Colloquia - British Association for Applied Linguistics

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BAAL Conference 2004 37 th Annual BAAL Meeting Reconfiguring Europe - Reconfiguring language units: A study of the use of semi-prefabricated units in translated texts Pernilla Danielsson Centre for Corpus Research, School of Humanities, University of Birmingham pernilla@ccl.bham.ac.uk In the new Europe, understanding across borders will require being able to communicate over linguistic boundaries. When ideas, opinions, and information need to be disseminated across 25 different countries, translation will hold the key to success. This paper will study the quality of translated texts. Decades ago translation studies focused on critical examination of the errors and faults in a translated text. This attitude to the subject may have changed but still today we assign translated texts a lesser status than that of originals. Often, translated texts are said to have a different flavour than the original; studies have indicated that a translated text is usually more grammatical than the original, while at the same time it lacks the naturalness and flow of the source text. Up to now there has not been any obvious way of avoiding these problems, but solutions may in future be found using modern corpus techniques, as new methods open up for more objective comparisons between translated and original texts. In this study, we will look at the translation differences in semi-prefabricated units. The idea of semiprefabricated units was first introduced in Sinclair's distinction between the idiom-principle and the open-choice principle (Sinclair 1991). A recent study by Erman and Warren showed that as much as 55% of the words in a text were there due to the idiom-principle, i.e. out of 100 words, 55 were part of larger units and were not present in the texts as individual choices in a grammatical system (Erman and Warren 2000). Whereas this study focused on monolingual use of language, we will here use the same line of argument to identify what is different in translated texts. The paper will also include a section where postgraduate students were asked to manually identify the units in authentic texts. Their results will be compared to those from a corpus. References Erman, B. and Warren, B. 2000. The idiom-principle and the open-choice principle. In: Text 20(1), pp 29-62. Sinclair, J. 1991. Corpus, Concordance, Collocation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Language marketing in Europe Barbara De Cock Katholieke Universiteit Leuven barbara.decock@student.kuleuven.ac.be barbaradecock@yahoo.com History has witnessed various initiatives for language planning and policy, such as standardisation and normalisation through institutions as the Académie Française or the Real Academia Española. Recently, language scientists and planners have acknowledged that in addition to mother tongue speakers foreign language speakers also increasingly determine the importance of a language. Acknowledging this new battlefield, EU languages try to gain more importance through language marketing efforts. I will first discuss the concept of language marketing (Domínguez 1998) and highlight the particular difficulties of promoting a language and culture abroad in an area where the language is not supported by a legislative power or only to a limited extent, as opposed to more traditional language planning and policy initiatives which are implemented within a state‟s own territory (Cooper 1989, Kaplan & Baldauf 1997). In order to concretise these differences, I will focus on the British Council, the Alliance Française and the Instituto Cervantes in a European context. My presentation will include a description of their structure - discussing the link with a nation-state, the type of activities organised and special attempts concerning the European Union (in its composition before and after the 2004 enlargement) programmes, officials and actors - as well as an assessment of the efficiency of the initiatives and language marketing in general. Finally, I will present CICEB, the umbrella organisation of various language and culture organisations in Brussels. I will discuss its reason for coming into being as well as the difficulties and opportunities it presents for a language and culture promotion conglomerate at supranational level. In my conclusion, I will highlight the particularities of the marketing of foreign languages and cultures in the European Union and I will link the difficulties of this concept to broader cultural and sociological concepts such as the concept of nation-state (Anderson) and consociationalist theory (Lijphart). King‟s College, London 9 – 11 th - 10 - September, 2004
BAAL Conference 2004 37 th Annual BAAL Meeting Emergent literacy practices in pre-school age indigenous children in Tennant Creek, central Australia Samantha Disbray and Prof Gillian Wigglesworth Department of Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, School of Languages, University of Melbourne, Australia gillianw@unimelb.edu.au Tennant Creek, in central Australia, is one of the communities participating in the Aboriginal Child Language Acquisition project. This project is investigating the complex multilingual nature of the language input children in remote Aboriginal communities receive from their caregivers. The project is focussing in particular on the relationship between input and acquisition, and socialisation in changing multilingual environments. Indigenous children in Tennant Creek, whose traditional language is Warumungu, are acquiring nonstandard English as a first language. Warumungu has undergone severe language shift but influences the variety of Aboriginal English spoken. The eight children in this study, aged between 14 and 36 months, are being recorded on a regular basis interacting with one or more caregivers and other children, over a three-year period. The problem for these children will be that at the age of five they will enter mainstream schooling where standard English is the language of instruction. In addition, literacy and learning programs assume that children have been socialised in literacy practice according to mainstream norms. In this paper, we focus specifically on the language used in activities normally associated with the development of pre literacy skills. Caregivers and older children were recorded reading and discussing picture books, and modelling oral story-telling styles in the children‟s homes. We argue that these kinds of activities should provide a foundation for links between home language practices and schoolbased learning. Peer-peer interaction in a paired speaking test: the case of the First Certificate in English Dr. Evelina D. Galaczi Research & Validation Group, ESOL Examinations, University of Cambridge Galaczi.E@ucles.org.uk This discourse-based study investigates paired test-taker discourse in the First Certificate of English (FCE) speaking test. The paired test format involves two test takers who work jointly on a task. The primary aim of the study is to focus on fundamental conversation management concepts of the paired test-taker interaction, such as overall structural organization, turn-taking, sequencing and topic organization. The study has been motivated by the complexity of the paired speaking test event and a need for a deeper understanding of the interactional dynamics in paired speaking tests in order to make better inferences about L2 speaking ability. The presentation will fall into three parts. First, I will briefly overview the available research on paired speaking tests. I will then present the main findings about the global patterns of interaction in the peer test-taker dyads which emerged as a result of the conversation analysis. The three patterns of interaction were termed "collaborative," "parallel," and "asymmetric," and were distinguished based on the dimensions of mutuality and equality (Damon & Phelps, 1989; Storch, 2001, 2002). In addition, the dimension of conversational dominance, operationalized as "participatory," "sequential," and "quantitative," (Itakura, 2001) was found to intersect with the dimensions of mutuality and equality, leading to sub-groups within each interactional pattern of high or low conversational dominance. I will end with a discussion of the theoretical and pedagogical significance of the study, namely (i) the deeper understanding it provides of paired oral test interaction in the FCE and the construct of conversation management; (ii) the SLA implications in terms of a lower- and higher-level conversational management ability, and (iii) the pedagogic insights it provides into patterns of interaction non-native speakers orient to when in pairs, and the benefits of teaching L2 learners the features of collaborative interaction. Regulative to Instructional Register: Towards Partnership Talk in Primary EAL Dr Sheena Gardner CELTE, University of Warwick S.F.Gardner@warwick.ac.uk "You'd better use the word 'partnership' there - that's what they want us to be doing now" said by a language support teacher as we reviewed my transcript of an earlier interview”. Despite the potential benefits of Partnership Teaching, as distinct from Collaborative Teaching and Support Teaching (Bourne and McPake 1991, Bourne 1997), international research suggests that language support staff may be marginalised in lesson planning (Arkoudis 2003) and in the classroom (Creese 2000, 2002), King‟s College, London 9 – 11 th - 11 - September, 2004
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