Kodrah Kristang: The Initiative to Revitalize the Kristang Language in Singapore

Kristang is the critically endangered heritage language of the Portuguese-Eurasian community in Singapore and the wider Malayan region, and is spoken by an estimated less than 100 fluent speakers in Singapore. In Singapore, especially, up to 2015, there was almost no known documentation of Kristang, and a declining awareness of its existence, even among the Portuguese-Eurasian community. However, efforts to revitalize Kristang in Singapore under the auspices of the community-based non-profit, multiracial and intergenerational Kodrah Kristang (‘Awaken, Kristang’) initiative since March 2016 appear to have successfully reinvigorated community and public interest in the language; more than 400 individuals, including heritage speakers, children and many people outside the Portuguese-Eurasian community, have joined ongoing free Kodrah Kristang classes, while another 1,400 participated in the inaugural Kristang Language Festival in May 2017, including Singapore’s Deputy Prime Minister and the Portuguese Ambassador to Singapore. Unique features of the initiative include the initiative and its associated Portuguese-Eurasian community being situated in the highly urbanized setting of Singapore, a relatively low reliance on financial support, visible, if cautious positive interest from the Singapore state, a multiracial orientation and set of aims that embrace and move beyond the language’s original community of mainly Portuguese-Eurasian speakers, and, by design, a multiracial youth-led core team

Can We Speak?: Approaching Oral Proficiency in the EFL Classroom

A oralidade tem vindo a ser progressivamente promovida em programas e currículos, tanto nacional como internacionalmente, como um dos grandes objetivos do ensino da língua estrangeira. No entanto, as características únicas desta competência fazem de si a mais difícil de abordar em contextos de sala de aula. Apesar de toda a relevância dada à oralidade, bem como a todos os seus constituintes na maioria dos documentos oficiais nacionais e internacionais, como as novas metas de Inglês para Portugal, as Aprendizagens Essenciais e o Quadro Comum de Referência para as Línguas (QECR), os professores portugueses parecem debater-se para conseguirem aplicar procedimentos adequados para desenvolverem tais competências na sua plenitude. Assim, este projeto inclui uma análise da teoria e da prática do ensino da língua inglesa nas salas de aula portuguesas, considerando a abordagem à oralidade no geral e à inteligibilidade em particular. Na realidade, o conceito de inteligibilidade está hoje firmemente enraizado na área da linguística aplicada como um dos fatores determinantes para explicar o sucesso, ou não, da comunicação entre interlocutores de diferentes origens culturais e linguísticas. Este estudo está dividido em duas partes distintas, uma primeira parte de cariz teórico e uma segunda parte de cariz prático. Nos capítulos da parte 1 são postos criticamente em perspetiva os conceitos globalização, comunicação e mudança, como base para uma reflexão acerca dos fatores históricos e antropológicos mais influentes para a disseminação e estatuto da língua inglesa. O foco é então direcionado para o papel do Inglês na Europa, bem como em Portugal, atendendo aos contextos de ensino-aprendizagem de ambos para irem ao encontro das necessidades linguísticas dos alunos coevos. Numa tentativa de clarificar os complexos desenvolvimentos da língua, este estudo examina os fundamentos que subjazem a conceitos-chave de proficiência linguística em ambiente educacional, assim como as premissas teóricas que os norteiam. Logo, serão igualmente reavaliadas algumas das compartimentações habituais no mundo anglófono, de acordo com a mudança do “centro de gravidade” que está a ocorrer no uso da língua inglesa. Como afirmado, a parte 2 do estudo é eminentemente prática. O plano e o método através dos quais o estudo se desenvolveu são apresentados, detalhando-se a abordagem metodológica da investigação em relação à informação quantitativa e qualitativa recolhida (questionários / observações em sala de aula / entrevistas / gravações áudio). O propósito é perceber o que está a ser feito pelos professores em sala de aula em termos de oralidade e quão inteligíveis são os alunos de inglês do 9º ano de escolaridade. A partir da informação recolhida, é feita uma análise dos resultados mais pertinentes, que por sua vez conduzirá às implicações e conclusão do estudo. Estas duas últimas secções discutem os potenciais efeitos dos resultados obtidos no processo ensino-aprendizagem da oralidade e a sua influência na inteligibilidade dos alunos, enquanto falantes e ouvintes.Speaking has been increasingly promoted in language syllabuses and curriculums, both nationally and internationally, as one of the major aims of foreign language teaching. However, the unique features of this skill make it the most challenging one to address in classroom-based contexts. Despite the conspicuous importance given to speaking and all its subsets in most national and international official documents, new English targets for Portugal, the subject’s core curriculum and the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR), Portuguese teachers seem to be at odds with suitable procedures to fully develop them inside the classroom. Thus, this project entails an analysis of the theory and practice of classroom English language teaching (ELT) in Portugal concerned with speaking in general and intelligibility in particular. Indeed, the concept of intelligibility is now firmly established in the field of applied linguistics as one of the key factors in explaining success or otherwise in communication between interlocutors from cultural and linguistic diverse backgrounds. This study is divided in two overarching parts, part 1 is a more theoretical one, whereas part 2 is a more practical one. Throughout the chapters of part 1 globalization, communication and change are critically put into perspective, laying the foundation for a reflection on the most significant historical and anthropological factors for English’s global spread and current status. The focus is then narrowed down to the role of English in Europe and further on in Portugal, bearing in mind the language learning and teaching contexts of these settings to meet the needs of students’ present-day reality. In order to shed greater light on these complex language developments, this study examines the rationale underlying some of the core concepts on educational language proficiency, including their definitions and key characteristics, as well as outlining the theoretical premises on which they are grounded. Thus, traditional divides in the English-speaking world are here reexamined in accordance with the change taking place in the ‘centre of gravity’ of the English language. As stated, part 2 of the study is eminently practical. The design and methods on which the study is carried out are delineated, detailing the research methodological approach of quantitative and qualitative data collection (questionnaires / classroom observations / semi-structured interviews / audio recordings). The goal is to understand what teachers do inside their classrooms in terms of speaking ability, as well as how intelligible 9th grade English students are. From the set of gathered data stems an analysis of the major findings, which in turn lead to the implications and conclusion of the study. These two last sections discuss the potential effect of the findings to the teaching and learning of speaking and its influence on the students’ intelligibility, either as speakers or listeners

