakers, yet Russian speakers claim to identify with it in some way, suggesting the dialect has covert prestige

From the patchwork of existing data it is possible to reconstruct a system of social networks based on the different settings and interlocutors with whom characters invoke the dialect, and which features they use. This analysis relies on historical accounts of population dynamics in Odessa, a dictionary documenting Odessan “errors” in spoken Russian (Dolopchev 1909), fiction written by Jewish writers in Odessa whose writings (attempt to) mimic speech, and fieldwork with the remaining speakers (now living in Brighton Beach, NY). The role of fictional literary works is central to the reconstruction of both CPR and OdR.

These findings further inform ongoing work in documentation: by providing researchers with an understanding of the reconstruction process and the challenges posed by missing components, we can better understand the kind of documentation needed for the future. I argue for a praxis of documentation that is embedded in an ethnography of communication, in order to preserve an understanding of the linguistic practices of the speech community.

About Lenore Grenole

Lenore A. Grenoble (BA, Cornell; MA, PhD University of California, Berkeley) is the John Matthews Manly Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago and Chair of the Department of Linguistics.

Her research focuses on language use as socially anchored and contextually embedded. She specializes in the fields of language contact, endangerment and shift; language documentation; and discourse analysis and interactional grammar. 

Organizer

Pia Lane

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Wednesday Seminar. Superdiversity and multilingualism: a useful connection (or not)?

Stephen May´s  (University of Auckland, New Zealand) lecture is open to all. Note: This time on Tuesday!

Time and place: May 3, 2016 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Henrik Wergelands hus, MultiLing meeting room 421

In recent years, we have seen a flurry of work in critical sociolinguistics foregrounding the notion of “superdiversity", a term first coined by the sociologist Steve Vertovec and used to describe the rapidly changing patterns of migration and transmigration in this late modern, globalised age.

The implications of superdiversity taken up within this recent sociolinguistic work foreground the rapid expansion of multilingual repertoires, particularly in major urban conurbations worldwide. Superdiversity has thus been used to foreground the normalcy of multilingualism, the dynamism and complexity of multilingual oral language use, and how both present key challenges to traditional structural linguistic approaches and analyses of language boundedness and use.

While broadly welcoming this development, in this presentation I explore some significant, and as yet still largely unacknowledged, limitations of superdiversity as an explanatory paradigm, particularly in relation to multilingualism – offering a note of caution to those who so enthusiastically advocate it as the paradigm du jour in critical sociolinguistics

Organizer

Maarja Siiner and Guri Bordal Steien

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Open lecture: Bilingualism and the brain

Recent studies have suggested that bilingualism may be one protective factor that delays the onset of cognitive decline. Learn more at this guest lecture by Professor Brendan Weekes (Hong Kong University). Open to everyone.

Time and place: Apr. 28, 2016 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Henrik Wergelands hus, MultiLing meeting room 421

Summary

More than half the world is bilingual — speaking at least two and sometimes more languages with some proficiency. Cognitive neuroscientists have discovered that bilingual speakers use very specific parts of the brain to communicate. However this depends on the age of acquisition, proficiency and linguistic similarity between languages.

Recent research suggests that bilingualism has protective benefits for the brain. Studies show that bilingual speakers perform better on decision-making tasks and develop dementia up to 5 years later than monolingual speakers. New evidence from bilingual seniors in Hong Kong suggests that greater proficiency in a second language could delay the structural decline to grey matter that is normally observed in healthy aging.

The conclusion is that bilingualism may be one protective factor that delays the onset of cognitive decline. Bilingualism may therefore reduce the social costs for the long-term healthcare of the elderly.

Abour Brendan Weekes

Brendan Weekes is Chair Professor at the Faculty of Education, Division of Speech and Hearing Sciences and Director of the Laboratory for Communication Science at the University of Hong Kong.  His special areas of expertise are cognitive aspects of communication disorders and treatment of communication impairments including dyslexia and dementia using behavioral and neuroscience methods. He is also a member of MultiLing’s Scientific Advisory Board. 

Organizer

Hanne Gram Simonsen

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Open lecture: What is "multilingualism"?

In this guest lecture, linguistic anthropologist Monica Heller (University of Toronto, Canada) will discuss "multilingualism", and the ways in which  contemporary social, political and economic conditions may be destabilizing the ways we understand language. The lecture is open to everyone. Welcome!

Time and place: Apr. 18, 2016 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Henrik Wergelands hus, MultiLing meeting room 421

Abstract

In this talk, I will situate the concept of "multilingualism" in the context of the emergence of ideologies of whole, bounded languages as tied to the workings of colonialism, the nation-state and mercantile and industrial capitalism. I will discuss some ways in which language became an important terrain for establishing and legitimizing those processes, setting up variation (including "multilingualism") as "matter out of place" requiring techniques of regimentation, ranging from the census to language education to research. I will end by suggesting that contemporary social, political and economic conditions perhaps destabilize the ways of understanding language, and therefore multilingualism, which have shaped research over the last century or so.

About Monica Heller

Monica Heller is Professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education and the Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto (Canada). A linguistic anthropologist, she is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and immediate past president of the American Anthropological Association. Her work has focussed on changing ideologies of language, identity, and nation, in particular in francophone Canada, and more broadly through the lens of linguistic minority movements. 

Organizer

Pia Lane

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Open lecture: The language learning challenge for Australian Indigenous children living remote

Guest lecture by Gillian Wigglesworth (University of Melbourne, Australia) on the linguistic ecology of Indigenous Australia, with a focus on Indigenous children's experiences in the English-speaking classroom. Open to everyone.

Time and place: Apr. 7, 2016 10:15 AM–12:00 PM, Henrik Wergelands hus, MultiLing meeting room 421

Summary

In pre-colonisation time, Indigenous Australia was a highly multilingual and mobile community and most people would speak several Indigenous languages many of which were not mutually comprehensible.  Estimates of the number of languages at that time vary, but there were at least 250-300 distinct languages in the country. Of those languages, today only around 11-12 remain strong in the sense that they are being learned by children, and these are almost always in remote locations.

In this talk, I will discuss the complex linguistic ecology of Indigenous Australia today, focussing in particular on the Northern Territory where almost 30% of the population is Indigenous. We will explore on what this means for Indigenous children who are required to attend school at the age of five, where, for the most part, the language of the classroom is Standard Australian English (SAE). 

Indigenous students in Australia, and particularly those living in the more remote areas, bring to the classroom extremely varied language experiences.  Some will come to school speaking Standard Australian English, while others will speak Aboriginal English (AE), a non-standard dialect which may vary from one place to another.  Other Indigenous children, particularly those living in remote locations, will come to school having had minimal previous access to either SAE or AE, but speaking fluently either an traditional Indigenous language (TIL), a new mixed language, or one of the variety of creoles spoken across the top end of Australia.  These children are the focus of this paper, and they have in common that they all live in communities which are essentially non English speaking.

The role of language in children’s cognitive, social and cultural development cannot be underestimated. Learning language and being able to use it to manage the world is critical to the healthy development, both cognitively and linguistically, of all children.  This paper explores the challenges and issues Indigenous children from these non-English speaking (i.e. EFL) backgrounds face in learning language, and argues for the importance of language as a focus in education.

About the lecturer

Professor Gillian Wigglesworth is Deputy Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne, and chief investigator on the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language where she runs the Learning program.  She has published extensively in both first and second language acquisition as well as bilingualism. Her major research focus is on the languages Indigenous children living in remote communities are learning, and how these interact with English once they attend school.

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Wednesday Seminar: Plurilingualism, language contact and Creole evolution

The presenter this week is Kofi Yakpo, visiting scholar from the University of Hong Kong. The seminar is open to everyone with a relevant background and interest in the subjects discussed.

Time and place: Feb. 10, 2016 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Henrik Wergelands hus, MultiLing meeting room 421

Abstract

The Afro-Caribbean English-lexifier Creoles (AECs) arose barely four hundred years ago and today constitute one of the largest language continua of the western hemisphere, with over 100 million speakers from Nigeria to Nicaragua. The linguistic grouping as a whole has undergone a considerable degree of genealogical differentiation in the short span of its existence. The AECs today show a fascinating typological diversity that corresponds with a remarkable linguistic and cultural heterogeneity of the linguistic ecologies these languages have been spoken in since their emergence, characterized by generalized individual and societal plurilingualism, tolerance for variation, elastic ethno-linguistic identities, and high degrees of geographic mobility.

In this talk, I provide an account of the roles of language contact and areal convergence in the genealogical differentiation of the AECs. Based on first-hand field data from West Africa and the Caribbean, I carry out a comparative analysis of specific structural areas in individual AECs. Detailed investigations of particular features across these languages can reveal the mechanisms of genealogical differentiation of the Afro-Caribbean English-lexifier Creoles and the role of language contact in this process. The findings can also help us understand language change in other world regions characterized by a similar degree of cultural and linguistic pluralism (e.g. Indonesia, the Philippines, South-East Asia, India).

About the presenter

Kofi Yakpo is Assistant Professor in Linguistics at The University of Hong Kong. He obtained his PhD from Radboud University Nijmegen (Netherlands) and holds degrees in linguistics, social anthropology, political science, and business administration from the Universities of Cologne (Germany) and Geneva (Switzerland). 

He has worked extensively on language contact and change, descriptive and documentary linguistics, and on socio-political aspects of multilingualism. 

Organizer

Maarja Siiner and Guri Bordal Steien

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Open lecture: Ethical issues in the study of multilingualism

Professor Kees de Bot, honoured member of MultiLing's Scientific Advisory Board, will be giving an "interactive" presentation about the many and varied aspects of ethical conduct in the study of multilingualism. Welcome!

Time and place: Jan. 8, 2016 1:15 PM–3:00 PM, Henrik Wergelands hus, meeting room 421

Abstract

In this interactive presentation a number of ethical issues we are faced with in the study of language and multilingualism in particular will be presented for discussion. Ethical/non-ethical is not an either/or choice, there are interpretations and disagreements. Even existing 'codes of academic conduct' are not unambiguous, so it is to a large extent a shared code in a community of researchers and their students.

