Linguistic Spring School Linguistics, language learning and education Perspectives from Greece, Germany, and beyond... 26th- 28th May 2016 University of Cologne English Studies Description: This two- day international spring school covers current issues and debates in the study of language learning and its application in education. The sessions will involve both presentations and interactive workshop components. They will focus on language development in and outside of school environments. We will draw on data from original research involving child and adult L2 acquisition, as well as monolingual and bilingual development. The language of instruction will be English. Greek and German will be used to facilitate the discussions. Participants: Advanced BA, MA and Doctoral Students in Linguistics and English Language Organizing Host: Prof. Dr. Christiane Bongartz (Department of English, University of Cologne) Organizing Committee: Eva Knopp & Maria Andreou, PhD (Department of English, University of Cologne) Contact: eva.knopp@uni- koeln.de; victoria.przybyl@uni- koeln.de funded by 1
Program: Thursday, 26th May: 19:30 Informal welcome, city tour and dinner Friday, 27th May: 9:00 9:45 Welcome coffee and registration (Reception Media Library) 9:45 10:00 Official Welcome (Sprachlabor IV) 10:00 11:30 Workshop (VL- Pool, Philosophikum): Learner Corpora in Second Language Acquisition (Marcus Callies) 11:30-12:00 12:00-13:30 Coffee break Interactive presentations (Sprachlabor IV, SSC) Working memory contributions to children s reading skills (Elvira Masoura) Lexical decision in Greek- German bilingual children: Effects of biliteracy and vocabulary knowledge (Maria Andreou & Eva Knopp) 13.30-15:00 15:00-16:30 Lunch break Interactive presentations (Sprachlabor IV) Sentence processing in the first and second language (Despina Papadopoulou) Patterns of variation in bilingual narratives: The role of literacy and cognition (Jacopo Torregrossa) 16:30-17:00 17:00-18:00 Coffee break Round table discussion (Sprachlabor IV) 18:30 Reception Linguistics and Education Saturday, 28th May: 10:00-11:30 11:30-12:00 Family and school language input: Their role in bilingual children s vocabulary development (Marina Mattheoudakis) Das bilinguale Erziehungsmodell an der Gesamtschule Kaiserplatz, Krefeld: Anwendungsbeispiele aus dem deutsch- griechisch bilingualen Unterricht in Naturwissenschaften (Adiamantoula Baka) Coffee break 2
12:00-13:30 The role of uninterpretable featuers in the construction of L2 grammars: Subject and Object Agreement in L2 English (Maria Dimikratopoulou) English articles in child foreign language learning (Lena Agathopoulou) 13:30 14:00 Farewell Contributors and abstracts (in alphabetical order): Prof. Dr. Elena Agathopoulou (Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki) English articles in child foreign language learning Despite many studies in the development of L2 English articles, there is lack of research involving children who learn English as a foreign language. The present study has attempted to fill this gap by investigating the use of English articles by primary school children in Greece. In the first part of this workshop I will discuss the results from two picture- based oral tasks: (a) story telling and (b) story retelling, focusing on the role of the semantic features [specific] and [definite] relevant for article use. In the second part of the workshop the participants will listen to examples of narratives and will be shown relevant transcripts of these narratives with the purpose to discuss methodological issues in research based on oral narratives. Dr. Maria Andreou and Eva Knopp (Department of English, University of Cologne) Lexical decision in Greek- German bilingual children: Effects of biliteracy and vocabulary knowledge Performance on visual lexical decision tasks (LDT) presupposes vocabulary knowledge and decoding skills as it reflects reading ability (Katz et al., 2012). Vocabulary development in monolingual and bilingual children is directly influenced by input quantity and schooling. Our study examines (1) how bilingual education influences performance on LDT in bilinguals and (2) which factors best predict this performance. We will present results of a study of fifty- seven Greek- German, 10-12 year- old bilingual children, who grow up in Germany and attend different bilingual schooling programs. 20 Greek and 20 German monolingual children served as controls. As part of the workshop component of our presentation, we will look at the stimuli that were used in the LDT in the two languages. We will investigate how the morphology and orthography of the two languages differ and how this might have affected the results of the study. Adiamantoula Baka (Gesamtschule Kaiserplatz, Krefeld) Das bilinguale Erziehungsmodell an der Gesamtschule Kaiserplatz, Krefeld: Anwendungsbeispiele aus dem deutsch- griechisch bilingualen Unterricht in den Naturwissenschaften The bilingual program at Gesamtschule Kaiserplatz, Krefeld: Hands- on examples from the Greek- German bilingual lessons in the Natural Sciences 3
In her presentation, Ms. Baka, who has been teaching at Gesamtschule Kaiserplatz for more than 15 years, will explain how the Greek- German bilingual heritage- language program at her school was developed and how it works. She will let us know about the program s advantages and disadvantages from her own experience. In a second part of the presentation, she will provide material and demonstrate how the content- language- integrated bilingual lessons in the Natural Sciences are planned and taught. Ms. Baka will present in Greek and her presentation will be translated into English for the non- Greek speakers. Prof. Dr. Marcus Callies (Department of English, University of Bremen) Learner Corpora in Second Language Acquisition This workshop is an introduction the use of electronic text corpora for the study of second language acquisition (SLA). The workshop consists of two parts. The first part gives an introduction to learner corpora and Learner Corpus Research (LCR) by providing an overview of the different types of learner corpora, the major findings of LCR and the different applications of learner corpora. This first part also includes a critical discussion and evaluation of some widely- discussed issues in