University of Wisconsin-Madison Language Institute

Keynote address for the 2015 German and Dutch Student Association Conference, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Long before infants produce their first words, they have learned a tremendous amount about their native language(s). What do infants know, and how did they learn it? In this talk, I will describe results from multiple lines of research that suggest that infants learn by tracking statistical properties of language. Implications for atypical language development will also be considered.

Bilingualism research has shown that the ability to focus one’s attention in the face of distraction develops earlier in bilingual children than in their monolingual peers (e.g., Bialystok, 1999; Martin-Rhee & Bialystok, 2008), and that lifelong bilingualism may protect older individuals from some areas of the cognitive decline that comes with normal aging (e.g., Bialystok, Craik, Klein, & Viswanathan, 2004; Bialystok, Craik, & Ruocco, 2006). While it is plausible to suppose that exceptional cognitive control is a felicitous by-product of the constant practice bilinguals are said to have with focusing their attention on the use of one language while suppressing interference from the other, the nature of the relationship between language-specific skill and domain-general cognitive control remains to be clarified, particularly among middle-aged individuals who are at the age at which the effects of cognitive aging commonly begin to manifest. With this study we sought to elucidate the relationship between language-specific proficiencies and general cognitive control by comparing the performance of Spanish/English bilinguals of different ages and language proficiencies on a series of cognitively demanding tasks. Participants were two groups of highly proficient Spanish/English bilinguals aged in their 20s or 40s/50s, and two age-matched groups of less-highly proficient Spanish/English bilinguals. Proficiency in Spanish and English was evaluated by participants’ self-assessments and by scores on independent measures of language proficiency. Cognitive control was assessed via complex sentence processing tests and via the Simon task, which tests the ability to respond to one type of visual stimulus (color) while suppressing attention to a competing visual stimulus (spatial orientation). Analyses of variance and multiple regressions were conducted to (1) compare the cognitive functioning of younger and older bilinguals, and (2) determine the predictive power of chronological age, age of onset of bilingualism, and language proficiency for efficiency of cognitive functioning among younger and middle-aged bilinguals.

The words we use can provide a window into ourselves. A robust body of research has shown that people’s language use reflects their underlying social and psychological processes, such as their personality traits, mood, social status, relationship orientation, and even use of deception. These linguistic cues include pronouns, articles, negations, and other “junk words” that carry little meaning and are often unconsciously processed. In this talk, I will provide a brief overview of the relationship between linguistic styles and psychological processes. Then, I will focus on the linguistic cues associated with deception. Do liars use words differently than truth-tellers? Is it possible to accurately determine whether someone is lying based on the language they use? Do untrained observers rely on linguistic cues to assess others’ trustworthiness? Finally, I will summarize research from my lab on the linguistic cues associated with deception in online dating profiles, and the linguistic cues used to infer the trustworthiness of anonymous posters in online medical advice boards.

Katrina Daly Thompson will talk about her book, Zimbabwe's Cinematic Arts: Language, Power, Identity (Indiana University Press, 2012). This timely book reflects on discourses of identity that pervade local talk and texts in Zimbabwe. As she explores questions of culture that play out in broadly accessible local and foreign film and television, Thompson shows how viewers interpret these media and how they impact everyday life, language use, and thinking about community.

The 2007 MLA Report, Foreign Languages and Higher Education: New Structures for a Changed World," called for the elimination of the often-criticized language-content structure of collegiate foreign language (FL) programs in favor of "a broader and more coherent curriculum in which language, culture, and literature are taught as a continuous whole" (p. 3). The Report further proposed that these reforms be accomplished through development of students’ translingual and transcultural competence and increased emphasis on cultural narratives present FL texts such as poetry, prose, film, and journalism. This final recommendation is a particular challenge in lower-division courses given that they are typically anchored in commercial instructional materials focused more on lexico-grammatical competence and oral transactional interaction than on text-driven learning. In addition, graduate teaching assistants (TAs) are often responsible for staffing the majority of lower-division course, and professional development opportunities are often insufficient in their scope and content to equip TAs to carry out instruction consistent with the aims of the MLA Report. This presentation will include discussion of challenges and strategies in meeting the 2007 MLA Report’s call for change in lower-division FL courses and, in particular, in relation to TA professional development. A pedagogy of multiliteracies (Gee, 1990; Kern, 2000; New London Group, 1996) is posited as a framework for anchoring TA professional development and several concepts from Vygotskian cultural-historical psychology (e.g., everyday and scientific concepts, appropriation, dialogic mediation, assisted performance) are foregrounded as key elements of professional development activities. Examples will be shared from an ongoing empirical study of TA conceptual and professional development.