Tradução de gírias e dialeto em Harry Potter: o tradutor como mediador de linguagem marcada

The present research covers the intersection between Descriptive Translation Studies and Children’s Literature and aims to investigate the important role of the translator as mediator of marked language, more specifically by dialect and slang. This paper is based both on Santos’s (2010) concluded mastering thesis which investigated the translation of the dialect of the character Rubeus Hagrid and Santos’s ongoing PhD research which deals with translation into Brazilian Portuguese of slang words in the Harry Potter series. The initial hypothesis is that dialects and slang words will be translated by standard language and this translator choice is influenced by the particularities of its readership.Partindo do princípio de que a publicidade opera, muitas vezes, como uma caixa de ressonância dos discursos dos clássicos contos de fadas, notadamente quanto fala da/sobre a mulher, proponho o presente estudo com o objetivo de refletir criticamente e de dar visibilidade a efeitos de sentidos e de identidades do feminino, mediante descrições analíticas de peças publicitárias impressas que circularam em revistas da grande mídia impressa brasileira. Para tanto, aciono do quadro teórico-metodológico da Análise do Discurso (AD) de filiação francesa pressupostos que tratam da relação necessária e inescapável entre sentido, sujeito e memória. Assim, confrontada com a materialidade complexa das peças selecionadas e com o espaço de memória ali convocado, constato que as (re)formulações, mais do que recitarem um conjunto de imagens e dizeres advindos do maravilhosomundo dos contos de fadas, asseguram, na contemporaneidade, efeitos de sentidos que contribuíram com os modos de subjetivação do feminino desde tempos quase imemoriais

AmericasNLI: Machine translation and natural language inference systems for Indigenous languages of the Americas

Little attention has been paid to the development of human language technology for truly low-resource languages—i.e., languages with limited amounts of digitally available text data, such as Indigenous languages. However, it has been shown that pretrained multilingual models are able to perform crosslingual transfer in a zero-shot setting even for low-resource languages which are unseen during pretraining. Yet, prior work evaluating performance on unseen languages has largely been limited to shallow token-level tasks. It remains unclear if zero-shot learning of deeper semantic tasks is possible for unseen languages. To explore this question, we present AmericasNLI, a natural language inference dataset covering 10 Indigenous languages of the Americas. We conduct experiments with pretrained models, exploring zero-shot learning in combination with model adaptation. Furthermore, as AmericasNLI is a multiway parallel dataset, we use it to benchmark the performance of different machine translation models for those languages. Finally, using a standard transformer model, we explore translation-based approaches for natural language inference. We find that the zero-shot performance of pretrained models without adaptation is poor for all languages in AmericasNLI, but model adaptation via continued pretraining results in improvements. All machine translation models are rather weak, but, surprisingly, translation-based approaches to natural language inference outperform all other models on that task

Sowing the Seeds at Semente: Grassroots Revitalization and Language Activism in Contemporary Galicia

This study was completed in June 2019 as part of a Collaborative Research Award from Sustaining Minoritized Languages in Europe (SMiLE), a project of the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage’s Language Revitalization Initiative

Gender Inclusivity in Italian: Can Gender Neutrality be Reached in a Gendered Language? Difficulties, Proposals and Public Perception of the Phenomenon

