Author: Sophie Bennett (Page 3 of 4)

Call for papers : Special issue, Diacrítica

December 17, 2021 / Sophie Bennett

Revista Diacrítica has recently published a call for papers for a special issue on “Teaching, learning and acquisition of foreign languages – interconnections”. Diacrítica is a multidisciplinary journal, edited by the Center for Humanistic Studies of the University of Minho (CEHUM), one of the HL2C founding institutions. For questions about the special issue, please email the editors below or visit the journal website.

Submission deadline: February 28, 2022

Online submission: Please follow the link

About the volume:

Editors: Jorge Pinto (CLUL), Lili Cavalheiro (CEAUL), Maria del Carmen Fondo (FLUL), Ana Cea (CEHUM)

Teaching, learning and acquisition of foreign languages – interconnections

The purpose of this thematic volume is to present recent studies that explore relevant issues related to the acquisition, learning, and teaching of foreign languages in different contexts, highlighting the heterogeneity and complexity that characterize them. Regardless of the different target languages on which research is carried out, in many cases their outcomes and implications may be transferred to the teaching and learning of other languages.

As the fields of acquisition and teaching and learning intersect, this volume aims to gather papers that do not exclusively focus on acquisition theories, but also address aspects of linguistics applied to the teaching and learning of foreign languages.

Finally, considering that the foreign language learning/teaching landscape has greatly changed in the last few decades, we expect works that reflect this, especially concerning multilingual contexts of classrooms. For example, the role of previously acquired languages, teachers’ attitudes towards multilingual approaches, and the advantages of a pedagogy which promotes the students’ interlinguistic development (e.g., translanguaging) versus monolingual bias.

In short, this thematic volume adopts a broad approach on the concepts of foreign language acquisition, teaching and learning, namely: 1) how foreign languages may be more easily learned and acquired, 2) which difficulties may arise when learning a foreign language, and 3) how foreign language learning has changed in view of our increasing multilingual society.

Considering the specific focus of this volume, articles related to sign language (e.g., LIBRAS, LGP) will not be considered for submission.

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Título do volume: Ensino/aprendizagem e aquisição de línguas estrangeiras – interconexões

Prazo de submissão: 28 de fevereiro de 2022

Submissão online em:http://diacritica.ilch.uminho.pt/index.php/dia/about/submissions

Apresentação do volume:

Este volume temático pretende reunir estudos atuais que explorem questões relevantes relacionadas com a aquisição, aprendizagem e ensino de línguas estrangeiras em diversos contextos, salientando a heterogeneidade e a complexidade que as caracterizam. Entende-se que, independentemente das diferentes línguas-alvo sobre as quais os estudos são realizados, os resultados obtidos e as suas implicações, em muitas situações, podem ser aplicados ao ensino e aprendizagem de outras línguas.

Como as áreas da aquisição e do ensino e aprendizagem se cruzam, pretende-se congregar trabalhos que não se concentram exclusivamente em teorias de aquisição, mas que abordem também aspetos da linguística aplicada ao ensino e aprendizagem de línguas estrangeiras.

Por fim, considerando que o panorama do ensino e aprendizagem de línguas estrangeiras mudou muito nas últimas décadas, esperam-se trabalhos em que isto se reflita, sobretudo considerando os contextos multilingues das salas de aula. Por exemplo, o papel das línguas previamente adquiridas, as atitudes dos professores em relação às abordagens plurilingues e os benefícios de uma pedagogia que promova o desenvolvimento interlinguístico (e.g. translanguaging) dos alunos versus o preconceito monolingue.

Em suma, este volume temático visa adotar uma abordagem ampla sobre os conceitos de aquisição, ensino e aprendizagem de uma língua estrangeira, a saber: 1) como as línguas estrangeiras podem ser mais eficazmente aprendidas e adquiridas, 2) quais as dificuldades que podem surgir na aprendizagem de uma língua estrangeira e 3) como a aprendizagem de línguas estrangeiras mudou, considerando a nossa sociedade multilingue em crescimento.

Tendo em conta o foco específico do volume, não serão considerados artigos para submissão relacionados com a linguagem gestual (e.g. LIBRAS, LGP).

Editores:

Jorge Pinto (CLUL)

Lili Cavalheiro (CEAUL)

Maria del Carmen Fondo (FLUL)

Ana Cea (CEHUM)

Children’s literature festival celebrated in Berlin: “Os Dias do Conto”

December 9, 2021 / Sophie Bennett

On Friday, November 5, 2021, the 32nd “Os dias do Conto” children’s literature festival was celebrated as part of the Berliner Märchentage at the premises of the Camões Institute, Centro Cultural Português, in Berlin.

