Promoting teacher–learner autonomy through and beyond initial language teacher education

With the growing international market for pre-experience MA in ELT/TESOL programmes, a key curriculum design issue is how to help students develop as learners of teaching through and beyond their formal academic studies. We report here on our attempts at the University of Warwick to address this issue, and consider wider implications for research and practice in initial language teacher education. At the Centre for Applied Linguistics at the University of Warwick, we run a suite of MA programmes for English language teaching professionals from around the world. Most of these courses are for students with prior teaching experience, but our MA in English Language Studies and Methods (ELSM) programme is designed for students with less than two years’ experience and, in fact, the majority enrol straight after completing their undergraduate studies in their home countries

Second language learning: finding ways to successfully integrate ICT resources and right strategies for language learning, translation and interpreting

Second language learning: finding ways to integrate ICT resources and right strategies for language learning, translation and interpreting Second language learning has gained importance as language accreditations have become imperative for any profession or academic career. Undergraduate students in Philology, Translation Studies, Tourism Studies or the like follow language accreditation programmes in order to be able to compile a valid and solid CV when they complete their degrees, master or PhD programmes. In the case of Translation students, they are subjects with strong motivation for language learning applied to translation or interpreting tasks. Language technologies and tools constitute an essential part of their learning processes and language teachers should find a way of optimising the use of these resources. For this purpose, we have conducted a survey among students, trying to find out which web resources they use, how they use them (or not) and why. Using these data, we considered new strategies to help students get the most out of these tools; in particular, we analysed the pros and cons of machine translation tools, such as deepL and Google Translator, as well as corpus linguistics tools.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tec

University entrance language tests : a matter of justice

University entrance language tests are often administered under the assumption that even if language proficiency does not determine academic success, a certain proficiency level is still required. Nevertheless, little research has focused on how well L2 students cope with the linguistic demands of their studies in the first months after passing an entrance test. Even fewer studies have taken a longitudinal perspective. Set in Flanders, Belgium, this study examines the opinions and experiences of 24 university staff members and 31 international L2 students, of whom 20 were tracked longitudinally. Attention is also given to test/retest results, academic score sheets, and class recordings. To investigate the validity of inferences made on the basis of L2 students' scores, Kane's (2013) Interpretation/Use Argument approach is adopted, and principles from political philosophy are applied to investigate whether a policy that discriminates among students based on language test results can be considered just. It is concluded that the receptive language requirements of university studies exceed the expected B2 level and that the Flemish entrance tests include language tasks that are of little importance for first-year students. Furthermore, some of the students who failed the entrance test actually managed quite well in their studies - a result that entails broad implications concerning validation and justice even outside the study's localized setting

Sociolinguistics II: Deviance, Dystopia, And Democracy (LING82) Syllabus

This course builds upon foundational concepts in sociolinguistic theory to examine discourses of news and entertainment media, across science fiction and politics. Drawing upon contributions in applied linguistics, media studies, cultural studies, and archival research, we ask which realities are mirrored in our everyday language and in the fictional and sensationalized worlds we engage in through the media we consume. What role does science fiction play in our explorations of social difference, deviance, control, disability, sexuality, and normativity? Can science fiction assist the goals of social justice and democracy? How does language surface in the biopolitics of human and non-humans? Together, we will explore key film and television, and select novels by authors Max Brooks, Octavia Butler, and Philip K. Dick. Students will learn advanced methods and theories in multimodal critical discourse analysis and digital humanities

Evaluation in media texts: a cross-cultural linguistic investigation

A quantitative/interpretative approach to the comparative linguistic analysis of media texts is proposed and applied to a contrastive analysis of texts from the English-language China Daily and the UK Times to look for evidence of differences in what Labov calls “evaluation.” These differences are then correlated to differences in the roles played by the media in Britain and China in their respective societies. The aim is to demonstrate that, despite reservations related to the Chinese texts not being written in the journalists' native language, a direct linguistic comparison of British media texts with Chinese media texts written in English can yield valuable insights into the workings of the Chinese media that supplement nonlinguistic studies

Soo Hyon Kim Assistant Profess of English (COLA) travels to New Zealand

In November 2015, I traveled to Auckland, New Zealand to present a paper at the 14th Symposium on Second Language Writing. The annual symposium, since its inception in 1998, has been devoted to moving forward the field of second language writing and encouraging interdisciplinary collaboration among scholars situated in fields such as applied linguistics, composition and rhetoric, education, and foreign language studies

Verão em Portugal (Text)

This text and translation into English accompanies an illustrated podcast in European Portuguese was created by Will Masters, a student of Applied Languages at the School of Languages and Area Studies, University of Portsmouth, as a part of a research project entitled ‘The Role of Student Audio Casting and Production in the Language Learning Curriculum’. The recording presents a refelction on the student's first experiences of Portugal, and of learning Portuguese. The podcast can be used as a learning resource in several different ways: as a focus for discussion or aural comprehension by students of the Portuguese language

Ingroup/outgroup dynamics and agency markers in Italian parliamentary language. A gender-based socio-psychological analysis of the speeches of men and women deputies (2001 and 2006).

The most recent literature on gender differences in language use has shown that the Italian political communication enacted by men and women parliamentarians only partly reflects and reproduces the asymmetries and stereotypes widespread in society. Starting from an anti-essentialist perspective, which holds that language differences between men and women speakers are much less extensive than claimed in the past, we analysed 463 parliamentary speeches in the course of the XIVth legislature (5-2001 / 4-2006) in four parliamentarian pairs, differentiated by gender and political orientation. The general aim was to explore the socio-psychological constructs of agency and ingroup/outgroup dynamics as revealed by linguistic behaviour in men/women parliamentarians. The two constructs were detected by specific linguistic markers in the interventions of men/women parliamentarian pairs. Specifically, for agency, we detected: (1a) pronoun variations between singular and plural first person (I, we); (1b) amplitude of we as either specific or superordinate; (1c) conditional modal form of verbs. For ingroup/outgroup dynamics, we detected: (2a) pronoun variation between first and second plural person (we vs. you) and (2b) their valence. Lexicographical analysis was carried out with statistical packages TaLTaC2 and TreeTagger on a corpus of 432,671 words. Chi-square and z-test were applied to word frequencies, while Student’s t-tests were applied to gender comparisons. The results showed reduced variability between men/women parliamentarians in the use of linguistic devices, confirming the weakness of the essentialist and binary logic that has long dominated the field of studies on language and gender

Crossovers: Digitalization and literature in foreign language education

Digitalization produces increasingly multimodal and interactive literary forms. A major challenge for foreign language education in adopting such forms lies in deconstructing discursive borders between literary education and digital education (romance of the book vs. euphoric media heavens), thereby crossing over into a perspective in which digital and literary education are intertwined. In engaging with digital literary texts, it is additionally important to consider how different competencies and literary/literacy practices interact and inform each other, including: (1) a receptive perspective: reading digital narratives and digital literature can become a space for literary aesthetic experience, and (2) a productive perspective: learners can become “produsers” (Bruns, 2008) of their own digital narratives by drawing on existing genre conventions and redesigning “available designs” (New London Group, 1996). Consequently, we propose a typology of digital literatures, incorporating functional, interactive and narrative aspects, as applied to a diverse range of digital texts. To further support our discussion, we draw on a range of international studies in the fields of literacies education and 21st century literatures (e.g., Beavis, 2010; Hammond, 2016; Kalantzis & Cope, 2012; Ryan, 2015) and, in turn, explore trajectories for using concrete digital literary texts in the foreign language classroom