Italian is a gendered language in which reference to grammatical gender has been constant and inevitable. As language reflects and shapes society, grammatical gender reinforces binary views of social gender and the invizibilization of non-binary identities. Movements for social justice have inspired gender-fair linguistic innovations, such as the feminization of job titles and gender-neutral markers, to promote gender equity and challenge hierarchies of power and dominance in society. This research aimed to explore gender-neutral forms in the Italian grammatical system and public perceptions of these innovations through two studies with two groups of participants. The first group of participants (n=27) identified as trans or non-binary. They provided information in the form of a survey about the pronouns and gender markers they utilize, together with information about the contexts in which gender-neutral forms are implemented and encountered. Quantitative results showed that while pronoun selection in Italian still relies heavily on binary categories, gender-neutral markers are used by the transgender, non-binary Italian community, with a preference for the asterisk and the schwa. Online communities were indicated as the main environment in which linguistic innovations are encountered, while usage was described as limited to people inside and outside of the LGBTQ+ community who would understand and accept innovative forms. Qualitative data collected from this first group of participants shed light on the limitations of the binary grammatical system of gendered languages and highlighted the marginalization and invisibilization that result from the lack of forms of language expression for non-cisgender identities. A second group of participants (n=102), who were overwhelmingly cisgender, completed a survey where they were asked to rate the comprehensibility and agreeableness of fifteen statements including the asterisk, the schwa and standard gendered forms for control. Quantitative results indicate that both innovations are largely comprehensible in written form, with a slight preference for the schwa over the asterisk, while the innovations are low in terms of agreeableness ratings. These data suggest that the reason behind resistance to linguistic innovations is rooted in prescriptivist and conservative views of language more than intelligibility. Qualitative data provided by the second group of participants indicated that reasons behind acceptance for these forms are social in nature. Linguistic innovations were framed as necessary to promote a more inclusive and gender-fair society. On the other hand, participants who showed resistance to them claimed that gender-neutral forms are unnecessary, overly complicated, hard to understand, and difficult to pronounce. These findings help to elucidate linguistic strategies for gender neutrality in Italian, clarifying their usage and capturing the experiences of non-cis Italian language users with gendered language and language reform. This research also advances our understanding of reasons behind resistance or acceptance of these forms by cis persons. In this way, they fill a knowledge gap in the literature on gender-neutral forms in Italian and enrich the scholarship on gender inclusivity and neutralization strategies in gendered languages. Moreover, they provide a foundation for further research on their implementation in spoken language and their potential application in world language classrooms to foster a gender-just education

Social and structural aspects of language contact and change

This book brings together papers that discuss social and structural aspects of language contact and language change. Several papers look at the relevance of historical documents to determine the linguistic nature of early contact varieties, while others investigate the specific processes of contact-induced change that were involved in the emergence and development of these languages. A third set of papers look at how new datasets and greater sensitivity to social issues can help to (re)assess persistent theoretical and empirical questions as well as help to open up new avenues of research. In particular they highlight the heterogeneity of contemporary language practices and attitudes often obscured in sociolinguistic research. The contributions all focus on language variation and change but investigate it from a variety of disciplinary and empirical perspectives and cover a range of linguistic contexts

Social and structural aspects of language contact and change

This book brings together papers that discuss social and structural aspects of language contact and language change. Several papers look at the relevance of historical documents to determine the linguistic nature of early contact varieties, while others investigate the specific processes of contact-induced change that were involved in the emergence and development of these languages. A third set of papers look at how new datasets and greater sensitivity to social issues can help to (re)assess persistent theoretical and empirical questions as well as help to open up new avenues of research. In particular they highlight the heterogeneity of contemporary language practices and attitudes often obscured in sociolinguistic research. The contributions all focus on language variation and change but investigate it from a variety of disciplinary and empirical perspectives and cover a range of linguistic contexts

Translanguaging in World Language Higher Education

Increased global migration and a myriad of other social and political factors has made today’s universities more diverse than ever. As a result, teachers in higher education regularly find multilingual learners from a variety of different linguistic and cultural backgrounds in their classrooms and must consider this diversity in their teaching. One of the ways that teaching can better serve today’s multilingual and multicultural student population is through translanguaging. The objective of this dissertation is to investigate the intentional and unintentional use of translanguaging by multilingual language learners and world language instructors in higher education. Additionally, this qualitative case study aims to explore the perceptions of both teachers and students towards translanguaging, using transformative interviewing to prompt participants to reflect on their own language learning ideologies and the application of translanguaging pedagogies to their teaching and learning. Findings point to numerous ways in which both teachers and students in world language university classrooms use translanguaging to make meaning during their language teaching and learning experiences. In addition, class observations and transformative interviews showed how participants gained reflective self-awareness and began to reconsider more/different ways in which translanguaging could enrich their teaching and learning. The significance of the study lies in a greater understanding of what translanguaging could look like in world language higher education settings, particularly regarding the way in which more inclusive language pedagogies such as translanguaging can allow teachers to recognize and utilize the full linguistic repertoire of their multilingual students while at the same time navigating tensions related to target language use and time constraints. Advisor: Theresa Catalan