Social class, language and power ‘Letter to a teacher’ : Lorenzo Milani and the school of Barbiana

The link between language and power and the indispensible and urgent need for the oppressed to master the dominant language for emancipatory purposes are among the recurrent themes of Lettera a una professoressa. Developing communicative abilities and learning the ‘art’ of writing are seen by the authors of the Lettera as instruments of empowerment and means to resist the dominant location of hegemonic groups who reproduce their power through an education process that self-serves the interests of the most powerful. One of the main notions expressed constantly throughout the Lettera is that each and every child can learn how to reflect on his/her use of different languages, including the mother tongue, and that all learning experiences in life are valuable, regardless of one’s socioeconomic status. However, when children with different backgrounds start attending school they go through different experiences, even because of the form of language used by teachers: in some cases this may be a natural transition from what they are exposed to at home, even in their pre-school years; in other cases the language of schooling is totally different, the language register may be more formal and the variety used may approach standard forms which contrast with local or regional varieties used at home. The language of schooling may therefore represent one of the first obstacles towards the socialisation and integration of some pupils.peer-reviewe

The role of linguistics in language teaching: the case of two, less widely taught languages - Finnish and Hungarian

This paper discusses the role of various linguistic sub-disciplines in teaching Finnish and Hungarian. We explain the status of Finnish and Hungarian at University College London and in the UK, and present the principle difficulties in learning and teaching these two languages. We also introduce our courses and student profiles. With the support of examples from our own teaching, we argue that a linguistically oriented approach is well suited for less widely used and less taught languages as it enables students to draw comparative and historical parallels, question terminologies and raise their sociolinguistic and pragmatic awareness. A linguistic approach also provides students with skills for further language learning

Language contact and language decay. Socio-political and linguistic perspectives

The present linguistic situation in Malta is a reflection of historical and political permutations of the past. The simultaneous presence of two languages in Malta – generally described as a bilingual situation, but which in fact includes a number of features which can be defined more appropriately through diglossia – gives rise to a context wherein language contact is extremely frequent: this occurs through both inter- and intrasentential code-switching as well as through the constant integration of foreign terms, mainly from Italian and English, into Maltese. Language policies in Malta are frequently caught in the midst of these dynamic diachronic and synchronic linguistic processes and often operate on two fronts: on the one hand internal changes inherent to the Maltese language must be taken into consideration, on the other hand language use, characterized by the presence of both English and Maltese, also must be accounted for.peer-reviewe

First verbs : On the way to mini-paradigms

This 18th issue of ZAS-Papers in Linguistics consists of papers on the development of verb acquisition in 9 languages from the very early stages up to the onset of paradigm construction. Each of the 10 papers deals with first-Ianguage developmental processes in one or two children studied via longitudinal data. The languages involved are French, Spanish, Russian, Croatian, Lithuanien, Finnish, English and German. For German two different varieties are examined, one from Berlin and one from Vienna. All papers are based on presentations at the workshop 'Early verbs: On the way to mini-paradigms' held at the ZAS (Berlin) on the 30./31. of September 2000. This workshop brought to a close the first phase of cooperation between two projects on language acquisition which has started in October 1999: a) the project on "Syntaktische Konsequenzen des Morphologieerwerbs" at the ZAS (Berlin) headed by Juergen Weissenborn and Ewald Lang, and financially supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, and b) the international "Crosslinguistic Project on Pre- and Protomorphology in Language Acquisition" coordinated by Wolfgang U. Dressler in behalf of the Austrian Academy of Sciences

The role of entrenchment and schematisation in the acquisition of rich verbal morphology

Entrenchment and schematisation are the two most important cognitive processes in language acquisition. In this article, the role of the two processes, operationalised by token and type frequency, in the production of overgeneralised verb forms in Croatian preschool children is investigated using a parental questionnaire and computational simulation of language acquisition. The participants of the questionnaire were parents of children aged 3;0–5;11 years (n = 174). The results showed that parents of most children (93 %) reported the parallel use of both adult-like and overgeneralised verb forms, suggesting that Croatian-speaking preschool children have not yet fully acquired the verbal system. The likelihood of overgeneralised forms being reported decreases with the age of the children and verb type frequency. The results of the computational simulation show that patterns with a higher type frequency also show a greater preference for the correct form, while lexical items show both learning and unlearning tendencies during the process

Experimental, Acquisitional and Corpus Linguistic Approaches to the Study of Morphonotactics

This volume presents results of bilateral research project BeSyMPHONic (ÖAW/Univ. Toulouse) funded by ANR & FWF. Differences between the two languages with respect to the processing of morphonotactic (MPH) vs. phonotactic (PH) consonant clusters are shown for the first time, the linguistically challenging claim that differences between MPH and PH are also realized phonetically is refuted, and the importance of the relative morphological richness of a language is illustrated.Der Band zeigt Ergebnisse des von ANR & FWF geförderten, bilateralen Forschungsprojekts BeSyMPHONic (ÖAW/Univ. Toulouse). Unterschiede zwischen beiden Sprachen in Bezug auf die Verarbeitung morphonotaktischer (MPH) vs. phonotaktischer (PH) Konsonantengruppen werden erstmalig aufgezeigt, die sprachtheoretisch herausfordernde Behauptung, dass Unterschiede zwischen MPH und PH auch phonetisch realisiert werden, widerlegt, und die Wichtigkeit des relativen morphologischen Reichtums einer Sprache veranschaulich

Experimental, Acquisitional and Corpus Linguistic Approaches to the Study of Morphonotactics

This volume presents results of bilateral research project BeSyMPHONic (ÖAW/Univ. Toulouse) funded by ANR & FWF. Differences between the two languages with respect to the processing of morphonotactic (MPH) vs. phonotactic (PH) consonant clusters are shown for the first time, the linguistically challenging claim that differences between MPH and PH are also realized phonetically is refuted, and the importance of the relative morphological richness of a language is illustrated.Der Band zeigt Ergebnisse des von ANR & FWF geförderten, bilateralen Forschungsprojekts BeSyMPHONic (ÖAW/Univ. Toulouse). Unterschiede zwischen beiden Sprachen in Bezug auf die Verarbeitung morphonotaktischer (MPH) vs. phonotaktischer (PH) Konsonantengruppen werden erstmalig aufgezeigt, die sprachtheoretisch herausfordernde Behauptung, dass Unterschiede zwischen MPH und PH auch phonetisch realisiert werden, widerlegt, und die Wichtigkeit des relativen morphologischen Reichtums einer Sprache veranschaulicht