Issues that will be discussed include: Mismanagement, mentorship, academic mis-conduct including (self)plagiarism, data management, privacy, conflict of interest, peer review and citation ethics. A number of real and fictive cases will be used to discuss these issues.

About Kees de Bot

Kees de Bot is Professor and Chair of Applied Linguistics at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands, and the University of Pannonia, Hungary. He is one of twelve members of MultiLing's Scientific Advisory Board.

Organizer

Hanne Gram Simonsen

2015

Open Wednesday Seminar: The Acquisition of L3 by Norwegian-Russian adolescents: The Linguistic Proximity Model

MultiLing's postdoctoral fellow Yulia Rodina will be giving this presentation together with Natalia Mitrofanova, Roksolana Mykhaylyk and Marit Westergaard, all from the Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø. Open to everyone.

Time and place: Dec. 2, 2015 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, MultiLing meeting room, HW 421

The study proposes a new model of third language acquisition, the Linguistic Proximity Model (LPM), according to which crosslinguistic influence may occur if there is supporting evidence for structural similarity at the level of abstract linguistic properties between the L3 and one or both of the previously learned languages. This means that transfer should generally not be dependent on the order of acquisition or general typological proximity.

Unlike other models, the LPM attempts to account for the complete learning process, not just the initial state, and it argues for incremental learning in small steps, not wholesale transfer of a full grammar in one fell swoop.

Evidence supporting the LPM comes from a grammaticality judgment task, comparing the acquisition of word order in English by Norwegian-Russian bilinguals to that of monolingual Norwegian and Russian L2 learners. Despite the typological similarity between English and Norwegian, the study shows facilitative transfer from Russian.

Organizer

Maarja Siiner and Guri Bordal Steien

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Grammatical Gender in Norwegian Heritage Language: Stability or Attrition?

Guest lecture by Marit Westergaard (UiT, The Arctic University of Norway). Open lecture.

Time and place: Dec. 1, 2015 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Henrik Wergelands hus, Meeting room 421

About Marit Westergaard

Professor Marit Westergaard is based at CASTL/the Department of Language and Linguistics at UiT The Arctic University of Norway. Her interests include first, second/third and bilingual language acquisition, child language, syntactic variation, diachronic change, com­parative syntax, word order and nominal structure. Westergaard is a MultiLing collaborator, working closely with postdoctoral research fellow Yulia Rodina, among others.

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Seminar: SOFT — A Case of Collaborative Language Learning at School and in the Community.

Seminar with Martha Robinson, coordinator of the SOFT project at Bilingualism Matters, University of Edinburgh. Open to everyone.

Time and place: Nov. 30, 2015 1:15 PM–3:00 PM, Henrik Wergelands hus, Meeting room 421

Abstract

In this talk we will present the results of the European “School and Family Together” (SOFT) project. This is a collaborative language learning project funded by the European Union EACEA/Lifelong Learning Programme which aims at fostering the linguistic and social integration of migrant children through shared language learning activities that involve children, teachers, and families.

In total, 576 children and 29 teachers have been participating in the project in Edinburgh. This has included 276 children from minority/migrant backgrounds, whose parents came from Poland, Iraq, Syria, South Africa, Nigeria, Zambia, Slovakia, China, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Brazil and who show various degrees of competence in the English language. Depending on the migrant/home child ratios in the classroom, the schools involved have been classified as following two strands:

Two homogeneous monolingual groups involving at least, either 95% of migrant and 5% of home children (high number with very limited English) who engage in language activities in English or vice-versa with 95% of Scottish and 5% of migrant children (English as the main language in the classroom). These latter group of children were learning a modern language such as French or Spanish.

Four heterogeneous groups (roughly 50% mono- and multilingual children) involving children from Scottish and migrant monolingual homes as well as multilingual families who were learning a new modern language together (either Spanish or French).

The Language activities implemented are based on the Narrative Format approach or also known as the “Hocus & Lotus” method, used previously in several previous EU projects and shown to be an effective language learning tool for pre-primary and primary children. Here, children learn languages through telling stories whilst acting them out, singing or drawing.

The most important aim of this project is, to raise awareness of the advantages of early language learning in terms of benefits for cognitive and literacy development, but also as a fun activity to do in the class with friends and feel valued. Thus, fostering positive attitudes towards intercultural communication and multilingualism and facilitating the use of cooperative and collaborative learning practices in class and enhancing home-school relationships.

The project has been evaluated quantitatively on the basis of cognitive testing for the development of executive functions, testing for linguistic competences in English and modern language learned, as well as qualitatively by means of questionnaires for teachers and families.

SOFT was introduced in December 2012 in Edinburgh, as a part of three-year European cooperation involving several countries (Spain, Germany, Switzerland, Scotland and Italy). It has enjoyed a great deal of support from certain members at Edinburgh Council Educational Department and English as an Additional Language service, the Heads of 6 school and key members of staff involved.

About the speaker

Martha Robinson has a PhD in Linguistics and a background in teaching Spanish and German to both children and adults. She is a research assistant at the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, Edinburgh University, and is currently responsible for running the SOFT project in the UK.

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Guest lecture: Convergence of L1 and L2 at the grammar-discourse interface

Guest lecture by Antonella Sorace, Professor of Developmental Linguistics and founding director of the research and information centre Bilingualism Matters at the University of Edinburgh. Open lecture.

Time and place: Nov. 19, 2015 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, MultiLing meeting room, HW 421

Abstract

Reference tracking requires the language user to both infer correct pronoun-referent mappings and dynamically update the discourse model following a change of referent status. Bilingual speakers of languages that allow a choice of pronominal forms (such as Italian and German) inconsistently extend the scope of the marked pronoun, both in production and in comprehension; in late bilinguals, these effects are attested in both the native and the second language, suggesting a convergence between L2 acquisition and L1 attrition. In contrast, linguistic structures that are less dependent on the integration of unpredictable contextual information are more stable in bilingual use.

I will argue that becoming bilingual affects specific aspects of non-linguistic attentional control involved in the encoding of anaphoric relations, and this in turn leads to the selective effects attested in both the L1 and the L2 of advanced late bilinguals. More generally, the convergence between L1 and L2 may be a marker of flexibility and the result of a reorganization of the language system that allows successful late bilinguals to efficiently handle cross-language competition.

Organizer

Elizabeth Lanza

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Guest lecture: New Approaches to Word Association Research

Professor Tess Fitzpatrick (Cardiff University, UK) will be discussing what place word association methods have in a linguist's toolkit, and under which conditions they can be reliably used. Welcome to this open lecture!

Time and place: Oct. 22, 2015 9:15 AM–11:00 AM, P.A. Munchs hus, room 252

Abstract

Word association methods have been used by applied linguists in order to identify patterns in first and second language development, and by psycholinguists in studies relating to age, cognitive function, personality, and psychoses.

While many of these studies have yielded results that are inconsistent or difficult to interpret, others have found patterns of word association behaviour which correlate significantly with other variables. Here I will consider how tenable it is to include word association methods in the linguist’s toolkit, and if so, under what conditions they can reliably be deployed.

Organizer

Hanne Gram Simonsen

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Structural Differences and Similarities in Three Heritage Languages in the USA

Open guest lecture by Professor Silvina Montrul (University of Illinois, US).

Time and place: Sep. 21, 2015 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, P. A. Munchs hus (PAM), seminar room 9

Abstract

In recent years there has been increasing interest in the nature of heritage language grammars. Heritage speakers are bilinguals who were exposed to a minority language at home (typically an immigrant language), either as the only language or together with the language of the wider speech community.

It is common for heritage speakers to experience language shift during late childhood, such that by early adulthood their first language becomes their secondary and weaker language, while their second language is now their dominant primary language. Under these circumstances the heritage language is often incompletely acquired and/or undergoes attrition, most notably in morphosyntax, showing many structural characteristics that may differ from those of first generation immigrants on the one hand and certainly from those of native speakers in the host countries on the other.

The wide range of linguistic proficiency attained by adult heritage speakers raise several fundamental questions about the stability of early bilingual acquisition and the role of input and use in the development and maintenance of a native language. Two other important questions are:

What do different heritage languages have in common at the structural level?

What language-internal and language-external factors contribute to the vulnerability of particular grammatical phenomenon in the heritage language?

I will address these questions by discussing how differential object marking—the overt morphological marking of some direct objects—typically acquired during early syntax in monolingual children, is differentially affected in Spanish, Hindi and Romanian as heritage languages and across generations. These are the results of a recently completed transnational and transgenerational experimental investigation of Hindi, Spanish and Romanian as heritage languages in the United States funded by the National Science Foundation.

About Silvina Montrul

Silvina Montrul is currently Professor and Head of the Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese and Professor of Linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she is also Director of the University Language Academy for Children and Director of the Second Language Acquisition and Bilingualism Lab. She is also co-editor of the journal Second Language Research.

Her research focuses on linguistic and psycholinguistic approaches to adult second language acquisition and bilingualism, in particular syntax, semantics and morphology. She also has expertise in language loss and retention in minority language-speaking bilinguals, or heritage speakers. 

Organizer

Janne Bondi Johannessen

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Wednesday Seminar: Making do: Constructing complex form-meaning mappings in L2

Seminar series at MultiLing, this time with a presentation by MultiLing postdoctoral fellow Hana Gustafsson. Open to everyone.

Time and place: Sep. 2, 2015 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Meeting room 421, Henrik Wergelands hus

Abstract

In this talk I will report on an exploratory study of the acquisition of L2 English phraseological chunks by instructed learners (L1 Dutch) from the perspective of usage-based linguistics.

