Celia's Blog

The LinC summer school and workshop  will be held at Cardiff University from August 31 to September 2 2016.  We offer a choice of two courses which are being run in parallel:

Introduction to Systemic Functional Linguistics

SFL and languages other than English, including topics such as typology, translation, language description and annotation.  

he CRELLA Summer Research Seminar will be held on Thursday, July 7th on the theme of 'Teachers' assessment literacy enhancement' at the Centre for Research in English Language Learning and Assessment (CRELLA), University of Bedfordshire (Putteridge Bury Campus), UK. 9:45    Registration & Coffee

Final conference: The linguistic landscape in higher education in English dominant and EMI settings: Future directions

Friday 8 July, 9.30-18.30 & Saturday 9 July 2016, 9.30-16.00

UCL Institute of Education

Despite an established body of knowledge on linguistic diversity and bi/multilingual learners in compulsory and complementary schooling, there is little established knowledge on linguistic diversity in higher education in English-dominant and EMI (English as a Medium of Instruction) settings. All too often the linguistic diversity brought about by a culturally diverse staff and student population is ignored or treated as a problem to be fixed rather than as a resource for enriching the sector and for fostering a vibrant and fair society and intercultural understanding. In the concluding conference in the ESRC’s

The Multilingual University

seminar series, we will pull together issues arising from the seminar series related to language policies, practices, identities and ideologies in linguistically diverse contexts in higher education in English-dominant and EMI settings under the seminar themes of internationalisation, widening participation and language revitalisation. We will discuss current and future avenues of research for examining, maintaining, fostering and raising the visibility of linguistic diversity in higher education in the Anglophone world and in EMI settings and for illuminating the idea of the ‘multilingual university’ in these contexts. The conference will showcase examples of research and practice in which linguistic diversity is used as a resource.

Keynote speakers: Jasone Cenoz (University of the Basque Country UPV/ EHU) & Durk Gorter (University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU; IKERBASQUE – Basque Foundation for Science), Kristina Hultgren (Open University), Karen M; Lauridsen (Aarhus University & IntlUni Coordinator) & Steve Marshall (Simon Fraser University)

Would you like to do fun craft session with kids or help people living in Essex care homes enjoy life?

The Essex Language Games Club is collaborating with the Friends and Neighbours charity to bring together children from local schools and residents in care homes to play language games. They’re looking for volunteers to help them and the children create materials for these games.

You can support a great project, learn about language games, and learn or share craft and sewing skills. The game-creation sessions take place in a Colchester school, every Friday from 1-3pm until 1 July.

Just paying a quick tribute to a great man (and soundtrack!)

The Eleventh Language at the University of Essex Postgraduate Conference. Thursday 16 June 2016, 9.00 am to 5.00 pm

In the Teaching Centre (2.12, 2.13, 2.8 and 2.9). University of Essex, Colchester, UK

The Department of Language and Linguistics at the University of Essex invites you to its eleventh postgraduate conference which will be held at the University of Essex on Thursday 16 June 2016, 9.00 am to 5.00 pm.

The conference aims at bringing together postgraduate students to present and discuss current research, results and problems from any field of linguistics.

Call for Papers, Posters & Workshops

Abstracts of no more than 400 words are invited on any topic in linguistics. They should include name and institution. The deadline for receiving abstracts for oral presentations or poster presentations and workshops is Monday 14th of March 2016, 23:59 (UK Time).

Please send your abstract to https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=langue2016

All abstracts should be in accordance with the formatting guidelines laid out in the attached form.

Note that no late submissions will be accepted. All submissions will be peer-reviewed.

Proceedings

Submission to the 'Proceedings of the LangUE' will be invited from all those who present their work at the LangUE 2016. Submissions must be emailed to [email protected] by 16 June 2016, and revised papers may be submitted in the two weeks following the conference (to allow for revisions following comments/discussion at the conference). Proceedings guidelines will be available

The seventh annual InForm conference is being held at Durham University on Saturday 16 July 2016 and is themed:

Working with Words: Supporting understanding of discipline-specific vocabulary in IFPs.

Keynote speakers are:

Michael McCarthy Emeritus Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Nottingham.

Dawn Knight Senior Lecturer in Applied Linguistics at Cardiff University

Speaker Proposals

Focus is on sessions on how people select and teach academic and discipline-specific vocabulary on IFPs. In particular we are interested in receiving proposals which involve collaboration between tutors across subject areas. Those who do not teach on IFPs but are involved in EAP and have proposals that are relevant to the conference theme are also invited to submit.

The form for submitting a talk, workshop or poster proposal is here: https://www.dur.ac.uk/resources/conference.booking/InFormSpeakerProposalForm.pdf

Deadline for submitting a proposal is 30 April 2016.

Registration:

Conference Fee: £60 (includes attendance to the 1 day conference, refreshments, lunch and a copy of the conference booklet).

The next Speech Science Forum talk will take place next Wednesday, 2nd March at 4pm in Room G10, Chandler House, UCL.

Speaker: Janet Pierrehumbert (University of Oxford)

Title: Real Words, Possible Words, and New Words

Abstract:

" Words that are possible in a language, but have no associated meanings, provide a window into people’s mental representations of language sound structure. They are heavily used by psycholinguists for experiments on language acquisition and lexical processing. Some such words are adopted as new words — indeed people acquire and create new words throughout their lives.

In this talk, I will first review some classic results about how people judge novel words and create new words, highlighting the following findings: Wordlikeness judgments are gradient, and reflect the statistical phonotactics of the language. When faced with novel word forms, people infer both a phonological analysis and a morphological analysis: their judgments are based on the best available morphological analysis. Morphemes that are recognised in many known words recombine to make new words, providing the dominant source of lexical innovation. These findings mean that the lexical system is probabilistic and has more than one level of representation.

Then, I will present three new collaborative projects aimed at further understanding of exactly how such a system is built and used: A statistical algorithm for bootstrapping the lexicon by segmenting the speech stream into word candidates (w. Robert Daland). An algorithm for using top down information (a small number of known words) to seed the morphological analysis of Tagalog and Zulu (w. Peter Baumann). A computational and experimental project to develop a new pseudoword database, which will be released as PseudoLex, and understand how phonotactic and morphological information interact in wordlikeness ratings for the items in it (w. Jeremy Needle and Jen Hay)."

There will be wine and nibbles provided after the talk at the atrium.

The SSF schedule for this and next term can be found on our website: