Existing Language Resources Research Articles

“It's Just a Hot Mess”: Supporting Teacher Praxis to Challenge Barriers for Multilingual Learners

ABSTRACTThis paper examines a professional learning (PL) program for upper elementary teachers focused on developing instructional practices to support multilingual learners (MLLs) in science. The PL sought to support teachers' praxis, which we describe as their sense of agency to critically analyze and take action against barriers to MLLs’ opportunities to learn. We analyzed pre‐PL interviews with teachers to identify the ways that they framed MLLs from asset‐ and deficit‐based perspectives and the barriers that they identified that undermine MLLs' science learning. Then, we analyzed the extent to which the teachers' participation in the PL shifted their framing of MLLs and fostered their sense of agency to challenge the barriers faced by MLLs. We found that teachers shifted toward more asset‐based views of students' existing language resources and deepened their sense of agency to employ scaffolds that engage these resources in their own instructional practice. However, teachers continued to surface barriers in their organizational contexts, including the emphasis placed on standardized language assessments and the misalignment between English language instruction and science learning. Our analysis shows that the PL did not adequately support teachers in navigating these particular institutional barriers. Based on our analysis, we argue that teachers and science education researchers should expand their focus beyond teachers’ instructional practices and work together to remove barriers for MLLs in the larger organizational systems of schooling.

Language Views for Scientific Sensemaking Matter: A Synthesis of Research on Multilingual Students’ Experiences with Science Practices Through a Translanguaging Lens

This synthesis examines recent science education research on multilingual students’ experiences with language-rich science practices. Adopting a translanguaging lens, we explore how researchers’ language conceptualizations impact the science practices they study and the ways multilingual students are positioned. This analysis helps us understand the extent to which recent research is disrupting, or sustaining, minoritizing narratives about multilingual students and how they sensemake in science. Based on our findings, we suggest researchers: (1) reflect upon and expand their views of language, which will enable the field to develop more nuanced understandings of how language use across linguistic and multimodal resources permeates all science practices, and (2) consider how to expand multilingual students’ language repertoires for sensemaking while also valuing students’ existing language resources and practices.

Navigating plurilingual learning: An inclusive education approach

AbstractLanguage experiences and linguistic knowledge of teenage migrants can be valuable resources for their continued language learning. Yet, home languages and existing plurilingual skills are often framed as obstacles to learning that tag young migrants as at risk of school failure in the context of monolingual education systems. This article draws on a comparative education study carried out in Aotearoa New Zealand and France in 2017–2019, observing young migrants' use of their languages in classroom learning. A total of 42 secondary students from a mix of asylum‐seeker, refugee, and migrant backgrounds participated, originating from 22 different countries and speaking 24 different languages. All of the students were in their first year of schooling in New Zealand or France at the time of the study. Findings draw on observations of how students made use of their existing knowledge of languages to (1) access learning in the language‐of‐schooling, (2) learn interactively through their home languages, and (3) navigate unfamiliar styles of teaching and learning, thus engaging with the unknown and developing behaviours for successful learning. Patterns across the cohort show that young migrants are adept at drawing on their existing language resources in learning. This suggests a re‐framing of success at school as not only outcomes, but also as defined by effective learning processes that young migrants put in place. As a result, this study suggests ways that teachers can work inclusively with young migrants through their languages, to support processes of learning that could lead to better educational outcomes.

Utilising heterogeneous language resources for term extraction in maritime domains

Abstract The development of terminologies for domains where these are lacking is a time-consuming and costly task. This article takes a methodological perspective and addresses a general methodological question: how can we, with limited funding, utilise to a maximal degree, existing language resources to create a terminology at a relatively low cost? Although an important player in the maritime industries for many centuries, Norway has not prioritised the systematic development of an official maritime terminology. The article therefore focuses specifically on efforts to develop a national resource for maritime domains. The article describes efforts to create a corpus of popular science and a parallel corpus of technical texts. Six different term extraction methods are applied. These include corpus-based statistical analyses of frequency, collocation and keyness, as well as bilingual term extraction. Finally, the pros and cons of each method are evaluated by means of a cost-benefit analysis.