Language matters, as it is a primary (though not sole) medium for constructing understandings of self and others in the world. In a world where ‘superdiversity’ is the new norm, scholars across fields such as education, language studies, second language acquisition, literacies, applied linguistics, media studies and others consider the ways in which messages and representations move with ever-increasing rapidity and fluidity across the globe. In this talk I explore the role of languages, literacies and complex representational modes in sense-making in transglobal communication among youth. Examining data from a project that links English-learning youth globally through digital communication, I primarily consider two issues: 1) the ways in which languages, and forms of language, were represented and negotiated, and resultant understandings; and 2) multimodal design, and how constellations of features shape shifting understandings of ‘self’ and ‘other.’ This brings into focus issues of appropriate theoretical frameworks for understanding language-in-use in global communications and of modes and methods for research, raises questions about the nature of ‘learning,’ and carries significant implications for language studies as well as transglobal education.

It’s never been more important for UW–Madison’s teachers, scholars and researchers to engage meaningfully with the people of Wisconsin. Linguists and language specialists can take up that challenge for issues of direct relevance to every community in the state. We describe ongoing efforts on this front, including hot button issues like immigrants learning English, differences between the speech of African-Americans and white Americans, as well as issues of general interest like whether dialect differences are dying out and ‘good English’. Through these projects, we have become convinced that outreach, teaching, and research — treated separately and distinctly for academic evaluation — are inextricably linked, often to the point of being indistinguishable in practice.

Abstract Within a variety of language-related disciplines, there is growing commitment to more holistic and ecologically oriented frameworks that recognize cognition and communication as coordinated, embodied, relational, distributed, and arrayed across mutable patterns of activity that emerge at different time scales. To date, however, such efforts have been primarily oriented toward theoretical and/or research contexts. Applying principles expressed in cultural-historical and ecological approaches to development (Bateson, 1972; Engeström & Sannino, 2010; van Lier, 2004), extended and embodied cognition (Atkinson, 2010; Clark, 2008), and recent scholarship produced by distributed language theorists (e.g., Raczaszek-Leonardi & Cowley, 2012; Fusaroli & Tylén, 2012; Thibault, 2011), this talk presents a design approach to language learning that is rooted in ecological understandings of cognition, language, and environment. A number of diverse projects and cases will be described: The first involves the use of corpus-based resources to support the development of intercultural discourse competence. The second project outlines the intertextual dynamics of event-driven communication, as well as engagement with attendant discourses, that comprise the semiotic ecology of massively multiplayer online gaming environments. A third case study reports on an experimental and currently in progress plurilingual augmented reality game project, the primary objective of which is to semiotically remediate (e.g., Prior, 2010) local places and embed language learning resources in phenomenologically rich and embodied experience in the world. These diverse empirical contexts reveal the complexities of languaging activity at the intersection of time, place, and space, and also suggest that the superordinate goals of language education are to catalyze anticipatory dispositions, build recipient-aware interactional capacities, and more broadly, to cultivate semiotic agility.

This presentation reports on a three-year development project to use the metalanguage of systemic functional linguistics to support children's disciplinary learning in the language arts classroom. The work is situated in a high poverty urban school district with a majority population of English language learners. Following professional development, teachers engaged children in using the metalanguage to make language-meaning connections in reading and writing instruction. Discourse analysis of classroom events demonstrates the affordances of the metalanguage and suggests directions for further research.