Phraseological chunks are a pervasive feature of language and play a crucial role in second language acquisition and use. The research field on chunks is broad with a variety of perspectives and methodologies (see ARAL Special Issue 2012 for an overview). There is general agreement that instructed L2 learners have difficulty acquiring L2 phraseological chunks and producing them in target-like ways; however, perhaps due to the fragmented nature of the field, we lack a satisfactory account of why this should be so (Wray 2012). I will argue that anchoring chunks in usage-based linguistics, specifically the cognitive-constructionist model (see Dabrowska 2014 for a brief and concise account) allows for a unified perspective on chunks as linguistic units (i.e., as complex form-meaning mappings), on the nature of their acquisition path, and on the mechanisms involved in their production. Moreover, and perhaps most importantly, usage-based linguistics as informed by complexity theory (Beckner et al 2009, De Bot, Lowie & Verspoor 2007, Hopper 1998) allows for a view of chunks as emergent patterns of use resulting from meaning-making processes repeated by language users in the same community. Usage-based linguistics thus constitutes a comprehensive socio-cognitive framework that may help us gain the missing insights into the acquisition and use of phraseological chunks.

Grounded in the usage-based model, this exploratory study investigates how instructed L2 learners (N=167) might acquire L2 phraseological chunks as complex form-meaning mappings by analyzing emergent patterns of use across the learners' expressions. In its choice of data the study is a follow-up on my earlier work in a similar direction (Smiskova, Lowie & Verspoor 2012).

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All for one, not one for all: Language ideologies among representatives of national and migrant minority languages in New Zealand

In this guest lecture, Julia de Bres will look into connections between different types of minority languages in post-colonial New Zealand. A key focus will be the language ideologies adopted by the minority language representatives to justify their position and aspirations in relation to other language groups. Open lecture.

Time and place: Sep. 1, 2015 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Meeting room 421, HW 4

Abstract

Both national minority languages and migrant minority languages can be considered ‘minority languages’ in relation to the ‘majority language/s’ of a nation-state, and speakers of these languages often have many further experiences in common, including domains in which they can use their languages, patterns of language shift, perceptions of identity linked to language, and institutional language status (Extra 2013). Despite these similarities, little research has approached national and migrant minority languages in an inclusive way.

On the basis of interviews with representatives of several minority language communities in New Zealand in 2014, I will discuss the connections between different types of minority languages in this post-colonial state, including the Maori language, New Zealand Sign Language, Pacific languages, and ‘community languages’. A key focus will be the language ideologies (de Bres 2013, 2015) adopted by the minority language representatives to justify their position and aspirations in relation to other language groups.

The results of the research support the existence of a minority language hierarchy in New Zealand, with representatives of groups at each level of the hierarchy tending to advance conceptions of language that work in the interests of their own language community, with little evidence of fellow feeling based on shared minority language identity.

About Julia de Bres

Julia de Bres is an Associate Professor in Sociolinguistics at the, Institute of Luxembourgish Language and Literatures, University of Luxembourg. Her research directs focus towards comparative multilingualism, minority languages, language policies, language ideologies and language in the workplace. 

Organizer

Unn Røyneland

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Wednesday seminar: The production and challenge of sociolinguistic expertise in late modern media

Wednesday seminars are MultiLing's primary forum for presenting various dimensions of research on multilingualism. The presenter is visiting scholar Jürgen Jaspers (Free University of Brussels). Open seminar.

Time and place: June 10, 2015 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Meeting room 421, Henrik Wergelands hus

Jürgen Jaspers is assistant professor of Dutch linguistics at the Free University of Brussels. His research focuses on ethnographic and interactional discourse analysis in connection to education, urban multilingualism and linguistic policy making. He also investigates vernacularisation and standardization processes in Flemish Belgium (with a focus on the rise of 'in between language', that is, non-standard as well as non-dialectal language use). Recently he is interested in the reception and mediation of expert linguistic knowledge in public discourse. 

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Morphosyntactic processing in aphasia, Alzheimer's disease, and healthy aging

Guest lecture by soon-to-be MultiLing postdoctoral fellow Valantis Fyndanis. This presentation will show that focusing on healthy aging can provide significant insights on the relationship between language and cognition, as well as on the nature of the language impairment. Open lecture.

Time and place: June 9, 2015 10:15 AM–12:00 PM, Henrik Wergelands hus 421

Abstract

In this talk, I will present “cross-population” data. In particular, focusing on verb related morphosyntactic production (subject-verb agreement, tense, aspect) in Greek, I will present data from my past and current work on aphasia (Fyndanis, Varlokosta, & Tsapkini, 2012), probable Alzheimer’s disease (Fyndanis, Manouilidou, Koufou, Karampekios, & Tsapakis, 2013), and healthy aging (Fyndanis, Arcara, Christidou, Choudala, Tsapakis, & Caplan, under review). I will also connect my current work on healthy aging to my future project at MultiLing, which will be starting next September. This project is on healthy aging and multilingualism. Specifically, for this project, my collaborators and I will investigate language and cognitive abilities in bilingual and trilingual healthy aging native speakers of Norwegian.

This presentation will show that focusing on healthy aging can provide significant insights on the relationship between language and cognition, as well as on the nature of the language impairment observed in neurological conditions such as aphasia and probable Alzheimer’s disease. It will also be argued that linking research on healthy aging to multilingualism will allow us to investigate the potential cognitive benefits associated with multilingualism from a different perspective. (To date, the bulk of evidence has been provided by studies focusing on the relationship between multilingualism and Alzheimer’s disease.) I will be happy to discuss with you the cross-population results I am going to present, as well as aspects of my future MultiLing project.

About Valantis Fyndanis

Valantis Fyndanis is a Marie Curie (post-doctoral) fellow at the University of Potsdam, Germany. His research focuses on (morpho)syntactic, lexical and cognitive impairments in (monolingual and bilingual) aphasia, Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, and healthy aging. In September 2015 he is joining MultiLing as a postdoctoral fellow. His project will be on multilingual healthy aging with a focus on native speakers of Norwegian.

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Wednesday seminar: "It is through script that a language gets its status": A language ideological debate.

Wednesday seminars are MultiLing's primary forum for presenting various dimensions of research on multilingualism. Open seminar.

Time and place: May 6, 2015 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Meeting room 421, Henrik Wergelands hus

Diana Camps is a PhD fellow at MultiLing.

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Guest lecture: The role of grandparents in multilingual development

Guest lecture by visiting scholar Professor Suzanne Quay (ICU, Japan). Quay specializes in child language and multilingualism. Open lecture.

Time and place: May 4, 2015 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Meeting room 421, Henrik Wergelands hus

Abstract

Numerous factors – from input and environment to children’s dispositions – can encourage or discourage active multilingualism. One line of research focuses on a ‘community of practice’ where children learn to speak, act, and believe according to the family’s own norms. The discourse strategies used by the youngest and the oldest members of a family – that is, a child and his grandparents – will be presented. Although grandparents are recognized to play an important role in childcare in many cultures, relatively little research has been done on such intergenerational language interactions.

This study analyzes the conversations between a preschooler and: (1) his code-switching grandmother who is trying to help shift his dominance from the home language, Cantonese, to the societal language, English, in preparation for formal schooling in Canada, and (2) his grandfather who wanted to maintain his own Mandarin-speaking abilities by using this third language with his grandson. The factors for learning an L3 in a limited input setting are discussed as well as the general finding that a developing multilingual can be more expressive when allowed to use all his linguistic resources in discourse, which occurs when this practice is accepted or enacted within families.

About Suzanne Quay

Suzanne Quay is a Professor at International Christian University in Tokyo, Japan, specializing in child language and multilingualism.

Organizer

Elizabeth Lanza

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Standard and anti-standard language ideology in Norway and in Lithuania

Presentation by MultiLing guest researcher Vuk Vukotic, PhD student at the Research Institute of the Lithuanian Language in Vilnius.

Time and place: Apr. 24, 2015 1:15 PM–3:00 PM, Meeting room 421, Henrik Wergelands hus

Abstract

Discourse about majority languages feature the standard language as a central point of debate. Research on standard language ideology (SLI) has shown how these discourses further shape notions and ideologies about language, so that “language” is defined mostly in terms of “a (single) standard language”. Research has also assumed that SLI would also be the major ideological basis in a standard language culture, but I argue that research has so far overlooked the explicit discourse of language users, assuming that SLI has a “hypodermic needle” scenario of effects.

In this presentation, I will present how discourses about language develop in online discussion platforms (in this case, newspaper comments) and how different ideologies of language are formed, focusing on discourses that challenge the SLI. The data was drawn from online discussions in Lithuania and Norway. These two countries have both a very special relationship to (standard) language: in Lithuania, it has institutional “protection” in form of a Language Commission and Language Inspectorate, which can issue fines for incorrect use of language. In Norway, a long period of language conflict, especially a failed state-initiated attempt at merging bokmål and nynorsk, have created an atmosphere of distrust to state-level interventions into the language and also made language a political question for a while (to a certain degree, even today).

Standard language ideology in Norway seems to be strong on the written level, but co-exists with a pro-dialect ideology on the spoken level, although, as I will try to show, the ideological basis for pro-standard and pro-dialect ideology might be the same. In Lithuania, standard language is seen as a “master” of its users by most commentators (a symbolically important entity that we should honour and serve), while the proponents of an anti-ideology tend to make the case that language should be a “servant” to the language user. I will conclude the presentation with typological notes about different ideologies found in these discourses.

Organizer

Unn Røyneland

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Guest lecture: Why linguistics is central to Alzheimer’s research

Open lecture by Professor Alison Wray. 

Time and place: Apr. 22, 2015 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Meeting room 421, Henrik Wergelands hus

Abstract

In this talk, I will explore the complex manner in which language defines and impacts on communication with and by people with Alzheimer’s Disease (AD). I will consider how linguists can apply their knowledge of language as a formal, functional, social and psychological system, to contribute new insights into, and possible solutions for, current practical problems in AD care.

