A strategic partnership for the study of Portuguese in multilingual settings

Author: Sophie Bennett (Page 2 of 4)

HL2C Seminar: Maria de Lurdes Gonçalves (Camões Institute), Teacher training in heritage language education: Challenges and opportunities

We are very pleased to announce our next HL2C seminar, taking place on Thursday 28th April 2022, from 3pm to 4pm (Dublin, Edinburgh, Lisbon, London).

Presenters:

Maria de Lurdes Gonçalves (Camões Institute)

Title:

Teacher training in heritage language education: Challenges and opportunities

How to join:

Our seminars are free to attend. Simply sign up to the HL2C Mailing List to receive the link to join us via Microsoft Teams link. You do not need a Teams account to access the talk.

Abstract:

Teaching Heritage Language (HL) is usually described as an endeavour situated within a continuum ranging from teaching L1 to teaching FL. Findings on the characteristics of heritage language speakers are helpful to guide teaching approaches, which intertwined with context knowledge, have been able to assist teachers to design successful teaching practices.

In this emerging field of research of Language Didactics, both teachers and researchers have been engaged in understanding and describing the specific work of HL teachers, in order to design adequate training and teacher education plans (Gonçalves & Melo-Pfeifer, 2020).

Based on the experience acquired over nine years of designing teacher education plans to assist HL teachers’ needs, this presentation will highlight some specific aspects of professional knowledge, having in mind and referring to challenges and opportunities of teacher training in heritage language education.

Gonçalves, M. L.; Melo Pfeifer, S. (Coord). (2020). Língua de Herança e Formação de Professores. Lisboa: Lidel.

Multilingualism in São Tomé and Príncipe: Opportunities and challenges

 

On 16th March 2022, The Camões Institute’s Centro de Língua Portuguesa em São Tomé organized a roundtable to discuss the opportunities and challenges of multilingualism in São Tomé and Príncipe, as well as the relationship that can be established with formal teaching and learning of the Portuguese Language.

The topics discussed at the event included the preservation of local creoles; the opportunity for multilingualism as a factor of cognitive development and social progress; the state of Portuguese language teaching; and the importance of mastering it as an instrument of citizenship and democratic participation.

The panel was attended by São Toméan specialists in Linguistics, Sociolinguistics and creoles: Abigail Tiny Cosme, professor at the Faculty of Sciences and Technologies (FCT), Researcher at the University of Lisbon and Coordinator of the IILP for São Tomé and Príncipe; Caustrino Alcantara; the writer Frederico Gustavo dos Anjos; and the Coordinator of the Department of Languages ​​at FCT, Beatriz Afonso. It also included Elebrak Costa, a recent graduate in Portuguese who won the 1st prize for his graduation thesis in the 1st IILP/Itamaraty contest for scientific articles on the Portuguese language, moderated by Guilherme Figueiredo, CICL Reader in São Tomé. Teachers of primary, secondary and university education and undergraduate students in Portuguese were also present.

The event also included the participation of the group Leji-tela (roots of the earth), whose members presented a moment of dialogue themselves and the public using the various mother tongues spoken in the country: Portuguese, Santome, Angola and Lungu’ie.

Translated from The Camões Institute’s website.

HL2C Seminar: Joana Moscoso (Native Scientist) and Julia Schiefer (Tübingen), Exploring the effectiveness of an innovative science outreach programme for migrant students

We are excited to announce our next HL2C seminar, taking place on Thursday 31st March 2022, from 3pm to 4pm (Dublin, Edinburgh, Lisbon, London).

Presenters:

Joana Moscoso (Native Scientist) and Julia Schiefer (Tübingen)

Title:

Exploring the effectiveness of an innovative science outreach programme for migrant students

How to join:

Our seminars are free to attend. Simply sign up to the HL2C Mailing List to receive the link to join us via Microsoft Teams link. You do not need a Teams account to access the talk.

Abstract:

Inspiring ethnic minority and migrant students to pursue higher education or careers in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) challenges many European countries. This target group often underperforms in STEM subjects due to various reasons, including specific linguistic and educational needs. We will present the results of a randomized controlled trial testing the impact of an innovative science outreach program, which connects migrant students with scientists of the same linguistic and cultural background. The Native Scientist project (www.nativescientist.com) follows a science and language integrated learning approach bringing together real-world STEM professionals and migrant students to discuss science topics and science careers in the students’ heritage language. The interaction between scientists and students happens through workshops whose effectiveness has been studied for both the students and the scientists. We observed increased attainment value, intrinsic interest, self-concept, and intention to future participation in science, and increased intrinsic interest and self-concept of ability for the students’ heritage language immediately after the workshop. We also identified a range of challenges and benefits for participating scientists. Overall, results indicate a positive effect of the workshops and that it is possible to foster migrant students’ motivation for science through their participation in a science outreach program

HL2C Seminar: Nur Ehsan Mohd Said (UKM), Differentiating instruction for EFL learners

We welcome you to our next HL2C seminar, taking place on Wednesday 9th March 2022, from 12pm to 1pm (Dublin, Edinburgh, Lisbon, London). The talk is co-organized with Lancaster’s SLLAT Research Group.