Globalization has increased interaction among people from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds. In global communication, English has been regarded as the international language par excellence indispensable in the neoliberal knowledge economy. This perception has promoted teaching and learning English for career advancement in many non-English-dominant countries. This trend, however, poses various paradoxes and contradictions. This talk will conceptually and empirically discuss how the neoliberal notion of acquiring English skills as part of human capital contradicts the multilingual reality in the global society and what communicative competencies might actually be required for transnational workers. Qualitative research conducted on Japanese transnational workers’ language use in the workplace revealed perceived importance of the ability to communicate not only in English but also in other languages as well as communicative dispositions, rather than English skills per se. Implications for language education will be discussed.

How might interaction contribute to SLA? Five responses to five basic questions suggest an answer: 1) What is intelligence? 2) What is interaction? 3) What is alignment? 4) What is learning? 5) How does alignment work in language learning? In the second part of this presentation, I analyze a video of an L2 learning activity for evidence that alignment is pervasive and relevant to L2 learning.

Negative scope’ involves the issue of just what it is that is being negated in a turn with a negative morpheme in it. As far as we can tell, this issue has been addressed in terms of first-order logic and syntactic phrase markers, but never in terms of how participants in an ordinary conversation figure out what is being negated in the context of a negative morpheme. With data from English and Japanese, in research with Tsuyoshi Ono, we explore the factors which shape the way participants do this; for each of these two languages, these factors include the clarity with which prosodic boundaries are marked, the grammar of negation, cognitive aspects of prefabs involving negation, and real-time expectation-building.

This talk seeks to look at cosmopolitanism from a post- or non- humanist perspective and proposes a critical examination of the implications of such a perspective for language, education, and policy. Introduction by Maggie Hawkins (Curriculum and Instruction). Comments by Mariana Pachecho (Curriculum and Instruction).

In this presentation, Appadurai’s (1990, 1996) work on scapes is used as a basis to theorize how linguistic and cultural hybridities emerge and transform in the current era of globalization. As intersecting flows of people, technology, images, and information cross boundaries, new opportunities are created for hybrid languages and cultures to emerge, and the result is an ever-increasing range of local, global, and hybrid identity options for speakers. The presentation will discuss the implications of these intersecting flows in two broad areas: First, exploring how multilinguals reterritorialize global, west-based forms of English in their local contexts through deliberate re-scaping of linguistic form and meaning. Drawing on research in East Africa, and showing how speakers reshape English from the mediascapes of hip hop and advertising within the ideoscapes of politics and public health education. Rather than simply adapting English to fit these new contexts, the presentation argues that Kenyans and Tanzanians are exploiting the multivocality (Higgins, 2009) of the language to simultaneously index the multiple meanings associated with each scape. Next, the talk will discuss how intersecting scapes offer language learners a new range of identities. Taking examples from case studies involving the acquisition of English, Swahili, and Japanese, the presentation illustrates how additional language learning in the current, globalizing era provides opportunities for people to develop and enact new selves that are no longer tied to traditionally defined ethnolinguistic, national, or cultural identities. Instead, and in line with theories of globalization that place hybridity as a central feature of new millennium globalization (Nederveen Pieterse 2009), the examples show how individuals are increasingly learning and using additional languages in the contexts of cultural mélange and new identity zones afforded by intersecting flows of people, ideas, and technology. Introduction by Cecilia Ford (English). Comments by Nancy Kendall (Curriculum and Instruction).