learner corpus analysis and the limitations, problems and challenges that LCR is faced with. The second part of the workshop consists of hands- on activities. Participants will work with corpus data to analyze the occurrence and use of a set of linguistic structures. Dr. Maria Dimikratopoulou (Center for the Greek Language, Thessaloniki) The role of uninterpretable features in the construction of L2 grammars: Subject and Object Agreement in L2 English Specifically, I intend to discuss the properties of IP and vp in L2 English, that is how subject and object agreement features are realized in +/- finite contexts, in the grammar of Greek learners of English using data from (1) subject realization in +/- finite clauses and (2) operator dependencies (object relative clauses, tough constructions). In the second part of the workshop, methodological issues will be brought up as regards the validity of grammaticality judgment tasks and production tasks as an index of linguistic competence. Participants will be given data from the constructions earlier presented and asked to evaluate the aforementioned data collection instruments in terms of the kind of knowledge they reflect. Prof. Dr. Elvira Masoura (Department of Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki) Working memory contributions to children s reading skills The present investigation attempts to identify the distinctive contributions of working memory and intelligence to reading. The main aim is not only to find contributions of those cognitive entities to reading but also to investigate their relationship. Sixty children participated in the study. Their intelligence and their working memory capacity were estimated. Children were also administered a reading fluency and a reading comprehension task. Statistical analyses revealed both common and independent contributions of simple verbal memory and vocabulary knowledge to both reading measures. 4
Prof. Dr. Marina Mattheoudakis (Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki) Family and school language input: Their role in bilingual children s vocabulary development The present paper reports on a study of vocabulary development among bilingual children, who are here defined as children exposed to two languages either from birth or later and well before the onset of puberty. The study is part of a larger research project on bilingualism (BALED, 2012-2015) aiming to study language and cognitive abilities in simultaneous and successive or sequential bilinguals. Bilingual children s language skills are highly varied due to the variability in their language experiences (Hoff and Core 2013). Language dominance is influenced by the linguistic environment (home, social, educational) to which the bilingual individual is exposed and the input s/he receives (Oller and Eilers 2002). However, the exact nature of the relationship between input quantity and language acquisition in a dual language setting remains largely unclear (Unsworth 2014: 182). Our paper aims to investigate the effects of family and educational contexts on bilingualism and, in particular, the type and amount of language input received at home and at school and its effect on children s vocabulary development in each of the two languages. In our study, we are going to focus on Greek- German bilingual children in Greece and in Germany. Prof. Dr. Despina Papadopoulou (Department of Greek Linguistics, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki) Sentence processing in the first and the second language The aim of this talk is to explore whether and how research in the area of sentence processing is beneficial for the investigation of second language acquisition. The students will be introduced to the main theoretical approaches and the experimental techniques employed in the area of sentence processing. The principles that guide parsing will be outlined and the sentence processing models will be exemplified in the light of ambiguity resolution studies. Moreover, the similarities and the differences between first and second language processing will be discussed. This discussion will be initiated by means of recent experimental findings from (a) attachment ambiguities, such as relative clause and PP attachment, subject object ambiguities etc., and (b) the way (un)grammatical structures are processed. In addition, the various experimental techniques employed in the field of sentence processing will be reviewed and hints will be provided regarding the design of experimental tasks. Prof. Dr. Jacopo Torregrossa (Department of Romance Studies, University of Hamburg) Patterns of variation in bilingual narratives: The role of literacy and cognition The purpose of this mini- course is to discuss the methodology for analyzing narratives produced by monolingual and bilingual children. We will assess children s narrative skills based on various measures of narrative macrostructure and microstructure. The investigation on macrostructure components involves a qualitative assessment of the narrative s formal structure and content in terms of complexity of story grammar, lexical choices and referential patterns. Microstructure analysis targets language- specific form- function mappings, such as the use of referential expressions and patterns of syntactic complexity. Then we will show how measures related to the child narrative performance can be correlated with the individual cognitive profiles (processing speed in lexical retrieval, 5
WM), proficiency levels (vocabulary score), background measures (language use in different contexts, age of onset and features of schooling system). These correlational analyses will reveal which factors play a major role in enhancing (or demoting) child narrative skills. How to find us: On campus: The Sprachlabor is located on the ground floor of the SSC (Studierenden Service Center) on the central campus, right next to the University s main building. Building no. 192 on the campus map. The VL- Pool is on the ground floor of the Philosophikum just opposite of the University s main building. Building no. 103 on the campus map. Transport: Next tram station: Next bus stations: Universität, Line 9 from Neumarkt or Zülpicher Platz Universitätsstr., Line 130 from South & 142 from Ehrenfeld Wiso- Fakultät, Lines 136 & 146 from Rudolfplatz 6