Search results for "612"
showing 10 items of 302 documents
Heteroglossia as a resource for reflexive participation in a community of Christian snowboarders in Finland
2013
This paper addresses the ways in which linguistic heteroglossia is mobilized to construct participation in a youth cultural community of practice. The analysis focuses on spoken interaction among Christian snowboarders in Finland, and specifically on how the community members create social meanings by using their shared linguistic resources (e.g. religious register or snowboarding terminology). These socially indexical resources gain new meanings when the snowboarders engage in debates concerning gender, expertise and literal versus non-literal interpretations of the Bible. During specific interactive events, they reflect on their responses to different Biblical discourses, thus aiming to r…
Music video covers, minoritised languages, and affective investments in the space of YouTube
2017
AbstractWhile interest in affective processes has led to an affective turn in cultural studies, in sociolinguistics this perspective has been given less attention. This study takes up the ‘lens of affect’ and directs it on two cases exemplifying the circulation of minoritised languages in new media spaces: music video covers from two minority-language contexts, Irish and Sámi, uploaded on YouTube. Combining recent theorising on affect with insights from sociolinguistic research, the study investigates how the YouTube users’ affective investments contribute to a (re)evaluation of the two minoritised languages, their speakers, and the related ethnic/national belongings, and how these investme…
The development of narrative productivity, syntactic complexity, referential cohesion and event content in four- to eight-year-old Finnish children
2013
This study focuses on the development of narrative structure and the relationship between narrative productivity and event content. A total of 172 Finnish children aged between four and eight participated. Their picture-elicited narrations were analysed for productivity, syntactic complexity, referential cohesion and event content. Each measure showed a developmental trend. Concerning consecutive age groups, significant differences were observed between four- and five-year-olds in productivity and event content and between five- and six-year-olds in referential cohesion. Multiple regression analysis showed that the relationship between productivity and event content was important, and espe…
Creating a bilingual pre-school classroom: the multilayered discourses of a bilingual teacher
2015
Teachers have an agentive role as they interpret, evaluate and develop language policies and practices. In the current study we interviewed a bilingual pre-school teacher in Finland during the first year of implementing a new way of working bilingually with a class of monolingual children. Applying nexus analysis, we explored the teacher discourses on the trajectory of the development of the new approach; the concepts, places and people that were circulating in her reflections; and how these connected with larger societal discourses. The analysis showed that the teacher's new bilingual language practices demanded the renegotiation of previously held personal and professional beliefs. The te…
Content and language integrated learning
2014
This special issue of The Language Learning Journal is devoted to Content and Language Integrated Learning, frequently referred to by its acronym CLIL in Europe, but also elsewhere of late. CLIL is...
L2 English derivational knowledge : Which affixes are learners more likely to recognise?
2016
Knowledge of derivational morphology is considered an important aspect of vocabulary knowledge both in L1 (mother tongue) and L2 (second or foreign language) English language learning. However, it is still not clear whether different derivational affixes vary in their (learning) difficulty. The present study examines whether Bauer and Nation’s (1993) teaching order of L2 English affixes can account for the difficulty learners have with recognising the affixes. The participants in the study were L1 Estonian and Russian learners of English at upper-secondary schools in Estonia (n = 62). Their performance was measured on a word segmentation task. There were significant differences in the numbe…
The simultaneous development of receptive skills in an orthographically transparent second language
2014
Learning to read in an orthographically very shallow language may seem easy. However, for adults who are non-literate in their first language (L1), have no experience of formal education, and have to acquire literacy in a new language (L2), learning to read at all can be a formidable task. In this article, the results of a case study of the outcome of the first 10 months of Finnish literacy training for five immigrant women (24–45 years of age) are presented. Relationships are sought between the participants' achieved reading skills, their oral receptive vocabulary, their knowledge of letters, their phonological working memory and their visual memory. The results of the study show that even…
A Survey of University Students’ Knowledge of Vocabulary Learning Strategies and Influential Factors in Middle East
2016
In this study, the most and the least common vocabulary learning strategies was explored among Eastern Mediterranean University international students. Besides, the role of personal factors such as gender and English proficiency level of students were considered. After distributing the questionnaire, the data were analyzed applying t-test and ANOVA. It was revealed that the level of importance of vocabulary learning strategy use was moderate for the EMU international students. Furthermore, it was found that metacognitive strategies and social strategies are the most and the least common vocabulary learning strategies respectively utilized by EMU international students for learning vocabular…
“You Can Stand Under My Umbrella”: Immersion, CLIL and Bilingual Education. A Response to Cenoz, Genesee & Gorter (2013)
2014
Classrooms the world over are full of people who, for different reasons, are learning additional languages and/or are studying through languages that are not their first. Gaining insight into such contexts is complicated for researchers and practitioners alike by the myriad of contextual variables that come with different implementations and make comparison and generalization a tricky business. We welcome Cenoz et al.’s (2013) article as an important contribution to the debate on how best to tackle this problem. In this Forum piece we would like to, however, redress the balance on two issues: the fact that terminologies have histories and the emphases on the research agenda suggested for fu…
Denkstil und Sprache/n in den Wissenschaften. Mit Beispielen aus der Medizin
2011
Scientific research is often understood as an activity or process simultaneously focused on seeking and explaining universal laws of nature. This is especially true in the STEM fields of Science, Technology, Engineering and Math. These universal laws of nature are widely understood as independent from human beings and individual languages. Because of this, the use of English as a lingua franca is often assumed as beneficial for the internationalisation and globalisation of academic life. The use of different languages is more widely accepted in social sciences, humanities and arts because their interest does not focus on universal laws of nature but on societal phenomena. In these disciplin…