The Berliner Märchentage is one of the largest children’s literature festivals in the world, celebrating traditional fairy tales, legends, myths and fables. The theme of this year’s festival was “The Purple Flower”.

The Portuguese Embassy in Berlin, together with the Portuguese Education Department in Germany, organised the presentation and reading of a Portugese short story, “Beatriz e o Plátano”, by Ilse Losa. The story was translated into German by Isabel Remer and edited in a bilingual version by Oxalá, with illustrations by Lisa Couwenbergh. Carla Gago and Patrícia Santos, teaching staff from the Elizabeth-Shaw Grundschule school in Berlin, read the story to a class of 24 pupils aged between 7 and 8, in the presence of translator Niki Graça.

The event aimed to promote Portuguese literature, to raise awareness of multilingualism and diversity in Europe and to encourage children to learn the Portuguese language.

For additional information, please visit the Coordenação Ensino Português Alemanha Facebook page or see the original news source.

British Council award for Lancaster team’s comics app to support language learners

December 2, 2021 / Sophie Bennett

A Lancaster University-led project team have won a highly prestigious British Council ELTons Innovation Award for work on an imaginative comics app to help dyslexic and non-dyslexic learners learn a second language.

The project was also given a Judges’ Commendation for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion.

The CIELL App project was led by Dr Julie-Ann Sime from Lancaster’s Department of Educational Research and also included Professor Judit Kormos, Professor of Second Language Acquisition at Lancaster and HL2C Scientific Advisory Board member, as well as colleagues from Germany, Greece and Cyprus. The project was co-funded by ERASMUS+ Programme of the European Union.

This very important award in the world of English language teaching is given in recognition of their international project “Comics for Inclusive English Language Learning” (CIELL) which aims to develop the competences of second language learners by promoting the use of comic art and other visual representations. The project also aims to enhance the quality of language teaching materials used for teaching writing in a second language by supporting the needs of dyslexic learners in a socially inclusive manner.

The CIELL App offers an inclusive, gamified approach to learning how to plan an essay at intermediate and advanced levels of English language proficiency. The award recognises that the app is designed to support students, with and without dyslexia, and offers an inclusive, gamified approach to learning how to plan an essay.

Dyslexia is a specific learning difference characterized by difficulties with word decoding, spelling, handwriting, reading, memory and attention span which affects around 10% of the population.

Many congratulations to all those involved in this important project!

For additional information, please visit the the CIEL app website, the original news source (Lancaster University website), or contact Dr Julie-Ann Sime.

Enrolment opens for free Armenian language and culture courses

December 2, 2021 / Sophie Bennett

avc website banner eng 1

Earlier this academic year, the University of Lisbon, one of the HL2C founding institutions, established a new cooperation agreement with the Armenian Virtual College, Yerevan State University, and the Portugal-Armenia Friendship Association.

As a result, we are pleased to announce an exciting opportunity for those interested in learning a new language. The Armenian Virtual College (AGBU) invites anyone interested in Armenian language and culture to enrol in various free online courses, from 3rd until 19th December 2021. The language courses start from 10th January until 15th March 2022 and provide the opportunity for students to enrich their knowledge of Eastern Armenian, Western Armenian, the history of Armenia, Armenian architecture, Armenian music and chess. More information about the courses can be found here.

The courses stem from a set of initiatives laid out in the cooperation agreement; they aim to strengthen the links between the various educational institutions and to promote Armenian language and culture in Portugal and Portuguese language and culture in Armenia.

For more information, please visit the original news source (University of Lisbon).

Science Awards: Congratulations to Ana Lúcia Santos

November 30, 2021 / Sophie Bennett

Congratulations to Professor Ana Lúcia Santos for winning the University of Lisbon – Caixa Geral de Depósitos Science Award 2020 in the Language Sciences category. Ana Lúcia is a specialist in language acquisition research and a member of HL2C Steering Committee.

The awards recognise scientific excellence across a wide range of fields and serve to promote dissemination of cutting-edge research in international academic journals.

Nominations for the 2021 edition of this prestigious award have recently been opened. Nominations will close on 15th December at 17:00 (Lisbon time). Further information about the award can be found on the University of Lisbon’s website.

Scientific Awards University of Lisbon/Caixa Geral de Depósitos | Applications open until December 15

HL2C Seminar: Elma Kerz (Aachen), New insights into the role of statistical learning abilities in second language learning

November 24, 2021 / Sophie Bennett

Our next HL2C seminar will take place on Wednesday 15th December from 12 noon to 1pm GMT (Dublin, Edinburgh, Lisbon, London). This talk is a joint initiative with Lancaster’s SLLAT Research Group.

