Search results for "6121 Languages"
showing 10 items of 20 documents
Literacy programs efficacy for developing children’s early reading skills in familiar language in Zambia
2018
This study investigated the comparative efficacy of a phonics-based reading program and a language experience approach based literacy program to develop reading skills among Zambian early childhood school learners. The learners (n = 1 986; Grade 2 level; females = 50.1%) took either the phonics-based reading program (n = 1 593) or the alternative language experience approach based program (n = 393). They were all assessed for reading skills utilising the Early Grade Reading Assessment test (EGRA) in four languages (Cinyanja, Icibemba, Kiikaonde, and Silozi). Results suggest that learners in phonics-based literacy program were significantly better in letter-sound knowledge in all the four la…
Corpus-based and corpus-driven research on translation and interpreting in Russian: the past, the present and the future
2022
Abstract (English)
 Recently, there has been a growing interest in descriptive and applied studies on translation conducted with the use of methodologies grounded in corpus linguistics. In this paper, we present an overview of state-of-the-art research in corpus-based and corpus-driven translation and interpreting studies conducted with the use of Russian corpora, notably parallel and comparable ones. In contrast to research conducted on other European languages (English, French, German, Spanish etc.), the considerable research tradition in Russian remains relatively unknown to a wider scholarly audience. We outline the scope of research conducted so far, present the most important par…
The International Comparable Corpus: Challenges in building multilingual spoken and written comparable corpora
2021
This paper reports on the efforts of twelve national teams in building the International Comparable Corpus (ICC; https://korpus.cz/icc) that will contain highly comparable datasets of spoken, written and electronic registers. The languages currently covered are Czech, Finnish, French, German, Irish, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Slovak, Swedish and, more recently, Chinese, as well as English, which is considered to be the pivot language. The goal of the project is to provide much-needed data for contrastive corpus-based linguistics. The ICC corpus is committed to the idea of re-using existing multilingual resources as much as possible and the design is modelled, with various adjustments, on t…
Children show right-lateralized effects of spoken word-form learning
2017
It is commonly thought that phonological learning is different in young children compared to adults, possibly due to the speech processing system not yet having reached full native-language specialization. However, the neurocognitive mechanisms of phonological learning in children are poorly understood. We employed magnetoencephalography (MEG) to track cortical correlates of incidental learning of meaningless word forms over two days as 6±8-year-olds overtly repeated them. Native (Finnish) pseudowords were compared with words of foreign sound structure (Korean) to investigate whether the cortical learning effects would be more dependent on previous proficiency in the language rather than ma…
Understanding developmental language disorder-The Helsinki longitudinal SLI study (HelSLI): A study protocol
2018
Background Developmental language disorder (DLD, also called specific language impairment, SLI) is a common developmental disorder comprising the largest disability group in pre-school-aged children. Approximately 7% of the population is expected to have developmental language difficulties. However, the specific etiological factors leading to DLD are not yet known and even the typical linguistic features appear to vary by language. We present here a project that investigates DLD at multiple levels of analysis and aims to make the reliable prediction and early identification of the difficulties possible. Following the multiple deficit model of developmental disorders, we investigate the DLD …
The Rally Course : Learners as co-designers of out-of-classroom language learning tasks
2019
This chapter introduces a “Rally Course” as a novel CA-inspired approach to teaching a second language. This approach builds on an understanding of language learning as a social process that is closely intertwined with L2 speakers’ evolving membership in the surrounding community. It addresses the need to develop experiential pedagogies that widen learners’ opportunities for interaction and support the socialisation process. Building on recent pedagogical initiatives supporting language learning in the wild, we illustrate the overall structure of the Rally Course, describe the main materials that were designed to support the learning objectives and present a case analysis of a student carry…
The value of academics’ research-related online writing
2020
Research productivity indicators tend to ignore online and social media writing of academics, nevertheless, many academics for instance tweet and blog. It thus seems that there is additional value for writing in these genres. This study sets out to explore what roles writing in these hybrid online genres plays in relation to academics’ research activities. Drawing on in-depth research interviews with 29 academics with various L1s from three different disciplines, the study focuses on the participants’ perceptions of tweeting and blogging, and how they value writing in these genres in relation to core research-writing genres in their fields. Besides some differences in the evaluations betwee…
Mapping Digital Discourses of the Capital Region of Finland : Combining Onomastics, CADS, and GIS
2022
This article discusses the three Finnish city names Helsinki, Espoo, and Vantaa, and the urban discourses that surround them. The study reveals patterns of socio-spatial differentiation by examining what meanings people attach to these capital region cities and investigating how these meanings are expressed in online discourses. Using the methodological approach of corpus-assisted onomastics (CAO), this study incorporates onomastics, geographical information systems (GIS), and corpus linguistics. This interdisciplinary research also examines how corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS) and GIS can be combined to reveal and visualize the contextual information and discursive patterns of topo…
What is a language error?
2022
Why are we so afraid of making mistakes? Students in language classes, speakers of non-standard varieties, professionals working abroad – we all share the anxiety of dropping the ball. But where does this anxiety come from? Why do we perceive certain linguistic features as errors in the first place? Is there any inherent faultiness in such features, or is a language error arbitrary? And if it is arbitrary, are errors less real? In this discussion, Maria Khachaturyan, Maria Kuteeva and Svetlana Vetchinnikova zoom in on the social life of variation in language and its uneasy relationship with our normative ideas. After that, Gunnar Norrman and Dmitri Leontjev give their comments. The discussi…
Commenting on poverty online : A corpus-assisted discourse study of the Suomi24 forum
2020
This paper brings new insight to poverty and social exclusion through an analysis of how poverty-related issues are commented on in the largest online discussion forum in Finland: Suomi24 (‘Finland24’). For data, we use 32,407 posts published in the forum in 2014 that contain the word köyhä (‘poor’) or a predefined semantically similar word. We apply the Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS) method, which combines quantitative methods and qualitative discourse analysis. This methodological solution allows us to analyse both large-scale tendencies and detailed expressions and nuances on how poverty is discussed. The quantitative analysis is conducted with topic modelling, an unsupervised …