Awad Ibrahim, University of Ottawa. The aim in this presentation is to explore and think through what is being called Global Hip-Hop Nation Language (GHHNL). Halifu Osumare’s notion of connective marginality and the notion of métissage will be the frame of reference. Connective marginality contends that, globally, Hip-Hop resonates with young people across four main fields: culture, social class, historical oppression, and youth rebellion; and métissage is a boundary-pushing notion of hybridity where languages, oralities, and cultures are rubbing against each other; and whose end result is a radically localized Hip-Hop. The presentation will offer four examples that show how globally marginal communities use Hip-Hop as their ‘passport’ into the Global Hip-Hop Nation, where GHHNL is their access. The first example shows that: the so-called “Arab Spring Revolution” started with a Hip-Hop song, Head of State. The second example demonstrates that, in Brazil, Hip-Hop single handedly brought the question of race and racialization (not to say racial inequality and racism) to the center of public discourse; Hip-Hop has become the voice of the favelas. The third example is from Japan, where Hip-Hop was so influential that it introduced rhymes into the Japanese language that did not exist before the introduction of Hip-Hop. The last example is from Hong Kong, where the Cantonese language, which was considered taboo to speak, is now a mainstream language and accepted by most people in Hong Kong, thanks to Hip-Hop. The talk will conclude with remarks on what pedagogical lesson we can draw from these examples, especially for cosmopolitanism and citizenship studies. It is time to ‘flip the script’ and wonder not so much about the ‘impact of globalization’ but what people do with (the semiotic of) globalization; that is, how they translate, make sense, and eventually creolize, indigenize and localize the global. Introduction by Maggie Hawkins (Curriculum and Instruction); comments by Ronald Radano (Music).

Benjamin Rifkin, The College of New Jersey. Dean Rifkin argues that a closer synchrony between the mission of the liberal arts institutions in which we teach (whether in liberal arts colleges or liberal arts divisions of research institutions) enhances the education we offer our students as well as our own security in this era of program closures. He presents an overview of the liberal arts learning outcomes established by the Association of American Colleges and Universities (Liberal Education and America’s Promise) and sample mission statements from several American colleges and universities. He demonstrates how many of the learning outcomes cited in these mission statements can be attained through the foreign language, literature and culture curricula at the post-secondary level. He examines sample college-level syllabi for language, literature, and culture (as posted to the web), and explain how these courses can be revised, ever so slightly, to be in closer synchrony with the mission statements of the liberal arts colleges in which they are offered, and how such revision benefits both our students’ long-term interests as well as the stability and success of our programs. Introduction by Monika Chavez (German). The PowerPoint for this presentation can be accessed here: http://tinyurl.com/7pun97d

Elana Shohamy, Tel Aviv University. Public lecture for 2009-10 series, The Pain of Language: Language and Migration. Recorded on March 22, 2010. The act of acquiring a new language, whether in the context of international migration or in inter-migration between home and school, demands a high price in terms of academic achievement, emotional dimensions, exclusion, rejection, discrimination and unrealistic expectations such as via language tests. Immigrants make various sacrifices when they are faced with these requirements; the costs are especially high given the high demands placed on immigrants by the host society, which is not aware of these difficulties and imposes various strategies 'in the name of language'. In this talk, Professor Shohamy addresses a number of cases of high demands enforced on immigrants with little awareness on the part of the host society regarding the costs involved or the feasibility of meeting the demands. The cases to be discussed are: 1) the cost of the need to acquire Hebrew in Palestine in the 1930's, when immigrants were 'forced' into Hebrew as part of national ideology; 2) the difficulties that immigrant students experience in terms of language discrimination and low academic achievement when testing is in the L2, following prescribed academic expectations; 3) adult immigrants who are forced to take language tests in the new language as a condition for continued residence, facing expulsion and deportation if they do not pass, but without opportunities to learn. Other cases include the learning of new languages by adults, even in cases when they are proficient in English, a language perceived to be of high prestige and status; and cases involving students in higher education, such as Arabs in Israel, who have no choice but to learn in Hebrew in institutions of higher education, while their school educational system is taught via Arabic. In all of these cases, the high costs render the policies difficult with which to comply. How these demands affect and relate to language rights, participation and justice will be discussed and elaborated, leading to proposals for more inclusive, considerate and less discriminatory policies. Introduction by Richard Young (Department of English); comments by Robin Worth (Department of English).