Presenters:

Elma Kerz (Aachen)

Title:

New insights into the role of statistical learning abilities in second language learning

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:

One of the major advances in the language sciences across theoretical orientations has been in recognizing that natural languages consist of complex, variable patterns occurring in sequence, and as such can be described in terms of statistical regularities or distributional properties among language units (Christiansen & Chater, 2016; Gibson, 2019). Learning a language thus heavily depends on figuring out these complex structured patterns inherent in the input and there is a growing recognition that such accumulated statistical knowledge constitutes an essential part of our language knowledge (Rebuschat, 2013; Ellis, 2019). This is supported by extensive empirical evidence from the literature on statistical learning (henceforth SL). SL is succinctly defined as a powerful mechanism for perceiving and assimilating the range of regularities in the input, thereby shaping fundamental aspects of human cognition and behavior (Armstrong et al., 2017; Sherman et al., 2020).

A number of previous studies based on within-subject designs have examined the relationship between individual differences in SL ability and variations in language learning and processing, in both child and adult populations and in adult second-language learner populations. The main assumption underlying these studies is that individuals can be divided into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ statistical learners, with the expectation that ‘good’ statistical learners will show better performance across a wide range of language domains and population groups, such as early language acquisition (Lany et al., 2018), word predictability (Kaufman et al. 2010), reading (Arciuli, 2018), processing of complex syntactic structures in children and adults (Kidd & Arciuli, 2017; Misyak & Christiansen, 2012) and online processing of multiword combinations in second-language learners (Kerz & Wiechmann, 2019). However, this assumption has recently been challenged and there is now increasing recognition of the need to consider a broader ecological perspective on the diversity of statistics that must be accommodated and the challenges associated with the theoretical construct of good statistical learners (Bogaerts et al., 2021).

In this talk, I will present my recent studies aimed at addressing this ecological perspective and advancing our understanding of the role of SL in language learning and processing. I will show how this line of research can benefit from synthesizing experimental studies based on within-subject designs with natural language processing and computational techniques (see Rebuschat et al. (2017) for background reading).

1 References

1. Armstrong, B. C., Frost, R., Christiansen, M. H. (2017). The long road of statistical learning research: Past, present and future.. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2017;372(1711):20160047.

2. Arciuli, J. (2018). Reading as statistical learning. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 49(3S), 634-643.

3. Bogaerts, L., Siegelman, N., Christiansen, M. H., & Frost, R. (2021). Is there such a thing as a ‘good statistical learner’?. Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

4. Christiansen, M. H., & Chater, N. (2016). Creating language: Integrating evolution, acquisition, and processing. MIT Press.

5. Ellis, N. C. (2019). Essentials of a theory of language cognition. The Modern Language Journal, 103, 39-60.

6. Gibson, E., Futrell, R., Piandadosi, S. T., Dautriche, I., Mahowald, K., Bergen, L., & Levy, R. (2019). How efficiency shapes human language. Trends in Cognitive Sciences. 5. 389-407.

7. Kaufman, S. B., DeYoung, C. G., Gray, J. R., Jim´enez, L., Brown, J., & Mackintosh, N. (2010). Implicit learning as an ability. Cognition, 116(3), 321-340.

8. Kerz, E., & Wiechmann, D. (2019). Effects of statistical learning ability on the second language processing of multiword sequences. In International Conference on Computational and CorpusBased Phraseology (pp. 200-214). Springer, Cham.

9. Kidd, E., & Arciuli, J. (2016). Individual differences in statistical learning predict children’s comprehension of syntax. Child Development, 87(1), 184-193.

10. Lany, J., Shoaib, A., Thompson, A., & Estes, K. G. (2018). Infant statistical-learning ability is related to real-time language processing. Journal of child language, 45(2), 368-391.

11. Misyak, J. B., & Christiansen, M. H. (2012). Statistical learning and language: An individual differences study. Language Learning, 62(1), 302-331.

12. Rebuschat P (2013) Statistical learning. In: Robinson P (ed.) The Routledge encyclopedia of second language acquisition. London: Routledge, pp. 612–15.

13. Rebuschat, P. E., Detmar, M., & McEnery, T. (2017). Language learning research at the intersection of experimental, computational and corpus-based approaches. Language Learning, 67(S1), 6-13.

14. Sherman, B. E., Graves, K. N., & Turk-Browne, N. B. (2020). The prevalence and importance of statistical learning in human cognition and behavior. Current opinion in behavioral sciences, 32, 15-20.

Porto series of public lectures

November 13, 2021 / Sophie Bennett

The University of Porto is hosting a series of two public lectures as part of their Master’s Degree in Portuguese as a Second Language/Foreign Language, with the support of CLUP. The lectures focus on Portuguese and its relationship with other languages in CPLP countries. For more information, please contact Professor Isabel Margarida Duarte.