Alzheimer’s Disease affects language in many different ways. Directly, language processing is undermined by damage to the language areas of the brain. Indirectly, language can be compromised by short term memory loss, distortions in perception, disturbed semantic representation and disorientation brought on by lost contextual information. Meanwhile, linguistic behaviour may change as a result of loss of confidence, depression, altered power relationships, the social construction of AD as an illness, and the discourse contexts in which people with AD finds themselves, such as how carers speak to them. People with AD will apply their remaining linguistic and communicative resources to rescue the situation, developing strategies for avoiding, compensating for, and covering up their problems. Some of these strategies may involve subversive responses that are easily misconstrued as absence of ability. In addition, language is used by others to describe symptoms, give instructions for tests, and express feelings and opinions about the condition and how it affects people. The general population uses language to capture and share its beliefs, assumptions and fears about AD, and language thereby influences social representations of AD. These representations in turn influence linguistic behaviour towards, and by, people with AD.

All of this makes AD an obvious focus of interest for linguists—yet a striking amount of what is published about AD language is written by non-linguists. AD language is independently researched in at least psychology, neuroscience, sociology, clinical linguistics and nursing. Each discipline has its own methods, theories, assumptions and values, which affect the research questions asked, the empirical approach taken in answering them, and how the evidence is interpreted. Linguistics needs to serve as an anchor for all of this valuable work, by bringing theory and evidence into a holistic picture of the experience of communication in Alzheimer’s Disease.

Alison Wray

Alison Wray is a Research Professor in Language and Communication at Cardiff University, where she is also Director of the Centre for Language and Communication Research, and Director of Research for the School of English, Communication and Philosophy.

Organizer

Bente Ailin Svendsen

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Guest lecture: Can one swear “appropriately”?

A comparison of swearing in English L1 and English LX users, by Jean-Marc Dewaele. Open lecture.

Time and place: Apr. 20, 2015 2:15 PM–3:30 PM, Meeting room 421, Henrik Wergelands hus

Abstract

To date, relatively little research has been carried out on multilinguals’ swearing behaviour (see however Dewaele, 2004, 2010, 2013).  Swearing “appropriately” typically requires an advanced level of sociopragmatic competence (Dewaele, 2008), which might explain why foreign language (LX) users tend to avoid it more than L1 users.  Because swearwords in a LX do not sound quite as bad as the ones in the L1, some LX users may use these “funny” words and come across as more impolite than intended.  I will argue that swearing is not intrinsically “impolite” but rather an indication of “in-group” membership, which makes its use more tricky for LX users with a foreign accent.

I will present an overview of the research on swearing among multilinguals, focusing on the effects of personality, social, biographical and contextual variables on self-reported swearing data in a corpus of English of 1159 L1 users and 1165 LX users.

About Jean-Marc Dewaele

Jean-Marc Dewaele is Professor in Applied Linguistics and Multilingualism at Birkbeck College, University of London.

Organizer

Anne Golden

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The syntax of possession in Noun Initial languages.

Guest lecture by Professor David Adger (University of London). Open lecture.

Time and place: Mar. 13, 2015 1:15 PM–3:00 PM, P.A. Munchs hus, seminar room 2

Abstract

The abstract semantic relations that fall under the broad term `possession’ are syntactically realised in various ways in languages of the world, and their syntactic realisation interacts with the expression of definiteness in an intricate fashion.

This talk explores possession in some noun initial languages, focussing on Scottish Gaelic and Hawaiian but drawing wider conclusions, defends an analysis of the syntax of nominal structures of these languages, and, on this basis, proposes some principles for regulating the syntactic and morphological expression of the relevant conceptual distinctions.

About David Adger

David Adger is professor of linguistics at Queen Mary College, University of London, UK. Read more on his UL staff profile.

Organizer

Janne Bondi Johannessen

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Functional categories in language death: the loss of passive and possessive structures in East Sutherland Gaelic

Guest lecture by Professor David Adger (University of London). Open lecture.

Time and place: Mar. 12, 2015 1:15 PM–3:00 PM, Meeting room 421, Henrik Wergelands hus

Abstract

In this talk, I extend the Combinatorial Variability approach to language variation (introduced in Adger (2006) and developed in a number of publications with Jennifer Smith since) to cases of language variability in the birth of new linguistic changes and in language death, when existing systems restructure.

The case of an emerging change (joint work with Jenny Cheshire and Sue Fox) is the appearance of a topicality sensitive allomorphy in relative complementizers in London English. I show that this emerging mapping between form and structure can be understood as being embedded into the grammar via the adoption of a new feature in the inventory of features that make up relative complementizers.

The case of variability in language death is an analysis of Dorian's (1973) discussion of the loss of certain kinds of possessive syntax and a concomitant loss of certain kinds of passive structure in East Sutherland Gaelic. This case involves the loss of features on a particular kind of determiner, creating an underspecified relationship between form and grammar/meaning, with ramifications elsewhere in the speakers' grammars.

On the basis of these kinds of cases, the paper argues that "where we are now" is actually sufficient to understand the mechanisms of variability: it involves both differences in the inventory of features of functional elements and the underspecified relation between these features and morphophonological forms. What this provides us with is an understanding of the detailed mechanisms of change that is compatible with both generative views of the structure of linguistic knowledge, and variationist views of the ways that linguistic systems are heterogeneous in an orderly way: in the words of Weinreich, Labov and Herzog, "nativelike command of heterogeneous structures is not a matter of multidialectalism or `mere' performance, but is part of unilingual linguistic competence'. 

About David Adger

David Adger is professor of linguistics at Queen Mary College, University of London, UK. Read more on his UL staff profile.

He will be giving another guest lecture on March 13, entitled "The syntax og possession in Noun Initial languages".

Organizer

Janne Bondi Johannessen

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Wednesday seminar: What Catalan Public Television Service tells us about Catalonia and its language(s): A sociolinguistic approach

Wednesday seminars are MultiLing's primary forum for presenting various dimensions of research on multilingualism. Open seminar.

Time and place: Mar. 4, 2015 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Meeting room 421, Henrik Wergelands hus

Abstract

In this talk I will focus on the sociolinguistic aspects of my project on the role played by Catalonia’s Public Television Service in representing a Catalan imagery interpreted as national. In the first part of my talk I will deal with the theoretic background which sustains my research, in particular on mass media and their role as Ideological State Apparatuses.

I will briefly present some examples of how some linguistic minorities in Europe have used radio and television channels as platforms for languages that had often been completely excluded by State-owned mass media. In the second part of my talk I will focus on the Catalan case and the definition of Catalan-language radio and television channels as “national media”. Finally, I will outline the main debates around language politics in the Catalan public television service.

Silvia Grassi is a researcher at the Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Language, University of Oslo.

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Teaching in Croatian in Serbia: discursive hegemonies and ‘state effects’

Guest lecture by Dr. Andrew Hodges (IEF, Croatia). Open lecture.

Time and place: Feb. 25, 2015 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Meeting room 421, Henrik Wergelands hus

Summary

In October 2013, the presidents of Serbia and Croatia met at a primary school in a small village in Serbia near the Hungarian border in which a large number of Croatian identified citizens live. The location was significant as it was a site in which forced relocations of nationalized citizens did not take place during the nineties wars, a series of wars in which new ‘nation-states’ were established with citizenship defined along national lines.

The linguistic and political situation  is particularly complex as the majority of those living in the village identify with an ethnic group (Bunjevci) which Croatian nationalists argue to be Croatian, whilst other ethnic Bunjevac activists argue that they constitute an ‘autonomous ethnic group’. Serbian, Croatian and Bunjevac language varieties form part of a mutually intelligible dialect continuum. The issue is particularly relevant at present as the Serbian government has allotted funding for the standardization of the Bunjevac language variety, as well as for school textbooks written in that language variety, a move that has angered some of those who identify as Croatian.

Speaking to journalists on the occasion of the presidential visit, the headmistress of the school described the visit to be of great significance, stating that teaching in Croatian has been systematically marginalized in Serbia, and that “parents can now be assured that there is nothing to fear, and they can freely enroll their children in the Croatian stream (at the school), above all for the preservation of our culture and identity”.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork I am currently conducting at this school, I will describe the relevant linguist context and details of the social and political context, before moving to consider discourses concerning teaching in Croatian circulating in and around the village in question. I particularly focus on the tight links drawn between languages, identity and culture in this context, and for whom making those links becomes important and how, examining discursive hegemonies established and ‘state effects’ (Trouillot, 2001) associated with the teaching. Finally I will present some preliminary themes which have surfaced over the course of the fieldwork so far, the classroom being the main interaction order considered.

About Andrew Hodges

Andrew Hodges is a postdoctoral Marie Curie/NEWFELPRO Research Fellow at the Institute for Ethnology and Folklore Research, Zagreb, Croatia.

Organizer

Pia Lane

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Wednesday Seminar: Assessment of bilingual children’s acquisition of majority language skills in Danmark. Developmental patterns and future needs

Seminar on language acquisition in bilingual children, by one of Denmark's top child language specialists, Professor Dorthe Bleses. Open seminar.

Time and place: Feb. 4, 2015 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, HW 421

Summary

A study of mono- and bilingual children’s acquisition of Danish from age 3-7 years based on a study of approximately 5.000 children using a national assessment instrument Language assessment 3-7  assessing will be presented.

The main developmental patterns indicate, not surprisingly, that bilingual children’s majority skills are significantly below monolingual children’s language and literacy skills with some interesting variations - and the child and parent background characteristics influence the observed patterns.

The predictability of low language skills on later reading outcomes has been demonstrated and we do find that bilingual children’s educational achievement in schools in Denmark is significantly lower than in monolingual children. This is therefore an issue that deserves substantial attention in early educational practice in Denmark.

The results will be put into perspective by a meta-analysis of effective language and reading interventions in schools suggesting that language and reading instruction in the majority language is as effective for bilingual children’s reading abilities as instruction in the minority language. Rather than the type of language, the quality of the intervention itself appears to be the most important factor.

About Dorthe Bleses

Dorthe Bleses is Professor of child language acquisition, and Director of the Center for Child Language (Center for Børnesprog) at the University of Southern Denmark.

