scholarly journals Opportunities and challenges in the analysis of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN)

2022 ◽  
pp. 014272372110646
Author(s):  
Cécile De Cat
Keyword(s):  
Language Use ◽  
Communicative Competence ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Code Switching ◽  
Assessment Instrument ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Children's Narratives ◽  
Methodological Challenges ◽  
Discourse Pragmatics ◽  
Analysis Of Narratives

The development of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN) has no doubt contributed to prompting a renewed interest in children’s narratives. This carefully controlled test of narrative abilities elicits a rich set of measures spanning multiple linguistic domains and their interaction, including lexis, morphosyntax, discourse-pragmatics, as well as various aspects of narrative structure, communicative competence, and language use (such as code-switching). It is particularly well suited to the study of discourse cohesion, referential adequacy and informativeness, and of course to the study of narrative structure and richness, and the acquisition of a more formal or literary register. In this commentary article, I reflect on the five empirical papers included in the special issue. I focus on methodological challenges for the analysis of narratives and identify outstanding questions.

scholarly journals Perspectives on bilingual children's narratives elicited with the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives

2015 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-9 ◽  
Author(s):  
DIANE PESCO ◽  
ELIZABETH KAY-RAINING BIRD
Keyword(s):  
Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language Impairment ◽  
Assessment Tool ◽  
Assessment Instrument ◽  
School Age Children ◽  
School Age ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Specific Language ◽  
Narrative Assessment ◽  
Children's Narratives

This Special Issue is all about the stories of children: preschool- and school-age children; bilingual and monolingual children; children developing typically or identified as having a specific language impairment (SLI); and children speaking and experiencing one or more of the following languages: English, Finnish, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Russian, Slovak, Swedish, and Turkish in minority or majority language contexts. The stories are fictional ones, about baby birds and baby goats, a cat and a dog: a cast of characters the reader will come to know well as they read the Introduction (Gagarina, Klop, Tsimpli, & Walters, 2016) and individual articles. They were collected using a new narrative assessment tool that is common to all the articles within the issue: the Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings—Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN; Gagarina et al., 2012, 2015), described at some length by its developers in the Introduction to the Special Issue.

Doing Tricks

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rodrigo Borba
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Feminist Theory ◽  
Sex Work ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Sex Industry ◽  
Commercial Sex ◽  
Business Transaction ◽  
Methodological Challenges ◽  
Social Scientific

Sex work has long been of interest to a variety of fields, among them anthropology, sociology, public health, and feminist theory, to name but a few. However, with very few exceptions, sociolinguistics seems to have ignored the fact that commercial sex, as an intersubjective business transaction, is primarily negotiated in embodied linguistic interaction. By reviewing publications in distinct social scientific areas that directly or indirectly discuss the role of language in the sex industry, this chapter critically assesses the analytical affordances and methodological challenges for a sociolinguistics of sex work. It does so by discussing the “tricks” played by sex work, as a power-infused context of language use in which issues of agency (or lack thereof) are paramount, on sociolinguistic theory and methods. The chapter concludes that the study of language in commercial sex venues is sociolinguistically promising and epistemologically timely.

scholarly journals Introducing the Special Issue: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Code-Switching

Languages ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 19
Author(s):  
Draško Kašćelan ◽  
Margaret Deuchar
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Code Switching ◽  
Human Language ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Language Faculty ◽  
Valuable Source ◽  
Human Language Faculty

Research on code-switching was the province of specialists in linguistics alone in the latter part of the twentieth century and is still a valuable source of insights into the human language faculty [...]

Hypersubjectivity

2014 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 261-273 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kira Hall
Keyword(s):  
Language Contact ◽  
Global Economy ◽  
Communicative Competence ◽  
Border Crossing ◽  
Linguistic Capital ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Linguistic Practice ◽  
Contact Zones ◽  
Globalizing World ◽  
Temporal And Spatial

This commentary responds to papers in a special issue on “Anxiety, Insecurity, and Border Crossing: Language Contact in a Globalizing World.” The discussion considers how anxiety emerges as transnational subjects seek semiotic stability in the global economy’s shifting terrain of indexical relations. Although contact zones informed by neoliberalism valorize linguistic flexibility, they also hierarchize certain kinds of communicative competence as more flexible than others. When linguistic practice is divorced from its temporal and spatial roots, it is readily essentialized as indexical of particular kinds of personhood, only some of which are viewed as appropriately global. The ambiguity of what counts as linguistic capital in the global economy leads speakers to defend their behaviors through appeals to authenticity, often confirming the very ideology that positions them as linguistically inflexible.

scholarly journals Cultivating student understanding of context through drama and scriptwriting

2016 ◽  
Vol X (2) ◽  
pp. 22-36
Author(s):  
Matthew Michaud ◽  
Todd Hooper
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Communicative Competence ◽  
Private University ◽  
Role Playing ◽  
Student Understanding ◽  
Language Aptitude ◽  
Japanese Students ◽  
Communicative Abilities ◽  
English Instruction

This paper presents an English as a foreign language (EFL) drama in language acquisition scriptwriting project that took place at a four-year private university located in Japan. The focus of this project was two-fold: firstly, to see if students’ cognition of situational context improved after completing scriptwriting exercises, and secondly to see if role-playing the scripts increased awareness in the identification of setting, roles of speakers, and purpose while increasing language aptitude. Furthermore, this study addresses the insufficient communicative competence abilities of Japanese students who have had years of structured English study. Their lack of communicative abilities may be attributed to the method of English instruction used in Japan such as focusing on grammar and vocabulary in isolated example sentences. This lack of context in second language (L2) instruction may leave students with limited communicative competence (Brown, Collins & Duguid 1989; South, Gabbitas & Merrill 2008). If students improve their understanding of the context of language use, they may become better equipped to use the language they know. One approach that may help students improve this understanding of context is scriptwriting and drama (Belliveau & Kim 2013; Davies 1990). The results of this study indicate that participating in scriptwriting activities may improve students’ ability to identify the context of conversations.

scholarly journals Understanding the effects of language revitalization workshops using long-format speech environment recordings

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 213
Author(s):  
Julia Nee
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Young Children ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Language Skills ◽  
Language Revitalization ◽  
Older Children ◽  
Teaching Language ◽  
Methodological Challenges

Long-format speech environment (LFSE) recordings are increasingly used to understand language acquisition among young children (Casillas & Cristia 2019). But in language revitalization, older children are sometimes the largest demographic acquiring a language. In Teotitlán del Valle, Mexico, older children have participated in Zapotec language revitalization workshops since 2017. To better understand how these children use language, and to probe whether the language workshops impact language use, I invited learners to collect LFSE recordings. This study addresses two main questions: (1) what methodological challenges emerge when children ages 6-12 collect LFSE data?; and (2) what do the data suggest about the effects of the Zapotec workshops? I argue that, while creating LFSE recordings with older children presents methodological challenges, the results are useful in highlighting the importance of not only teaching language skills, but of creating spaces where learners are comfortable using the Zapotec language.

Summary and conclusion

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Gafaranga
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Research Direction ◽  
Code Switching ◽  
Negative Attitudes ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Advanced Level ◽  
Concurrent Use ◽  
Interactional Functions ◽  
New Research

Research in code-switching, undertaken against the backdrop of very negative attitudes towards the concurrent use of two or more languages within the same conversation, has traditionally been geared towards rehabilitating this form of language use. From being seen as a random phenomenon reflecting the user’s lack of competence, code-switching is currently seen as sign of an advanced level of competence in the languages involved and as serving different interactional functions. However, as a result of its success, the research tradition now faces an entirely new challenge: Where to from here? How can research in code-switching continue to be relevant and interesting now it has largely achieved its original purpose? This book has argued that, in order to overcome this challenge, the notion of bilingualism itself must be redefined. Bilingualism must be seen as consisting of diverse interactional practices and be investigated as such. This book has made the case for this new approach, outlined a methodology for investigating bilingualism as interactional practices and illustrated it by means of three case studies. This concluding chapter wraps up the argument and invites other researchers to contribute to this new research direction.

Language choice and conversational repair in bilingual interaction

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Gafaranga
Keyword(s):  
Language Use ◽  
Language Choice ◽  
Code Switching ◽  
Negative Attitudes ◽  
Additional Resource ◽  
Concurrent Use ◽  
Language Alternation ◽  
Conversational Repair ◽  
Research Questions

Research in code-switching, undertaken against the backdrop of very negative attitudes towards the concurrent use of two or more languages within the same conversation, has traditionally been geared towards rehabilitating this form of language use. Now that code-switching has been rehabilitated, the research tradition faces an entirely new challenge, namely that of its continued relevance. This book argues that, in order to overcome this challenge, research should aim to describe specific interactional practices involving the use of two or more languages and outlines a methodology for doing so. This chapter illustrates this methodology by means of a specific case study. The chapter describes the interactional practice of conversational repair in bilingual interaction. Two research questions are raised: (a) where in the repair sequence can language alternation occur and (b) what does language alternation do when it occurs in repair sequences. It is shown that language alternation interacts with repair organisation in two ways. Either language alternation is the focus of conversational repair or it is an additional resource for the organisation of conversational repair.

scholarly journals Inertial Sensors—Applications and Challenges in a Nutshell

Sensors ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (21) ◽  
pp. 6221
Author(s):  
Thomas Seel ◽  
Manon Kok ◽  
Ryan S. McGinnis
Keyword(s):  
Inertial Sensors ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Methodological Challenges

This editorial provides a concise introduction to the methods and applications of inertial sensors. We briefly describe the main characteristics of inertial sensors and highlight the broad range of applications as well as the methodological challenges. Finally, for the reader’s guidance, we give a succinct overview of the papers included in this special issue.

scholarly journals What Is Electoral Psychology?—Scope, Concepts, and Methodological Challenges for Studying Conscious and Subconscious Patterns of Electoral Behavior, Experience, and Ergonomics

Societies ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 20
Author(s):  
Sarah Harrison
Keyword(s):  
Electoral Behavior ◽  
Aggregate Level ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Methodological Challenges ◽  
Introductory Article ◽  
Electoral Studies ◽  
Psychological Models ◽  
Methodological Approaches ◽  
Electoral Psychology ◽  
The Individual

Electoral psychology is defined as any model based on human psychology that is used to explain any electoral experience or outcome at the individual or aggregate level. Electoral psychology can also be an interface with other crucial aspects of the vote. For example, the interface between electoral psychology and electoral organization constitutes electoral ergonomics. The very nature of the models tested in electoral psychology has also led scholars in the field to complement mainstream social science methodologies with their own specific methodological approaches in order to capture the subconscious component of the vote and the subtle nature of the psychological processes determining the electoral experience and the way in which it permeates citizens’ thoughts and lives. After defining electoral psychology, this introductory article scopes its analytical roots and contemporary relevance, focuses on the importance of switching from “institution-centric” to “people-centric” conceptions of electoral behavior, and notably how it redefines key concepts such as electoral identity and consistency, and approaches questions of personality, morality, memory, identity, and emotions in electoral psychological models. Then, it discusses some of the unique methodological challenges that the field faces, notably when it comes to analyzing largely subconscious phenomena, and addresses them, before explaining how the various contributions to this Special Issue give a flavor of the scope and approaches of electoral psychology contributions to electoral studies.

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