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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...