Organizer

Hanne Gram Simonsen

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Brigitta Busch: Linguistic repertoire and the lived experience of language

This lecture focuses on the bodily, emotional, and historico-political dimensions of language experience along life trajectories. Open lecture.

Time and place: Jan. 14, 2015 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Meeting room 421, Henrik Wergelands hus

About the lecture

Looking at linguistic repertoires taking a multimodal, biographical approach, this paper focuses on the bodily, emotional, and historico-political dimensions of language experience along life trajectories. The concept of Spracherleben, the lived experience of language, becomes particularly salient in the context of linguistic diversity, of mobility and migration.

In my presentation I suggest to consider three perspectives on repertoire:

The first is concerned with how we interact linguistically and socially, drawing on interactional and anthropological approaches.

The second looks at how we are constituted as speaking subjects by historical/political discourses, drawing on poststructuralism.

The third is inspired by phenomenology, addresses Spracherleben, and investigates the bodily/emotional prerequisites for speaking and experiencing of language.

All three contribute to our understanding of repertoire, but in linguistics, the third remains under-researched. Drawing on language biographical accounts, I will elaborate on how a phenomenological view of the lived experience of language helps us to understand the discomfort or confusion that ensues if one suddenly finds oneself in an unknown sociolinguistic space.

About the speaker

Brigitta Busch is Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Vienna, Austria.

Organizer

Unn Røyneland and Elizabeth Lanza

2014

Guest lecture: Changing city, changing accents — identity, power and conflict in Marseille

Guest lecture on the relationship between language, space and social mobility, by Médéric Gasquet-Cyrus, Aix-Marseille University/LPL, France. Open lecture.

Time and place: Nov. 6, 2014 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Meeting room 421, Henrik Wergelands hus

Abstract

Combining urban sociolinguistics (Calvet, 1994; Gasquet-Cyrus, 2002), critical sociolinguistics (Blommaert, 2005; 2010; Boutet & Heller, 2007), perceptual dialectology (Cramer & Montgomery, in press) and ethnographic approaches, the research presented here is part of a larger body of works mixing reflections about space and language (Eckert, 2010) and ‘sociolinguistic of mobility’ (Blommaert, 2010). This presentation will focus on how the social and urban changes occurring in Marseille since the beginning of the 21st century are shaping both an ongoing linguistic change and latent or manifest urban conflicts, where the issues of language are above all issues of identity and power.

As France’s second largest town and the European Capital of Culture in 2013, Marseille is well-known for what is considered the most famous accent in the country, the so-called ‘Marseille (working-class) accent’, prototype of the ‘Southern’ or ‘Provençal’ accent and often opposed to a more affected or stiff ‘Parisian’ accent (Kuiper, 2005). But beyond the traditional centre-periphery rivalry, internal conflicts in Marseille are revealing of more complex sociolinguistic issues. Previous studies have outlined the existence of at least three “accents” associated with specific areas of the town (Binisti & Gasquet-Cyrus, 2003) and with different symbolic values already into conflict (Gasquet-Cyrus, 2009). These places are not objective spaces, but social areas functioning as symbolic territories, whose moving boundaries reflect strong social tensions and can explain some recent linguistic changes.

Very recently, urban policies aiming at the regeneration of the inner-city have attracted new inhabitants, whose socio-cultural and socio-economic profiles unbalance the traditional sociolinguistic patterns. The emergence of a new category of city-dwellers, the ‘neo-Marseillais’, associated with a “new way” of speaking challenging local customs, has shed light on new processes of perception, linguistic change and urban conflict (Gasquet-Cyrus, in press).

These different urban language conflicts will be reviewed, and particular attention will be paid to the process of gentrification of space and its linguistic correlates, i.e. “gentrification of speech” (Trimaille & Gasquet-Cyrus, 2013), and to the agonistic dimension of these contacts. Finally, the conference will argue for a theoretical framework combining urban sociolinguistics and critical sociolinguistics in order to raise—through the study of linguistic change and conflicts in urban setting— issues of identity and power.

Organizer

James Costa

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Wednesday Seminar: Effects of bidialectal literacy in Norway: Cognition or culture?

Presentation by Øystein A. Vangsnes from UiT The Arctic University of Norway & Sogn og Fjordane University College. Open event.

Time and place: Nov. 5, 2014 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Henrik Wergelands hus, Meeting room 421

Abstract

In this talk I will first present results from a study of available register data that show a positive correlation between school achievement and linguistic environment in Norway. The results from national tests in reading, arithmetic and English for four cohorts of 8th graders from all of Norway (99,7% of the total pupil population) formed the basis for the study which was carried out at the level of municipality. Municipalities in which some portion of the pupils are instructed in Nynorsk Norwegian (14%) performed slightly below the national average. However, when corrected for socio-economic status the results were better than expected. The results were statistically significant, and they were only significant for municipalities in which more than 50% of all pupils have Nynorsk as their language of instruction.

Viewed on the background of findings in the literature that show cognitive benefits of bilingualism in childhood, one may ask whether the finding in any way can be seen as an effect of the language situation in the Nynorsk municipality. It is beyond reasonable doubt that children brought up with Nynorsk in school learn to master Bokmål Norwegian more or less simultaneously due to extracurricular exposure, whereas the opposite seldom holds. In that respect the Nynorsk children receive more varied linguistic stimulation related to their native language.

However, there are obvious differences between the dual language stimulation Nynorsk children receive and more typical situations of bilingualism: (i) We are dealing with two very close linguistic varieties, (ii) one may claim that competence in Nynorsk and Bokmål first and foremost pertain to literacy, not to oracy. For these reasons we may invoke the term ‘bidialectal literacy’ to characterize the Norwegian situation. In my talk I will discuss these issues and claim on the one hand that linguistic closeness in principle does not entail that bilingual benefits cannot arise and on the other hand that Nynorsk children do in fact possess, and practice, oracy skills also in Bokmål. The question is nevertheless whether the seeming advantages Nynorsk children experience is due to hardwired cognitive benefits or to more general beneficial cultural factors. As matters currently stand, the answer to the question seems fairly open.

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Guest lecture: Biliteracy development of French-Turkish bilingual children and teenagers in France

Open guest lecture with Professor Dr. Mehmet-Ali Akıncı.

Time and place: Oct. 31, 2014 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Seminarrom 4, P.A. Munchs hus, Blindern Campus

Abstract

The main purpose of this paper is to characterize the development of biliteracy in both languages (Turkish and French) of Turkish-French bilingual children and adolescents born of immigrant parents in France.

The present study is part of a larger crosslinguistic study of bilingual language development of older children and adolescents in France and Germany. The method employed adapts that used by Berman & Verhoeven (2002) to be appropriate to the investigation of multilingual competencies. Our corpus consists of data from bilinguals in four age groups: 5th (elementary school), 7th (secondary school) and 10th and 12th grades (high school). In each age group, at least 15 subjects were asked to produce two types of texts (personal narration and expository) in two modalities (spoken and written). In this paper, we focus on the written French and Turkish only.

Three categories of analysis are made: i) thematic content of texts; ii) global discourse structure and organization; and iii) clause-internal constructions. Our analyses reveal that all participants make clear distinction between the two types of texts (narratives vs expository discussions) in content and in linguistic means of expression. The youngest children produce relatively well-organised, though minimal, narrative texts, but expository text construction is not consolidated until high school. The elementary and secondary school children made more spelling mistakes and they relied less on conventional punctuation and page layout.

About Mehmet-Ali Akıncı

Mehmet-Ali Akıncı is Professor at the Department of Linguistics (University of Rouen) where he teaches mainly language acquisition and bilingualism. His research fields primarily relate to bilingual language acquisition and language contact in migration contexts.

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Studies on Turkish at MultiLing

Mini-workshop with Professor Mehmet-Ali Akıncı, University of Rouen, France. 

Time and place: Oct. 30, 2014 10:15 AM–2:30 PM, Meeting room 421, Henrik Wergelands hus

Turkish is one of the important immigrant languages in Western Europe. Studies on Turkish have been attracting researchers in Norway as well. MultiLing is hosting Prof. Mehmet-Ali Akıncı from the University of Rouen during the last week of October. On this occasion we would like to gather researchers at MultiLing to present their on-going and/or planned projects related to Turkish and create an arena for exchanging ideas.

Program

• Welcome. Elizabeth Lanza, Center Director
• Current Studies on French-Turkish Bilingualism in France. Mehmet-Ali Akıncı
• Lexical and grammatical development in Turkish and Norwegian among Turkish-Norwegian 3-year-olds. Pernille Hansen, Hanne Gram Simonsen and Emel Türker-van der Heiden
• Cross-Linguistic structural priming of passives in (adult) Turkish-Norwegian bilinguals. Gözde Mercan
• Language knowledge and linguistic anxiety among across three generations of the Turkish immigrant community in the Netherlands: The Effects of Language Shift. Yeşim Sevinç
• Testing sentence processing and grammatical gender agreement in healthy bilinguals. Janne Bondi Johannessen
• Morphosyntactic development of L2 Turkish among adult learners. Emel Türker-van der Heiden, Gözde Mercan

Organizer

Eml Türker-van der Heiden

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Guest lecture: Acquisition of Turkish from a cross-linguistic and multilingual perspective

Seyhun Topbaş (Anadolu University, Turkey) is Professor of Speech-language therapy and a collaborating partner of MultiLing. Open lecture.

Time and place: Oct. 17, 2014 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Henrik Wergelands hus, meeting room 421

Abstract

A number of research studies have been conducted in language acquisition of Turkish children. Although large-scale studies are scarce, developmental stages of phonological and certain grammatical development can be inferred.

With respect to timing and order of acquisition in Turkish, the phonology and the rich and regular grammatical morphology in simple sentences is acquired at an early stage, although mastery necessarily waits upon further developments in complex syntax and semantics in the following years. The complex sentences pose problems because the surface form of syntactic structures does not reflect underlying meaning in a transparent fashion as it does in simple structures. The discrepancy between the early and late acquisition of certain structures in Turkish becomes more vulnerable in multilingual contexts.