Mary McGroarty, Northern Arizona University. Public lecture for 2009-10 series, The Pain of Language: Language and Migration. Recorded on February 12, 2010. In this presentation, Professor McGroarty considers the roles and perceptions of languages other than English and their influence on the present environments of language policy and pedagogy. Relevant frameworks include texts in language policy and planning (e.g Kaplan & Baldauf, 1997; Ricento, 2006; Spolsky, 2009) and the typology of orientations set out by Ruíz (1984). These foundations, along with concepts drawn from work on linguistic ideology (McGroarty, 2008; in press) and findings of sociolinguistic research, offer several insights into professional and public discussions of languages other than English in the U.S. and elsewhere. Regarding categorization and function of home languages, recent research (Blackledge & Creese, 2009; McKay & Bockhorst-Heng, 2008; Zentella, 1997) suggests that, in some circumstances, categories used by governments and educational institutions may not be sufficiently fine-grained to capture varieties of language use accurately. Because language choices are closely connected to individual and collective identity, the degree to which they might represent any form of resistance can only be determined situationally, taking local and national history, relevant power relationships, and communicative needs and goals into account (Blommaert, 2008; Hornberger, 2009). Finally, the extent to which bilingual or multilingual skills represent resources for individuals or groups is partly a function of their salience in varied and dynamic communicative environments, temporal and geographic, (Lo Bianco, 2008; Wiley, 2005; Wolfram, 2009) only some of which are predictable far enough in advance to guide educational choices. Contemporary scholarship thus raises challenges of definitions, means, and goals for applied linguistics research and practice. Introduction by Jane Zuengler (Department of English).

Martha Bigelow, University of Minnesota. Public lecture for 2009-10 series, The Pain of Language: Language and Migration. Recorded on September 22, 2009. The perspectives of immigrant youth can reveal the powerful role society has in framing and forming the range of possibilities available to them. Immigrant youth often face mismatches between home and school in terms of values and language, but they sometimes encounter intra-cultural struggles as well. This presentation will a) explore immigrant cultural and linguistic adaptation using oral and written texts produced by Somali adolescents; and b) outline some of the cultural and linguistic issues involved in moving from a highly oral society to a hyper-literate one. By exploring Somali youth perspectives, language use, and identities, we can better understand the result of migration at school, at home, and in other public spaces. Introduction by Maggie Hawkins (Department of Curriculum and Instruction); comments from Deborah Brandt (Department of English).

Olga Kagan, University of California-Los Angeles. Public lecture for 2009-10 series, The Pain of Language: Language and Migration. Recorded on October 19, 2009. This paper reviews the findings of an online survey of heritage language learners designed and administered by the National Heritage Language Resource Center (NHLRC) in 2006-08. The existing data of over 1,700 respondents from 22 languages offers a broad look at the linguistic proficiencies, identities and motivations of college age heritage language learners. It shows that while English is their language of education, in their everyday communications, heritage language learners continue to use both English and the home language. The data also reveals that many of the respondents have dual language and cultural loyalties that may create a challenge, or even a tension, both in the learner’s daily life and in the language classroom. Introduction by Dianna Murphy (Language Institute); comments by Karen Evans-Romaine (Department of Slavic Languages and Literature).

Monica Heller, University of Toronto. Public lecture for the 2011-12 series, Cosmopolitanism and Language. Recorded on September 19, 2011. This talk draws on long-term fieldwork in francophone Canada to examine the impact of the globalized new economy on heretofore dominant ideas about language, identity, culture, nation and state. It shows how globalization and the commodification of language and culture connected to the new economy challenge dominant ideologies, producing malaise alongside creativity in re-imagining new ways of connecting and belonging. It examines some specific attempts to move beyond nationalism, which tend to come from former peripheries and to draw heavily on irony as a discursive trope, as well as attempts to, in Bourdieu's terms "save the (national) market". Introduction by Heather Willis Allen (Department of French and Italian); comments from Jane Zuengler (Department of English).