Session 1:

Date: 28th September

Presenter: Professor Karin Noemi Rühle Indart (National University of East Timor)

Title: A Oficialização da Língua Portuguesa em Timor-Leste e os Desafios de Implementação da Política Linguística no Sistema de Educação

Click on this link for more information

Session 2:

Date: 16th November

Presenter: Professor Liliana Inverno (University of Coimbra)

Title: Contacto linguístico e restruturação da gramática da língua portuguesa em Angola.

PhD Defense: Aníbal José Ribeiro Serra, University of Evora

November 13, 2021 / Sophie Bennett

On Friday, 12th November, 2021, Aníbal José Ribeiro defended her PhD thesis in Linguistics at the University of Evora.

Title:

O Português, língua de herança nos Estados Unidos: O caso de Hudson, Massachusetts

Thesis Directors:

Maria Filomena Gonçalves

Joseph Abraham Levi

Members of the PhD committee:

Isabel Margarida de Oliveira Duarte (University of Porto)

Manuel Célio Conceição (University of Algarve)

Porto MOOC receives IELA Honorable Mention

October 29, 2021 / Sophie Bennett

We are pleased to announce that Porto University’s Introduction to Portuguese MOOC has received an Honorable Mention in the Academic Division of the 2021 International E-Learning Awards under the E-Learning category. Congratulations to all colleagues involved!

The MOOC (Massively Open Online Course) was co-produced by Porto’s Faculty of Arts and by the Educational Technologies Cluster. The MOOC is a free online course hosted by the AcademiaUP platform, and the scheme of work aims to explore first contact with Portuguese in everyday situations. The course is based on a fiction series consisting of 8 episodes, recorded by TVU Networks, involving professional actors in different areas of the city of Porto. The teaching materials were developed by a team of trainers with experience in teaching Portuguese as a Foreign Language, and the audiovisual work was carried out by the Educational Technologies Nucleus.

Below you will find a brief video introduction to the course.

The International E-Learning Association (IELA) hosts the annual competition to recognise candidates who show an outstanding ability to promote learning, professional development and job performance through the use of technology. Successful candidates in this Award demonstrated this through the application of E-learning, blended learning and mobile learning, and were evaluated based on criteria such as “soundness and effectiveness”, “usability”, and “overall significance”.

The Faculty of Arts and the Educational Technologies Cluster at the University of Porto deserve a huge “congratulations” for their achievement. For more information on the MOOC, please contact Professor Fátima Silva, mhenri@letras.up.pt.

HL2C Seminar: Children using collaborative tasks in an EFL context

October 20, 2021 / Sophie Bennett

We are delighted to host the next talk as part of the HL2C Seminar Series for 2021-2022 , taking place on Wednesday 27th October, 12 noon to 1pm UK (same time zone as Dublin, Edinburgh, Lisbon, London).

Presenter:

María del Pilar García Mayo (University of the Basque Country, UPV/EHU)

Title:

Children using collaborative tasks in an EFL context. Some insights from research

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 early learning of English in school settings has grown tremendously in the past twenty years, with estimated figures of half a billion primary-aged children around the world (Ellis & Knagg, 2013; Enever, 2018). Considering this trend it seems striking that the research lens has only recently been placed on young learners (Enever & Lindgren, 2018; García Mayo, 2017; Murphy & Evangelou, 2016; Pinter, 2011), as child second language acquisition (SLA) differs significantly from adult SLA and deserves to be studied in its own right (Oliver & Azkarai, 2017). In the last decade, task-based language teaching (TBLT) research has expanded substantially in foreign language contexts, but most research studies have been carried out with adults in university settings. There is a clear lack of research-based evidence of what children actually do while performing tasks in this setting and about their learning process. This evidence is crucial in order to make decisions about appropriate educational provision, to inform policy makers and to maximize children’s learning opportunities (García Mayo, 2017, 2018).

In this talk I will focus on current research with Spanish English as a foreign language (EFL) children (age range 8-12) while they perform several collaborative tasks (oral and oral+written) in both mainstream and Content and Language integrated learning (CLIL) contexts. I will show how children are able to negotiate for meaning with age- and proficiency-matched peers and to focus on formal aspects of the language without the teacher’s intervention. Issues related to the impact of task modality on language-related episodes and of task repetition on collaborative patterns and L1 use will also be considered, together with the importance of agency in pair formation. I will conclude by highlighting both ethical and methodological challenges in this type of research (García Mayo, 2021) and by pointing to interesting topics in the future research agenda.

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