In the light of the current research I will summarize the language development implicit in some detailed studies in a cross-linguistic and multilingual perspective. 

About

Seyhun Topbaş is Professor of Speech-language Therapy at Anadolu University in Turkey. 

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Hidden in plain sight: micro-analysis, institutions and inequality

Open guest lecture with Professor Emerita Celia Roberts (King's College London, UK). 

Time and place: Oct. 7, 2014 10:15 AM–12:00 PM, P. A. Munchs hus, seminar room 5

In increasingly globalised societies, institutions seek more linguistic technologies to assert fairness within diversity. However, these technologies produce their own inequalities – what I call ‘linguistic penalties’. Two settings: workplace selection interviews and assessment of family doctors will examine how these linguistic penalties work.

About Celia Roberts

Celia Roberts is Professor Emerita of Sociolinguistics at King’s College London. Her research is concerned with language and ethnicity. She uses two qualitative methodologies, Interactional Sociolinguistics and ethnography to look at disadvantages faced by linguistic and ethnic minorities in interaction with institutions.

Organizer

Veronica Pajaro and Jan Svennevig

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Interrogative and Demonstrative Verbs in Wolaitta (Omotic)

Presentation by Dr Azeb Amha (Leiden University, the Netherlands). This open lecture is part of a lecture series organised by the Forum for Theoretical Linguistics.

Time and place: Oct. 1, 2014 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus, Block B, Room 1220

Interrogative and Demonstrative Verbs in Wolaitta (Omotic): linking reference and indexing

I will discuss three interesting pairs of verbs in Wolaitta and elaborate their link to referential and indexical functions in grammar. The verbs in question are the following:

(1a) Question verb:           

• waán-  ‘Be what?’                                
• waát-   ‘Do what?’                               
• woíg-    ‘Say what?’          

(1b) Demonstrative Verb:               

• yaág-       ‘Say thus'
• yaán-       ‘Be thus’
• yaát-        ‘Do thus’

The six verb roots inflect for tense-aspect, polarity and person-number categories just like any other lexical verb in the language; some can also undergo derivational processes and be (co)-subordinated. The first two verb roots in each set are distinct only in their volition: subject-oriented (intransitive-like) verbs waán- and yaán- contrasting with object-oriented ones: waát- and yaát-. A note-worthy paradigmatic difference between the two involves mood and modality: while the verbs in (1a) can only be used in questions, those in (1b) may be used in questions, statements or direct or indirect commands.

As the English translations indicate the six verbs appear to be hybrids of two syntactic categories: a verb and a question word in (1a), and a verb and a demonstrative in (1b). However, only some of the component parts can be readily distinguished as independent lexemes, so a compounding analysis is not directly apparent. Functionally, the two sets of verbs are different: those in (1a) question the very state of affairs denoted by the predicate itself, while those in (1b) are indexical, deictic expressions, involving gestural depictions of actions or pointing to parts of utterances in discourse.

Using data from spontaneous speech, the functions of these verbs will be discussed comparing them to regular interrogative verbs and demonstratives in Wolaitta. 

Organizer

Forum for Theoretical Linguistics

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Language Use on the Internet in Ethiopia

Guest lecture by Dr Binyam Sisay Mendisu from the Dept. of Linguistics, Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia. Open lecture.

Time and place: Oct. 1, 2014 10:00 AM–12:15 PM, P.A. Munchs hus, seminar room 10

Language Use on the Internet in Ethiopia: Evidence from TemariNet and Facebook 

In recent years, Internet is increasingly adopted among the urban youth in Ethiopia as an alternative and favored means of communication. Hence, this paper explores language use patterns and discourse among young Ethiopians on computer-mediated communication (hereafter CMC). CMC is a type of human-to-human text-based interaction done via the Internet.

The focus of the study is discourse and language use in asynchronous comments and posts made on two social network sites that are frequented by young Ethiopians, i.e. TemariNet and Facebook. Sample language use of members of the online social groups over a period of one month is collected and systematically analyzed with a view to find out language preference, orthography choice, nature and structure of written language and their social as well as cultural implications. 

In order to examine the online communication, Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis (hereafter CMDA) as described and presented by Herring (2004) is adopted. CMDA is an approach that “views online behavior through the lens of language” by means of “the analysis of logs of verbal interactions (characters, words, utterances, messages, exchanges, threads, archives, etc.)” (Herring 2004, 2).

Tentative findings of the study reveal that:

(i) English is the most preferred language of online communication

(ii) the use of Amharic is commonly noted. Yet, more often than not, transliteration in stead of the Ethiopic script is employed

(iii) the style of written communication is informal and it exhibits a lot of code-mixing (English/Amharic), grammatical and typographic errors, the prevalence of structural reduction (including abbreviated words and omissions), the repetition of letters, punctuation and capitalization for emphasis etc

(iv) the online language use behavior has social and cultural implications and in the long term it might instigate language change.

Organizer

Janne Bondi Johannessen

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Wednesday Seminar: Affective multilingualism

Presentation by Tommaso Milani (Witwatersrand University, South Africa) and Scott Burnett (loveLife, South Africa). Open event.

Time and place: Sep. 24, 2014 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Meeting room 421, Henrik Wergelands hus

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to investigate a multilingual HIV-prevention campaign that was launched by the South African NGO loveLife in 2006. Unlike in previous campaigns where English was employed as the language of “aspiration” (cf. Nuttal 2006) for South African teenagers, the 2006 billboards featured several African languages. Crucially, the very choice of languages other than English to talk about the social drivers of HIV proved controversial, generating a flurry of very emotional reactions from the general public.

Inspired by critical discourse analytical work on language ideologies in the media (see e.g. Blackledge 2005; Johnson and Milani 2010), we demonstrate how the debate on the loveLife campaign was not about languages alone, but was ultimately the manifestation of deeper concerns about the intersections of language, culture, gender, sexuality and race.

Methodologically, the paper highlights the importance of understanding the processes underlying the production of particular texts (see Heller 2010). Theoretically, the paper also seeks to engage with the social life of affect (Ahmed 2004), and what kind of theoretical implications a “turn to emotion” might have for a discipline like Critical Discourse Studies that has been largely underpinned by a Habermasian idea of a “rational” subject/speaker (see Habermas 1984).

About the presenters

Tommaso Milani and Scott Burnett are visiting MultiLing for the duration of September 2014. Milani is Associate Professor and Head of the Deptartment of Linguistics at Witwatersrand University, South Africa. Burnett represents loveLife, South Africa's largest national HIV prevention initiative for young people.

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FAQ on academic journals

Workshop on academic publishing with Tommaso M. Milani, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa.

Time and place: Sep. 23, 2014 10:15 AM–12:00 PM, Meeting room 421, Henrik Wergelands hus

Abstract

The aim of this interactive workshop is to demystify the processes underlying academic journals. We will consider such issues as submission, peer-review, and editorial decision; we will also discuss how to choose the ‘right’ journal for a specific research output. Finally, the workshop will deal with the role and function of special issues, and how to approach journal editors with proposals for a themed collection of articles.  

In order to enhance interactivity, participants are invited, but not required, to talk about their own experiences of submitting to journals and of dealing with the peer-review letters and editorial decisions. Participants are also most welcome to bring drafts of proposal for special issues.

Tommaso M. Milani is Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Linguistics at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. 

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Whither Linguistic Landscape? Sexed signs – Queering the scenery

Guest lecture on language in the public space by visiting researcher Tommaso Milani, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. Open event.

Time and place: Sep. 22, 2014 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, P.A. Munchs hus, seminar room 10

Abstract

Most commonly known under the somewhat controversial umbrella term of “Linguistic Landscape” (LL), the study of language in public space has gained considerable momentum within sociolinguistics over the last ten years or so. Whether taking quantitative or qualitative approaches, it is my contention that this body of research has largely ignored – erased even – the gendered and sexualised nature of public space. Why is this the case?

A most obvious answer can be found in the disciplinary origin of Linguistic Landscape as a radical offshoot of research on language attitudes and language policy - two strands of sociolinguistic inquiry that have traditionally been less concerned with gender and sexuality than with other forms of social categorization such as ethnic and national identity.

Read from a language policy viewpoint, it is rather unsurprising that scholars analysing the built environment have focused nearly exclusively on the multilingual aspect of signage, a semiotics that is often quite straightforwardly tied to ethnic tensions in the nation-state but does not lend itself equally easily to reflections on gender and sexuality. Put bluntly, too much focus on multilingualism has made scholars blind to the complexity of meaning-making processes in public spaces.

Against this backdrop, the aim of this lecture is to redress this blindness both theoretically and methodologically. I’ll argue for the importance of employing a particular type of feminist approach – a queer theoretical lens – through which to read “public texts” (Sebba 2010). Firstly, queer theory provides us with an important analytical toolkit to unpack the operations of power in relation to gender and sexuality, and other social categories, without falling into too easy conflations between “processes”, on the one hand, and “identities”, on the other. Secondly, through a queer approach, I’ll question the logocentric bias of research on language and public space by encompassing not only the visual but also and most importantly the corporeal. Such a proposal will be buttressed by a plethora of empirical examples from a variety of different contexts.

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Linguistic Diversity and School Achievement: A Critique of PISA

Guest lecture by Professor Jim Cummins, University of Toronto. Open lecture.

Time and place: Sep. 19, 2014 11:15 AM–12:00 PM, Sophus Bugges hus, Auditorium 3

A critique of PISA

The OECD’s Programme for International Student Achievement (PISA) has provided an invaluable set of data regarding school achievement in countries around the world. It has also enabled us to examine how students from immigrant backgrounds perform in different countries and to explore potential causal factors underlying different patterns of achievement. Unfortunately, some OECD authors have interpreted these patterns in problematic ways with the result that the policy implications of the data have not been accurately assessed.

The presentation will examine PISA data with respect to (a) language spoken at home, (b) socioeconomic status, and (c) reading engagement in order to identify potential causes of underachievement and ways in which schools can respond effectively to these potential causal factors.

