By Rachel, on March 17th, 2020%
Susan Gal (University of Chicago) and Judith T. Irvine (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor) discuss their new book Signs of Difference: Language and Ideology in Social Life.
Firstly, tell us what motivated you to write Signs of Difference?
Our interest in collaboration began some years ago when we discovered a curious parallel in our findings from the two very different places where we had done research: small towns in Senegal and Hungary. Our collaboration started with those unexpected parallels between our separate ethnographic projects. Reading each other’s papers and listening to each other at AAA meetings, we saw amazingly similar processes in two fieldsites that were utterly worlds apart.
The happy result has been a semiotic approach to difference, an approach that is much wider . . . → Read More: An interview with Susan Gal and Judith T. Irvine
By Jen Malat, on March 23rd, 2018%
In advance of the upcoming AAAL Annual Meeting in Chicago, we asked editors of Cambridge applied linguistics journals for their thoughts on the state of the field.
Where is applied linguistics headed? Are there new approaches, methods or priorities that you think will have real impact on research and related practice in coming years?
Martha Crago, editor of Applied Psycholinguistics: “In the next year’s two major developments, one technological and one social, will have a striking impact on applied linguistics: 1)The disruptive technology of machine learning (artificial intelligence) is based on the early work on neural networks in neuropsychology as well as on reinforcement learning that was once considered a learning mechanism for language acquisition. These new technological developments are likely to circle back . . . → Read More: Where is Applied Linguistics headed? Cambridge Journal editors weigh in
By Lisa Jansen and Michael Westphal, on February 27th, 2018%
Based on an article in English Today
Pop music surpasses national and linguistic boundaries. It creates a marketplace of various linguistic resources that artists use in their music performances to create their pop personas. Performers are mobile, transnational linguistic agents. They do not only physically travel worldwide and spread their multivocality, but their products are distributed and consumed internationally via a multitude of media channels. They transport mobile standard and non-standard varieties into new spaces and make them accessible to a broad audience.
Rihanna is a globally successful artist with Caribbean roots who combines different musical styles (R’n’B, hip-hop, reggae, pop) and the performance codes associated with these genres (African American English, Jamaican Creole, Standard American English). Her single “Work” stirred up attention: . . . → Read More: Rihanna Works Her Multivocal Pop Persona: Morpho-syntactic and Accent Variation in Rihanna’s Singing Style
By Sarah Coates, on January 10th, 2018%
Language Teaching announces the award of an essay prize which honours one of the founding editors of this journal.
Christopher John Brumfit (1940-2006) was Professor of Education, Head of the Research and Graduate School of Education, and Director of the Centre for Language in Education at the University of Southampton, UK. He was a former Chair of the BAAL and Vice-President of AILA.
In his obituaries of Professor Brumfit in The Guardian newspaper and in Applied Linguistics, Professor Henry Widdowson wrote that ‘[Chris] was both a defender and a critic of traditional values. Education imposed conventional constraints, but these had also to provide for the individual freedom of unconventional self-expression’ adding that ‘Rather than accept current ideas or conventional assumptions, he would submit them . . . → Read More: Announcing a brand-new Applied Linguistics Essay Prize
By Charlotte Cox, on April 13th, 2017%
Blog post from Akira Murakami and Theodora Alexopoulou:
We wish to express our sincere gratitude to Studies in Second Language Acquisition and Cambridge University Press for selecting our paper, ‘L1 influence on the acquisition order of English grammatical morphemes: A learner corpus study’, as the winner of the Albert Valdman Award. The paper is based on the PhD thesis of Akira, who first grew his interest in SLA when he learned about the natural order in an undergraduate SLA class. It is an interesting coincidence that his very first journal paper turned out to be on the topic and eventually won this prestigious award. Morpheme studies in the 1970’s and 1980’s let us believe that the morpheme acquisition order is universal. Modern . . . → Read More: Albert Valdman Award Winners 2017
By Charlotte Cox, on March 20th, 2017%
Commentary by Emma Marsden, University of York and Margaret Borowczyk, Georgetown University
IRIS is a repository of instruments used in second language research. It was created to increase access to the variety of materials used to elicit data for empirical studies (e.g. pictures, participant instructions, language tests, response options, working memory tests, videos, software scripts). These materials are so often left out of research reports, mainly due to publishers’ space constraints. IRIS allows consumers to more directly evaluate the validity of certain research and improves the speed and accuracy of replication research. It is a free, theory agnostic, database that is searchable across over one hundred different search criteria (such as ‘type of instrument’, ‘research area’, or ‘language’). IRIS currently holds more . . . → Read More: Tasks, methodological transparency and the IRIS database of research materials
By Charlotte Cox, on March 17th, 2017%
Commentary by Kathleen M. Bailey, Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey and President, AAAL and Alison Mackey, Georgetown University and Lancaster University and editor of ARAL
Every year for almost four decades, ARAL has served a pivotal role as an official journal of AAAL. ARAL has long been a preeminent source for state-of-the-art reviews and syntheses of timely topics within the field of applied linguistics, thus providing a kind of compass indicating interests and developments in applied linguistics. It will retain this function, in addition to becoming a source for position pieces, methodological critiques, and empirical articles that stay on the pulse of new approaches to the field.
On a few occasions, ARAL’s theme has coincided with the theme of the AAAL conference, with . . . → Read More: The American Association for Applied Linguistics and the Annual Review of Applied Linguistics: New format/closer ties
By James McKellar, on February 3rd, 2017%
This series highlights key topics in Applied Linguistics. Each book presents original research, either up-dating and re-thinking a traditional theme, or introducing important new concepts. . . . → Read More: Cambridge Applied Linguistics Series
By James McKellar, on June 12th, 2014%
Dr. Aneta Pavlenko Professor of Applied Linguistics
Written by Aneta Pavlenko, Temple University
We are often asked about the relevance of linguistics for the ‘real world’. On June 2, 2014, I got an opportunity to explain this relevance to the judge, the media, and the general public when I testified as an expert witness in the pre-trial hearing of a Kazakh national, Dias Kadyrbayev, friend of the accused Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnayev. The hearing was not about guilt or innocence. Its purpose was to determine whether Dias understood his Miranda rights – to remain silent, to request a lawyer, and to have a lawyer provided to him for free – and the consequences of waiving them. There were two complications: the . . . → Read More: A linguist’s foray into the ‘real world’: Why Dias Kadyrbayev was highly unlikely to understand his Miranda rights
By admin, on December 2nd, 2013%
Post written by Jan H. Hulstijn, based on an article in Language Teaching
The second language acquisition (SLA) field is characterized by a wide variety of issues and theoretical perspectives. Is this a bad thing? Are there signs of disintegration?
In applied linguistics in general, and in particular in the field of SLA, it is not uncommon to distinguish between quantitative and qualitative approaches or between cognitive and socio-cultural approaches. In my view, what is potentially more threatening to the field than a split between quantitative and qualitative subfields is the proportion of nonempirical theories. If an academic discipline is characterized by too many nonempirical ideas and too few empirical ideas, it runs the risk of losing credit in the scientific community at . . . → Read More: Is the Second Language Acquisition discipline disintegrating?
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