Presenter:

Nur Ehsan Mohd Said (Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia)

Title:

Differentiating instruction for EFL learners: Identifying and measuring changes in language attitude and critical thinking (Joint talk with Lancaster’s SLLAT Group.)

How to join:

Our seminars are free to attend. Simply sign up to the HL2C Mailing List to receive the link to join us via Microsoft Teams link. You do not need a Teams account to access the talk.

Abstract:

As a country that was once under British rule, Malaysia has accorded English the status of a second language and its teaching is compulsory at both primary and secondary schools. However, local scholars have reported mixed attitudes towards the English language as evidenced by research from different decades. While some users display a favourable attitude towards the teaching and learning of the language, others have indicated a fear that English could be a threat to the national language. Despite being an important language in the country, efforts to mandate the teaching of English outside English classrooms by the government (e.g. the teaching of Mathematics and Science) have resulted in a public outcry and street protests in the past.

In this talk, I will share findings from a preliminary study that investigated the effects of differentiated instruction (DI) on English language learners’ attitude. Over the years, education practitioners have introduced DI to accommodate multifarious learning needs within intact classrooms more efficiently, but it is a relatively novel concept in Malaysia with limited empirical evidence from English classrooms. Spanning 14 months, the study employed a classroom research design to investigate an English teacher and his students’ experience at a national secondary school. Data were collected by means of a pre- and posttest, and semi-structured interviews. The classroom intervention comprised a 13-week module, designed in line with the national curriculum and learning activities were tailored to the students’ learning styles. Analysis of the quantitative data indicated that DI has had a positive effect on language attitude with a large effect size while also revealing findings that may influence the landscape of language teaching in the country. The qualitative data revealed a rise in learner autonomy and acceptance of the differentiated learning tasks. In line with the government’s aspiration, it is proposed that DI should be practiced by English teachers more readily. It may be further facilitated by greater collaboration between university researchers and schoolteachers, and centralized provision of training nationwide.

HL2C Seminar: Montserrat Comesaña (Minho), The representational nature of grammatical gender: The relevance of language transparency

We are pleased to announce the next HL2C seminar, taking place on Thursday 24th February from 3pm-4pm GMT (Dublin, Edinburgh, Lisbon, London).

Presenter:

Montserrat Comesaña (Minho)

Title:

The representational nature of grammatical gender: The relevance of language transparency

How to join:

Our seminars are free to attend. Simply sign up to the HL2C Mailing List to receive the link to join us via Microsoft Teams link. You do not need a Teams account to access the talk.

Abstract:

The study of the representation and processing of grammatical gender during noun lexical access in language production has reached controversial results across languages. For Germanic and Slavic languages, a context of agreement has been widely found to be necessary for the emergence of gender competitive effects (e.g., slower responses when two nouns of different gender compete for selection than when these nouns are of same gender –gender congruency effect). For Romance languages, the results are instead puzzling, since some studies find that this context of agreement is necessary, but others do not. Thus, available evidence seems to support the idea that gender nodes would behave differently across language families. The picture is even more clouded with bilingual populations. Late bilinguals who carried out naming and translation tasks showed a gender congruency effect (i.e., faster responses for gender-congruent translation pairs) independently from the language family and the presence of an agreement context. The reason behind the effects obtained with late bilinguals of Germanic languages producing bare nouns (BNs) remains unknown. Here, we will present a series of experiments which are aimed at testing the tenets of a recent hypothesis developed in our lab: the Gender Acquisition and Processing (GAP) hypothesis. This hypothesis explains data discrepancies across studies with native speakers of different languages as a result of differences in the basal activation level of gender nodes due to the disparity in the degree of phonological gender transparency of each language. Also, it explain the findings with late bilinguals as a result of the way second languages (L2s) are learned and used.

PhD Defense: Mara Moita, NOVA University of Lisbon

On Thursday 20th January 2022, Mara Moita, researcher at NOVA CLUNL’s LiFE group , defended her PhD thesis in Linguistics  at NOVA University of Lisbon.