About Professor Jim Cummins

Dr. Jim Cummins is Professor at the Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), University of Toronto, Canada. He has since late 1970 been on the forefront of research and theory building on the role language proficiency plays for knowledge acquisition and social integration in school, with a special focus on students with multilingual and multicultural background.

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Guest lecture: The use of Scottish accents in animated movies

Cecelia Cutler is an Associate Professor of linguistics at City University New York, Lehman College and The Graduate Center, New York City, USA. Her lecture looks into how accents are used for effect in animated kids' films today. 

Time and place: June 10, 2014 2:30 PM–4:00 PM, Henrik Wergelands hus, meeting room 421

“Ets jast ma booooooooooooo”: the emerging social meanings of Scottish accents in contemporary animated children’s films

Accents used in children’s animated films often reinforce negative stereotypes about certain groups of speakers with foreign accents and particularly RP used to denote malevolent characters, while social dialects like African American Vernacular English are often used for unemployed characters involved in trivial pursuits (Lippi-Green 1997).

The current study explores the emerging/shifting social meaning of Scottish accents in recent animated children’s films which are used to portray a range of characters who may or may not actually be Scottish (Shrek, 2001; How to Train Your Dragon, 2010; Tin Tin, 2011; Brave, 2012). Thus, it’s possible in to use Scottish accents to represent Scotsmen and women, an English sea captain, and even Vikings.

Recent work on attitudes towards British dialects in the UK (Coupland and Bishop 2007) shows that Scottish English along with other Celtic varieties - Southern Irish English, and Edinburgh English, in particular  - enjoy high ratings of prestige and/or social attractiveness so the choice to use a Scottish accent in animated films may to derive from its positive social evaluation relative class neutrality (as compared with RP or Cockney).

In this talk, I analyze the types of characters that typically get portrayed via Scottish accents (e.g. rustic, well-intentioned, bawdy) and the associations that are established between this way of talking and particular types of people (Eckert 2008; Johnstone 2009,). In the realm of CMC, I look at how Scottish accents are evaluated and represented in the comments of YouTube viewers in response to clips from these films which serve to enregister Scottish accents with new meanings (Agha 2003). These comments offer up rich metalinguistic commentary on features of Scottish such as monophthongal /e/ and /o/ in ways that enregister Scottish accents as raucous, subversively funny, or even sexy.

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Guest lecture: English as a lingua franca in higher education

Associate professor at Roskilde University Janus Mortensen will visit UiO on June 6th to give a guest lecture on the phonetic reduction of faktisk ‘actually’, and has agreed to start the day with a guest lecture at MultiLing about English as a lingua franca. Open to the public.

Time and place: June 6, 2014 10:00 AM–12:00 PM, Henrik Wergelands hus, meeting room 421

English as a lingua franca in higher education: Definitions, practices and implications for language policy

In this talk I will offer a critical discussion of how ‘English as a lingua franca’ can be defined as an object of study, and relate this to empirical studies of the use of English as a lingua franca in Danish higher education.

I will use examples from the CALPIU storehouse to illustrate the obvious but nevertheless often overlooked fact that scenarios where English is used as a lingua franca are by definition multilingual, and discuss the implications of this for language policy in higher education.

In brief, my argument will be that the principle of parallel language use or parallellingualism, which has become a cornerstone of many university language policies in the Nordic countries, perpetuates a monolingualist language ideology which clashes with core ideals of transnational education.

About Janus Mortensen

Janus Mortensen is an associate professor in English at the The Department of Culture and Identity, Roskilde University. His research areas include language in social life, English as a lingua franca, epistemic meaning and epistemic stance, language ideology, linguistic landscapes, linguistic history of Danish universities, and English and Danish grammar. 

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Guest lecture: Cécile Vigouroux

Dr. Cécile Vigouroux (Simon Fraser University & Collegium de Lyon) will be giving a lecture entitled Lost in translation? A Spatial Approach to Micro and Macro Scale Multilingualism in a Religious Setting. The lecture is open to everyone.

Time and place: May 23, 2014 10:15 AM–12:00 PM, Henrik Wergelands hus, MultiLing meeting room 421

Lost in translation? A Spatial Approach to Micro and Macro Scale Multilingualism in a Religious Setting

In this presentation I explore the display of multilingualism in a Congolese Pentecostal church in Cape Town, South Africa. I focus particularly on the interpreting activity taking place between an appointed interpreter and the pastor. I show that, contrary to the received doctrine, interpreting does not necessarily bridge a communicative gap between speakers who don't share a communicative code. In the church under study, everybody understands the languages of the sermon: French and Lingala. The question to be addressed here is: what communicative and symbolic roles does the interpreting activity fulfill during the service?

This questioning leads me to analyze multilingual practices as an ongoing process of space production taking place through the reorganization and reweighting of the different dimensions of space: geographic, symbolic and social. I show that the intersection of different scales produce local communicative practices that make sense only if we also take into account the complex intertwinement of their multidimensional space.

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Guest lecture: Loraine Obler

Loraine Obler is visiting MultiLing, and will be giving a guest lecture entitled Issues in bilingual aging. The lecture is open to everone.

Time and place: May 15, 2014 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, MultiLing meeting room, Henrik Wergelands hus 421

Loraine Obler is a professor both at CUNY Graduate Center and at The Department of Neurology at Boston University School of Medicine. She has published widely on topics related to bilingualism, language changes in healthy aging and Alzheimer’s disease, and aphasia. She is also a member of MultiLing’s Scientific Advisory Board.

Loraine Obler has agreed to give a class on bilingualism and aging at ILN during the coming academic year. As a preview to this class, she will give a guest lecture entitled Issues in bilingual aging.

Summary

After a review of language changes associated with monolingual aging, she will cover briefly the issues concerning the so-called bilingual advantage, discuss patterns of aphasia and recovery in aphasia in older adults, and treat issues in bilingual dementia like language-choice and semantic breakdown.

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Guest lecture: Alexandre Duchêne

Prof. Alexandre Duchêne (University of Fribourg) is visiting MultiLing and will be giving a guest lecture entitled Multilingualism as Work: Resource and source of exploitation. The lecture open to everyone.

Time and place: Apr. 25, 2014 10:15 AM–12:00 PM, P.A. Munch Building, seminar room 1

Multilingualism as Work: Resource and source of exploitation

Abstract

In a competing, transnational and predominantly service-oriented market, language can be seen as a resource in order to provide an added value to a product or an experience, to manage the circulation of goods, people and information, or to adapt to the need of certain customers.

However, not all languages are equally the object of economic consideration. On the contrary, the process of language commodification is highly variable, ambiguous, and linked to political and economic fluctuation, which provides some languages and speakers with a profit of distinction, and some not. Here I wish to highlight the fluctuation of the economic appropriation of multilingualism as a resource.

To do this, I will focus on ethnographic work on the production and management of linguistic practices in the tertiary industry sector in Switzerland. By examining the variable use of linguistic features as object or not of economic appropriation, I will ask how, for what purposes, under what conditions and with what consequences languages and speakers become central for the “productive” achievement of work activities. Specifically, I will show that multilingualism emerges as a distinctive promotional tool in the Swiss economic sector.

I will insist however on the fact that linguistic diversity as an argument is balanced, modified and sometimes erased according to the fluctuation of national/regional markets. This variability and fluctuation, I will argue, is partially solved through the management of the linguistic competences of the employees, who, as a flexible, adaptable and manageable “parole d’oeuvre” (wordforce), can perform multiple linguistic “identities” for the sake of a heterogeneous and not so easily predictable market.

At the same time I will show that these linguistic resources are not necessarily correlated with institutional recognition, leading often to forms of exploitation of the already most vulnerable workers.

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Language, identity and social categorization

Guest lecture by visiting scholar Dr. Pedro Álvarez (University of Salamanca).

Time and place: Mar. 14, 2014 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Meeting room 421, Henrik Wergelands hus

Dr Pedro Álvarez will be presenting some of the key aspects of his research on language and categorization. In this informal meeting, he will be focusing on the processes of language crossing in the rap context (both from a sociolinguistic and cognitive approach) and on the preliminary results of his on-going research on social categorization and language attitudes in South Africa.

Pedro Álvarez is visiting MultiLing from the Dept. of English Philology at the University of Salamanca, Spain.

Organizer

Unn Røyneland

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Multilingual universities: students’ perspectives in three bilingual contexts

Guest lecture by Professor Peter Garrett (Cardiff University). The presentation will address how local and international students in universities in bilingual contexts in Europe view the notion of ‘multilingual university’. The lecture is open to everyone.

Time and place: Mar. 5, 2014 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, P.A. Munch building, seminar room 14

Abstract

This presentation explores how local and international students in universities in three bilingual contexts in Europe view the notion of ‘multilingual university’ in terms of advantages and disadvantages.

The universities are located in the Basque Country (University of the Basque Country), Catalonia (University of Lleida) and Wales (Cardiff University), and their sociolinguistic situation is different enough to be able to assess the extent to which the institutional role of English and that of the minority language have a direct impact on the students’ views of institutional multilingualism and multilingual competence.

A preliminary analysis of the data obtained by means of a survey shows that local and international students at the three universities see more advantages than disadvantages in a multilingual university. The main types of issues that the students associate with positive and negative aspects of a multilingual university are related to four main themes: language learning and use, communication barriers, cultural breadth, and academic provision.

Research conducted collaboratively with Josep M. Cots, University of Lleida, and David Lasagabaster, University of the Basque Country.

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France’s Linguistic Landscape 2007-14: Trends in methodologies

Guest lecture by Dr. Robert Blackwood (University of Liverpool), who will be discussing the evolution of Linguistic Landscape methodologies. Open to everyone and free of charge.

Time and place: Feb. 28, 2014 10:15 AM–12:00 PM, P.A. Munch Building, Seminar Room 9

Abstract

Although the public narrative woven by some politicians might suggest otherwise, France is home to a range of regional languages from different language families. Despite the best efforts of strident language management policies designed to privilege French and marginalise all other languages, these regional languages have persisted and, to varying degrees, are visible in France’s public space.