Kate Paesani, Wayne State University. Workshop for Language Instructors presented by the Department of French and Italian and the Language Institute. This talk explores the role of literature in the foreign language curriculum and its contribution to students’ foreign language literacy by first establishing a working definition of literature and identifying goals of literature instruction at all levels. Next, to facilitate integration of literature across the foreign language curriculum and bridge the gap between the more language-oriented goals of lower level courses and the more content-oriented goals of upper level courses, a multiliteracies approach to literature instruction is proposed. Within this approach, literacy is defined broadly to include the complex and contextually sensitive linkages among readers, writers, texts, culture, and language (Kern & Schultz, 2005). A multiliteracies approach therefore not only develops students’ abilities to interpret literature through reading, it also encourages contextualized language use and analysis, critical thinking, and language production through writing. Specific instructional strategies for developing students’ foreign language literacy through interpretation, reflection, problem solving, and collaboration regarding the cultural, stylistic, and linguistic features of literary texts will be discussed and a sample lesson plan will be provided. Introduction by Heather Willis Allen (Department of French and Italian).

Yasuko Kanno, Temple University. Public lecture for the 2010-11 series, Immersion and Language Learning: Contexts and Challenges. Recorded on April 28, 2011. This lecture examines two immersion programs in Japan in which Japanese children learn English by learning subject context in English. One is Nichiei Immersion School, a partial English immersion program housed in a private Japanese school; the other is Hal International School, an international school where both Japanese children and Western expatriate students learn together. Observations suggest that each program has its own power dynamics, which has a strong impact on the L2 acquisition of immersion students. Introduction by Junko Mori (Department of East Asian Languages and Literature); comments from Mariana Pacheco (Department of Curriculum and Instruction). A transcript of this lecture is available as the lyrics of the track.

Alastair Pennycook, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia. Public lecture for the Doctoral Program in Second Language Acquisition. Recorded on March 21, 2011. This lecture starts by discussing the idea of the city, and in particular port cities and their longstanding multiplicity and cosmopolitanism. Research on linguistic landscapes has shown the complexity of reactions between people and the urban signs around them. Of particular importance is an understanding of the dynamics of movement (walking and talking in the city are related): people move to and within cities, producing constantly changing linguistic configurations. Drawing on metrolinguistic studies of hip hop, graffiti, multilingual workplaces and early urban literacies, this presentation seeks to expand the possibilities for thinking about talking (and writing) in (and on) the city. A transcript of this lecture is available as the lyrics of the track.

Glenn Levine, University of California-Irvine. Public lecture for the 2010-11 series, Immersion and Language Learning: Contexts and Challenges. Recorded on February 8, 2011. Following sociocultural theory and ecological perspectives of language and learning, this presentation lays out an approach to the language classroom as a multilingual social space, one in which learners and teacher study, negotiate, and co-construct code choice norms toward the dynamic, creative, and pedagogically effective use of both the target language and the learners’ first language(s). Introduction by Monika Chavez (Department of German); comments from Diana Frantzen (Department of Spanish and Portuguese). A transcript of this lecture is available as the lyrics of the track.

Dan Davidson, Bryn Mawr College. Public lecture for the 2010-11 series, Immersion and Language Learning: Contexts and Challenges. Recorded on October 26, 2010. Reports on a study of formal and informal language learning behaviors and activities that correlate with target language gains. Introduction by Sally Magnan (Department of French and Italian); comments from Karen Evans-Romaine (Department of Slavic Languages and Literature). A transcript of this lecture is available as the lyrics of the track.

Celeste Kinginger, Pennsylvania State University. Public lecture for the 2010-11 series, Immersion and Language Learning: Contexts and Challenges. Recorded on September 20, 2010. This talk reviews research on the process of language socialization, presents findings on the outcomes of study abroad experiences, and considers implications for the use of study abroad programs involving language learning. Introduction by Richard Young (Department of English); comments from Rob Howell (Department of German). A transcript of this lecture is available as the lyrics of the track.