Title:

The Acquisition of Syntactic Dependencies with Movement in Deaf Children with Cochlear Implant: A movement deficit?

The PhD exams took place at 2:30pm in Auditorium 223 in Almada Negreiros College, on the Campolide Campus at NOVA University of Lisbon.

Original source

 

PFMO project supports the second edition of the training program for Timorese judges in Portugal

 

On 31st January  2022, the Camões Institute, IP, welcomed six Timorese judges who started a training programme in Portugal. This programme will run for a period of six months and includes a theory component to be taught by the Centre for Judicial Studies in Lisbon, and an internship period in Portuguese courts.

This is the second edition of the programme, and the first in the post-pandemic period, which will not only involve specialising in technical legal matters, but also developing and strengthening techniques for the application and use of legal terminology in Portuguese. This experience is also intended to build and strengthen the relationship, in the long term, between Portuguese and Timorese institutions, and between their professionals.

The training program is supported by the PFMO project – Reinforcement of Public Finance Management and Supervision in Timor-Leste, funded by the European Union and co-financed and managed by Camões, IP.

Translated from the original news item, published by Camões Institute.

 

HL2C/SLLAT Seminar: Xiaobin Chen (Tübingen): AISLA – An intelligent agent for second language English learning in real-life contexts

Another exciting HL2C seminar will take place on Wednesday 9th February from 12 noon to 1pm GMT (Dublin, Edinburgh, Lisbon, London).

Presenter:

Xiaobin Chen (Tübingen)

Title:

Aisla—An intelligent agent for second language English learning in real-life contexts (Joint talk with Lancaster’s SLLAT Group.)

How to join:

Our seminars are free to attend. Simply sign up to the HL2C Mailing List to receive the link to join us via Microsoft Teams link. You do not need a Teams account to access the talk.

Abstract:

Aisla, a project funded by the German Ministry of Education, aims at developing an Intelligent Computer Assisted Language Learning (ICALL) system for training spoken English within real-life contexts. The system features design principles of Task-based Language Teaching (TBLT), naturalistic speech interaction with AI-powered conversation agents, and live adaptive feedback with Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies. In this talk, the Aisla team will present the design principles of ICALL language learning tasks, describe the Aisla system architecture, and demonstrate the current state of a mobile app implementing the above-mentioned features. We will also talk about the outlook of the project and the unique opportunities the Aisla system may offer to second language acquisition research.

HL2C Seminar: Shanley Allen (Kaiserslautern), Cross-linguistic influence in heritage language speakers?

We are pleased to announce that another HL2C seminar will take place on Thursday 27th January from 3pm to 4pm GMT (Dublin, Edinburgh, Lisbon, London).

Presenters:

Shanley Allen (Kaiserslautern)

Title:

Information structure in the majority English of heritage speakers: Cross-linguistic influence and other patterns

How to join:

Our seminars are free to attend. Simply sign up to the HL2C Mailing List to receive the link to join us via Microsoft Teams link. You do not need a Teams account to access the talk.

Abstract:

Most linguistic research on heritage speakers to date has focused on their heritage language (Benmamoun et al. 2013; Kupisch 2013; Montrul 2016). In contrast, much less is known about patterns in their majority language, especially for adolescents and adults. In majority English, for example, only a few studies have been published to date, all focused on semantic structures (Lee et al. 2011; Montrul & Ionin 2010; Scontras et al. 2017).

To address this gap, we undertook a large-scale project investigating noncanonical patterns in majority English as produced by adolescent and adult heritage speakers of German, Greek, Russian and Turkish as well as English monolinguals in the USA – part of the Research Unit on Emerging Grammars in Language Contact Situations (RUEG). The 276 participants in our study all recounted a short video of a (fictitious) car accident, in each of four registers (informal spoken, informal written, formal spoken, formal written). Narratives were all transcribed and annotated in Exmaralda. We then explored several patterns related to information structure, particularly in the domains of referential expression and syntactic construction. Consistent with RUEG’s overarching approach, we assessed the impact of register, age, and language contact.

In this talk, I will present the results of our work to date on concept lexicalization, clause types, subordination, and left dislocations. While some results show cross-linguistic influence from the heritage language to majority English, others show a general pattern across all groups of heritage speakers regardless of language background. Our results contribute to the understanding of the contact-linguistic status of non-canonical patterns in the majority English of heritage speakers, the sources of their development, and their position within speakers’ broader repertoires of languages and registers.