Starting with the premise that visibility of the written form of these languages indicates their vitality in some way or form, this project has explored the presence of these regional languages in France’s towns and cities over the course of the last seven years.

Over the course of the same period, the main lines of discussions within Linguistic Landscape research have developed and diversified, and this presentation will review critically the approaches to understanding multilingualism based on the fieldwork undertaken in mainland France, Corsica, the French Caribbean, and the South Pacific.

With the aim of evaluating the evolution of Linguistic Landscape methodologies, we will reassess the collection of data and its subsequent analysis from fieldwork in Brittany, Corsica, Northern Catalonia, Marseille, Flemish France, Nice, Guadeloupe, Martinique, and New Caledonia.

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Laughables as an interactional resource for the establishment of shared knowledge and co-membership

Guest lecture by Louise Tranekjær (Roskilde University). The lecture will be followed by a data session on interaction on a construction site involving immigrant workers, presented by Kamilla Kraft.

Time and place: Feb. 12, 2014 9:15 AM–10:45 AM, Henrik Wergelands hus, Meeting room 421

Abstract

In this presentation I will investigate the use of laughables as an affiliative resource that interactants use to establish and investigate sharedness in knowledge and co-membership (Erickson & Schultz 1982) of social categories such as 'mother', 'student' and 'Danish'. I will apply a conversation analytical framework and the analytical perspective of Membership Categorization Analysis (Hester & Eglin 1997; Sacks 1972; Schegloff 2007) to illuminate the relation between two phenomena that are described individually in the CA literature, namely epistemics (Heritage 2012a; Stivers 2011) and laughables (Glenn 2010, Jefferson 1984; Jefferson et al. 1977; Jefferson et al. 1987).

The production of laughables formulates certain expectations of what constitutes a shared point of reference and shared knowledge between interactants. Regardless of them actually being successful in generating laughter, laughables in this way project recognition and response from the recipient with respect to such sharedness. I will present some examples, some preliminary analytical findings and some questions that I would like to pursue further and discuss with you.

Schedule

Tranekjær's lecture lasts 45 minutes (10:15-11:00), and will be followed by a data session (11:00-12:30) on interaction on a construction site involving immigrant workers, presented by PhD fellow Kamilla Kraft (MultiLing).

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Guest lecture: Word order and verb inflection in agrammatic aphasia

Guest lecture by Roelien Bastiaanse, University of Groningen.

Time and place: Jan. 14, 2014 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Henrik Wergeland Building, room 536

MultiLing and the Research Group in Clinical Linguistics and Language Acquisition, ILN, have the pleasure of introducing Professor Roelien Bastiaanse, professor of neurolinguistics at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands.

Word order and verb inflection in agrammatic aphasia: a cross linguistic quest to the underlying disorder(s)

Agrammatic speech is characterized by poor production of verbs and verb inflection and the use of simplified sentences. Several theories have been formulated to account for these impairments: a morphological disorder, a syntactic disorder, missing of the top of the syntactic tree, a disorder in discourse linking, a mapping problem and many more. By systematically studying verbs, word order and verb inflection and, more importantly, the relation between these lexical, syntactic and morphological phenomena in several languages and in bilingual agrammatic speakers, we try to understand why these categories are vulnerable and whether there is a relationship between these impairments.

2013

Workshop with Marianne Gullberg

Marianne Gullberg gives an presentation on the Humanities Lab at Lund University. Not open to the public.

Time and place: Oct. 29, 2013 10:15 AM–12:00 PM, MultiLing meeting room

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More than just hand-waving: Gestures and meaning in multilingual language use

Professor Marianne Gullberg from Lund University will be addressing the topic of how bi- and multilinguals employ gestures differently from monolinguals.

Time and place: Oct. 28, 2013 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, P.A. Munch Building, seminar room 6

Abstract

A key question in studies of speakers with knowledge of more than one language ('multicompetent speakers'; e.g., Cook, 1991) is how to probe the details of underlying representations in order to gauge whether, and if so how, bilinguals’ representations differ from those of monolinguals, and how they are deployed in real-time use. I will discuss what the study of speech-associated gestures can contribute to our understanding of semantic representations in particular.

Using voluntary and caused motion (e.g., Oscar tiptoed out of the kitchen and Oscar put the cup on the table) as example domains, I first discuss speech and gesture evidence for different representations in monolingual native speakers. I then review a series of studies examining the consequences of such crosslinguistic differences in multicompetent speakers (L2 speakers and functional bilinguals), revealing gestural evidence of shifts in representations, bidirectional crosslinguistic influence (L1 on L2 and L2 on L1), and possibly convergence. I will highlight what the gesture analysis adds that cannot be gleaned from speech analyses alone, and discuss methodological and theoretical implications of these findings (cf. Gullberg, 2006; 2010; 2012).

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Methods in research on multilingualism in education

Open mini-seminar featuring lectures from Professor Adrian Blackledge and Professor Christine Hélot. Organized by MultiLing in collaboration with KiS (Knowledge in Schools), the Faculty of Educational Sciences and the University of Oslo. 

Time and place: Oct. 25, 2013 10:15 AM–1:00 PM, P.A. Munch Building, seminar room 14

Voice in Team Ethnography

Professor Adrian Blackledge, University of Birmingham/MOSAIC Centre for Research on Multilingualism. 

In a recent study of complementary schools in the UK, ‘culture’, ‘heritage’ and ‘language’ emerged as salient dimensions of linguistic interaction. The study was conducted by a nine-member multidisciplinary, multilingual ethnographic research team. The team represented a range of social categories (ethnicity, gender, class, language, cultural inheritance, nationality) as well as different professional backgrounds, statuses and securities. This paper reports on the complex processes of theory building in a team consisting of myriad identity categories, values, social networks, discourses and practices. In the production of ethnographic accounts the team members used linguistic, social and cultural resources as capital in positioning themselves in relation to case study participants (teachers, parents and young people), and in relation to each other. The paper considers the scope of team ethnography and its methodological possibilities in furthering understanding of scholarly, theoretical, and political debates of contemporary social life.

From Bilingualism at Home to Plurilingualism at School: Theoretical concepts and methodological issues

Professor Christine Hélot, Université de Strasbourg /LILPA (Linguistique, Langues, Parole) / GEPE (Groupe d'Études sur le plurilinguisme Européen) UR 1339.

In this presentation I will propose a reflection on the methodological choices I made during my career as a researcher in the domain of bilingualism. I will explain the different contexts I chose to investigate bilingualism in (home, school, early childhood education), the research questions I addressed in these specific contexts and the scientific disciplines that I referred to (from linguistics, to sociolinguistics, to language policy and sociodidactics). I will also discuss the limitations of the research methods I used and why today I prefer ethnographic approaches to investigate language practices in multilingual settings.

Organizer

MultiLing, KiS (Knowledge in Schools), Faculty of Educational Sciences and UiO

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Signals and clues in detecting crosslinguistic influence: What detectives and detectors can tell us

Scott Jarvis will be visiting from Ohio University to speak about how it is possible to detect crosslinguistic influence in language corpora.

Time and place: Sep. 30, 2013 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus, auditorium 5

Language corpora contain clues concerning the identities of the people who produced the texts in the corpus, and they also contain clues about those people’s backgrounds, particularly of the L1 and L2 discourse communities they have been a part of. Some of these clues are found in discrete bits of information (e.g., the use of a particular word or a unique type of error), but others are detectable only as part of a larger constellation (e.g., where the use of a word or structure in one part of the text has consequences for the use of other words and structures in other parts of the text). When human judges are asked to identify writers’ backgrounds based on their patterns of writing, some human judges are surprisingly good detectives, knowing which clues to focus on and which to ignore. Some human judges also have well-developed intuitions that allow them to detect writers’ backgrounds very quickly without an apparent awareness of which clues they have relied on.

Whether human judges rely on detailed analyses or on intuition, high rates of success in identifying writers’ backgrounds (such as their L1 backgrounds) serve as evidence of the ubiquity and reliability of the clues in data. High rates of detection accuracy also serve as evidence of the effects of writers’ backgrounds on their writing. The advantages of human judges is that they take all available clues into consideration at the same time and flexibly adjust the priority they give to different clues. However, these advantages turn into disadvantages when the researcher wants to determine the strengths of individual clues or classes of clues. For this, it is best to turn to machine-automated analyses — or detectors — which focus on only certain clues at a time, and are blind to all others. In this paper, I illustrate and discuss the complementary advantages of human judges and machine classifiers in the detection of L1 influence in L2 learner corpora.

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Open lectures with Natalie Schilling

Natalie Schilling will be giving three open lectures as part of a seminar in sociolinguistic field methods for PhD students.

Time and place: Sep. 23, 2013 9:15 AM–Sep. 25, 2013 10:00 AM, PA Munchs hus

Monday September 23:

• Planning and designing a study (which includes discussion "what is a speech community" and "problematizing social categories (ethinicity, gender, age)"
• Data collection methods (including surveys, sociolinguistic internviews, ethnographic methods, and questions regarding objectivity, subjectivity, overcoming the "observers paradox")

Wednesday September 25:

• Giving back to the community (quesetions of objectivity and commitment, level of involvement in the community)

Organizer

Pia Lane

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Ethiopian Linguistic Landscapes

Guest lecture by Dr. Hirut Woldemariam, affiliate of MultiLing and project leader of the new Ethiopia project.

Time and place: Sep. 2, 2013 10:15 AM–12:00 PM, P.A. Munchs hus, Seminar room 6

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Guest lecture with Susan Gal

Susan Gal visits from the University of Chicago. Organised by Pia Lane and the STANDARDS project.

Time: June 21, 2013

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Muslim youth speak and unspeak Marseille

As part of the opening of the MultiLing Center, Cécile Evers from the University of Pennsylvania will be giving a lecture on multilingual youth subculture in Marseille.

Time and place: June 3, 2013 1:15 PM–3:00 PM, P. A. Munch House, Seminar room 7