Colloquia - British Association for Applied Linguistics

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BAAL Conference 2004 37 th Annual BAAL Meeting have indicated that community languages could be taught alongside or in place of 'foreign' languages in schools. In Scotland, support for Gaelic and other community languages is identified as a national education priority. At European level, the European Communities' Action Plan 2004-6, Promoting Language Learning and Linguistic Diversity, specifically includes what are termed 'regional, minority and migrant languages'. But what impact are such commitments likely to have, and how can this be measured? Limited attention to this issue in the past means that even very basic information about the nature of current provision is lacking: for example, neither for the UK nor for Europe more generally is it possible to establish the number of languages for which provision is made, nor the number of people who take up such provision. Base-line information of this kind will be necessary in order to establish the impact of current and future initiatives, but collecting these data presents considerable challenges. These issues are discussed in this paper, which is based on work currently underway at CILT - the National Centre for Languages and Scottish CILT, in preparation for a UK-wide survey in 2004-5 and a European survey in 2005-7. Both surveys aim to map the kinds of formal and informal provision available for school-aged learners and to describe, in broad terms, the outcomes of such provision. Miss, who needs the languages of immigrants? Values and attitudes attached to bilingualism Dina Mehmedbegovic Ethnic Minority Achievement Adviser, City of Westminster LABSS dmehmedbegovic@westminster.gov.uk These were the words of a sixteen year old Kurdish girl when asked if in her opinion her languages, Arabic and Kurdish, could be of help in the career she wanted to pursue - as a travel agent. Currently a student in an inner London secondary school, she has been here for eleven months. Does that mean that only within eleven months of living in Britain, despite the fact that she was new to English when she arrived, this students has already received the 'low message value' in regards to minority languages? Britain as a country, in comparison to some other European countries, e.g. Scandinavian countries, Belgium, Switzerland, does not have a culture that supports or values bilingualism in individual or communities. For example, one of Britain's native bilingual communities situated in Wales has gone through a whole history of a complete language rights denial. It was only in 1993 that Welsh Language Act was passed, which for the first time guaranteed a 'basis of equality' between English and Welsh. An earlier act of this kind was passed in 1967, but it was much more limited. When it comes to the current situation in terms of immigrant communities maintaining their languages there are no issues regarding the exercise of this right, but the issue is that mother tongue schools are largely ignored by the mainstream system and the work done by children in these schools receives very little recognition outside of their communities. This paper seeks to explore how small samples of different groups within the British context relate to bilingualism. It is based on three studies: � study with bilingual parents; � study with mainstream headteachers; � study with bilingual children. The data collected in these studies are analysed using Ruiz's classification of attitudes towards bilingualism. According to Ruiz there are three main categories of attitudes towards bilingualism: bilingualism as Problem, as Right and as Resource. I have modified this framework by adding the category of bilingualism as Identity. Data-driven learning in German for Academic Purposes: A corpus-based approach for specialist learners Dr Martina Möllering Head of German Studies, Macquarie University, Sydney martina.mollering@mq.edu.au Following the rationale that corpora have an important part to play in fostering language awareness, this paper investigates the use of corpora in the teaching of German as a foreign language. Over the past decade, corpus-based research has had an increasing influence on language teaching pedagogy, with regard to linguistic content as well as to teaching methodology (c.f. Tribble & Jones 1989, Johns & King 1991, Wichmann et al 1997, Kennedy 1998, McEnery & Wilson 2001). While the majority of studies reporting on corpus-based teaching approaches refer to English, only a small number of studies have discussed such an approach for German (e.g. Dodd 1997, Jones 1997, Möllering 2001). This paper describes an approach to teaching German designed for students who wish to acquire a reading knowledge of the German language, specifically for research purposes in King‟s College, London 9 – 11 th - 20 - September, 2004
BAAL Conference 2004 37 th Annual BAAL Meeting the field of Ancient History where a large number of standard texts are published in German. The paper discusses the design and compilation of a corpus of German academic texts, which serves as a basis for linguistic analysis of semantic, morphological and syntactic patterns through procedures commonly employed in corpus analysis, such as compilation of word lists, frequency counts and concordances. While existing corpora of written German focus mainly on press and literary texts, a specialised corpus as examined here can serve as a database for research into the linguistic structures particular to academic texts in German, notably in the domain of Ancient History. In this contribution, the exploitation of language corpora is proposed in order to arrive at authentic teaching materials in the field of German for Academic Purposes. Dodd, B. (1997): Exploiting a corpus of written German for advanced language learning. In: Wichmann, A., Fligelstone, S., McEnery, T. & G. Knowles (eds): Teaching and Language Corpora. London/New York: Longman, pp. 131-145 Johns, T. & P. King (eds) (1991): Classroom Concordancing 4. English Language Research Journal. Birmingham: Birmingham University Jones, R. (1997): Creating and using a corpus of spoken German. In: Wichmann , A., Fligelstone, S., McEnery, T. & G.Knowles: Teaching and Language Corpora. London/New York: Longman, pp. 146 - 156 Kennedy, G. (1998): An Introduction to Corpus Linguistics. New York: Longman McEnery, T. & A. Wilson (2001): Corpus Linguistics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press Möllering, M. (2001): Teaching German Modal Particles: A Corpus-Based Approach. Language Learning & Technology. Vol. 5, No. 3, pp.130 -151 Tribble, C., & Jones, G. (1989). Concordances in the classroom. Harlow, UK: Longman Wichmann, A., Fligelstone, S., McEnery, T. & G. Knowles (eds) (1997):Teaching and Language Corpora. London/New York: Longman. Cars, bands, films: Towards a local grammar of popular culture nomenclature Tim Moore Language and Learning Unit, School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics, Monash University tim.moore@celts.monash.edu.au An interesting recent focus of discourse analysis has been on 'language in restricted domains'(Lehrberger, 1986). Such languages have been referred to as 'sub-languages', with the aim of the analysis being to develop what Gross (1993) calls 'local grammars'. One such sub-language, which has already received some coverage in the literature, is the language of newspaper headlines, whose grammar has been found to have its own distinctive syntax and lexis. This paper provides some preliminary findings and conclusions about another sub-language, one of interest to applied linguistics working in the area of popular culture - the language of product nomenclature (see also Lehrer, 1992). Examples are taken from three fields - the naming of car models, rock bands, and films. A number of patterns - lexical, syntactic and phonological - will be discussed for each field. For example, a key structural element in the syntax of rock band names is the definite article. In the titling of films, gerundive structures have played a significant role in recent times. In the naming of car models, a key linguistic unit is a phonological one - what might be called "the latinate tri-syllable of no particular meaning". A variety of explanatory models are considered for the patterns observed, including genre, intertextuality and linguistic novelty. Also considered will be the way that naming practices in English transfer to product nomenclature in non-English speaking markets. The research is thought to make some contribution to the theoretical field of local grammars. It also has practical application to the professional field of marketing and product promotion - as well as to the critiquing of these fields. European classrooms speak English: interactional and pragmatic implications? A look at classroom discourse in Finnish CLIL settings Tarja Nikula Department of Languages/ English, University of Jyväskylä tnikula@campus.jyu.fi The process of European unification has also its linguistic consequences. Language policies of the European Commission have, for example, resulted in its strong support for Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL), i.e. teaching non-language subjects through the medium of a foreign language. The popularity of CLIL has increased since the 1990s and, despite the instructional use of also other languages, the foothold of English as a medium of instruction in various European countries remains particularly strong. King‟s College, London 9 – 11 th - 21 - September, 2004
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