HL2C/SLLAT Seminar: Joe Kakitani (Lancaster), Effects of distributed practice on L2 speech fluency development

Our next HL2C seminar will take place on Wednesday 26th January from 12 noon to 1pm GMT (Dublin, Edinburgh, Lisbon, London). This talk is a joint initiative with Lancaster’s SLLAT Research Group.

Presenters:

Joe Kakitani (Lancaster)

Title:

Effects of distributed practice on L2 speech fluency development

How to join:

Our seminars are free to attend. Simply sign up to the HL2C Mailing List to receive the link to join us via Microsoft Teams link. You do not need a Teams account to access the talk.

Abstract:

There has been a surge of interest in L2 research investigating how practice schedule can influence various aspects of L2 learning such as grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation (e.g., Kasprowicz, Marsden, & Sephton, 2019; Rogers & Cheung, 2018, 2020; Li & DeKeyser, 2019). Recent L2 distributed practice research has focused on oral fluency development—a dimension of L2 performance which hinges highly on L2 procedural knowledge (Kormos, 2006). Manipulating the timing of task repetitions has shown to affect the fluency of the repeated performance (Bui, Ahmadian, & Hunter, 2019), and the effects of practice schedule have been found to transfer to a performance on a novel task (Suzuki & Hanzawa, 2021). Research in cognitive psychology suggests that an ideal distribution of repeated practice rests on the ratio of the interval between practice sessions (i.e., the intersession interval; ISI) and the time gap between the final practice session and the time of testing (i.e., the retention interval; RI). However, no research to date has examined the effects of distributed practice on L2 oral fluency development by systematically manipulating the ISI–RI ratio. An investigation of specified ISI–RI ratios is necessary to gain a better understanding of distributed practice effects on L2 fluency development, and how the research findings from cognitive psychology can be applied to a rather complex skill of L2 speaking. The current study, thus, aimed to fill the research gap by examining the effects of distributed practice using the ISI–RI ratios of 10–30%, an optimal range suggested by cognitive psychology research (Rohrer & Pashler, 2007). To this end, 116 Japanese university students participated in an online experimental study. The participants were randomly assigned to one of four groups, which consisted of two experimental groups (a short-spaced group [1-day ISI] and a long-spaced group [7-day ISI]) and two control groups. The experimental groups engaged in four narrative-task practice sessions which were identical in terms of content and procedure, with the only difference lying in the distribution of the practice sessions (1 day vs. 7 days apart). The control groups, by contrast, only took the three tests (pretest, posttest, delayed posttest) which followed the same schedule as each corresponding experimental group. A total of 348 speech datasets were analyzed in terms of speed fluency (e.g., articulation rate), breakdown fluency (e.g., frequency and duration of mid-clause and clause-final pauses), and repair fluency (e.g., repetition). Linear mixed-effects modeling showed the advantage of the long-spaced practice over short-spaced practice in terms of breakdown fluency (e.g., mean length of mid-clause pauses) on the delayed posttest, demonstrating greater retention of enhanced fluency performance. The present findings contribute to the existing body of L2 research by yielding insights on how distributed practice may benefit the long-term development of L2 oral fluency.

Bui, G., Ahmadian, M. J., & Hunter, A.-M. (2019). Spacing effects on repeated L2 task performance. System, 81, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2018.12.006

Kasprowicz, R. E., Marsden, E., & Sephton, N. (2019). Investigating distribution of practice effects for the learning of foreign language verb morphology in the young learner classroom. The Modern Language Journal. https://doi.org/10.1111/modl.12586

Kormos, J. (2006). Speech production and second language acquisition. New York: Routledge.

Li, M., & DeKeyser, R. (2019). Distribution of Practice Effects in the Acquisition and Retention of L2 Mandarin Tonal Word Production. https://doi.org/10.1111/modl.12580

Rogers, J., & Cheung, A. (2018). Input spacing and the learning of L2 vocabulary in a classroom context. Language Teaching Research, 1–26. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362168818805251

Rogers, J., & Cheung, A. (2020). Does it matter when you review?: Input spacing, ecological validity, and the learning of L2 vocabulary. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0272263120000236

Rohrer, D., & Pashler, H. (2007). Increasing retention without increasing study time. Psychological Science, 16(4), 183–186. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8721.2007.00500.x

Suzuki, Y., & Hanzawa, K. (2021). Massed task repetition is a double-edged sword for fluency development: An ESL classroom study. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 1(1), 1–26. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0272263121000358

« Older posts Newer posts »