How Users Responded to a Responsive Dictionary

The Thesaurus of Modern Slovene is a responsive dictionary: it is compiled automatically from existing language resources while further developments of the dictionary include user participation. Many of the features introduced by the responsive model are new to the Slovene language community (e.g. data is extracted automatically and includes some errors; nonexperts are involved in dictionary compilation; the resource is never truly finished). With financial support from the Slovene Ministry of culture, a survey was conducted to gauge (potential) user opinions on the new features. The paper presents the results of the survey (n = 671) including statistical analyses of dependencies between the respondents’ opinions and their reported familiarity with the new dictionary, their age, and their professional occupation.

The Croatian Web Dictionary – Mrežnik Project

The Croatian Web Dictionary – Mrežnik project is at the moment of writing of this paper at the end of the third year. The project goals are to compile an e-dictionary of the Croatian language that is online, free, corpus-based, monolingual, hypertext, searchable, normative, and based on the contemporary results of e-lexicography and computational linguistics. Mrežnik consists of three modules: for adult native speakers of Croatian, schoolchildren, and non-native speakers of Croatian. It will be the central meeting point of the existing language resources of the Institute of Croatian Language and Linguistics but also of the language resources created within the project. Croatian Web Dictionary – Mrežnik is conceived as a dynamic dictionary that can be further compiled and edited even after the end of the four-year project and the result of the project will be the model for the growing Croatian e-dictionary that will be a long-term project of the Institute of Croatian Language and Linguistics.

Playful Literacies, Creativity, and Multilingual Practices

AbstractEmergent language learners develop literacy through social interactions in multiple, overlapping communities: home, school, peer groups, and popular culture. The author focuses on how classrooms can be spaces that cultivate authentic literacy engagements while incorporating and valuing students’ existing language resources.

The Language Grid: supporting intercultural collaboration

A variety of language resources already exist online. Unfortunately, since many language resources have usage restrictions, it is virtually impossible for each user to negotiate with every language resource provider when combining several resources to achieve the intended purpose. To increase the accessibility and usability of language resources (dictionaries, parallel texts, part-of-speech taggers, machine translators, etc.), we proposed the Language Grid [1]; it wraps existing language resources as atomic services and enables users to create new services by combining the atomic services, and reduces the negotiation costs related to intellectual property rights [4]. Our slogan is “language services from language resources.” We believe that modularization with recombination is the key to creating a fullrange of customized language environments for various user communities.

Constructing a poor man’s wordnet in a resource-rich world

In this paper we present a language-independent, fully modular and automatic approach to bootstrap a wordnet for a new language by recycling different types of already existing language resources, such as machine-readable dictionaries, parallel corpora, and Wikipedia. The approach, which we apply here to Slovene, takes into account monosemous and polysemous words, general and specialised vocabulary as well as simple and multi-word lexemes. The extracted words are then assigned one or several synset ids, based on a classifier that relies on several features including distributional similarity. Finally, we identify and remove highly dubious (literal, synset) pairs, based on simple distributional information extracted from a large corpus in an unsupervised way. Automatic, manual and task-based evaluations show that the resulting resource, the latest version of the Slovene wordnet, is already a valuable source of lexico-semantic information.

Space, scale and accents: Constructing migrant identity in Beijing

This paper draws oil the recently, theorised notions of space and scale in sociolinguistics to investigate the complexity told micro-variation of the Chinese language in the context of mass internal migration, and the way in which sociolinguistic processes shed light on the construction of migrant identities. In spite of the enormously rich diversity in Chinese languages, images of linguistic stability and homogeneity overlie the societal diversity that characterises every real social environment. The monoglot ideologies focused on Putonghua often present obstacles for migrant workers whose Putonghua proficiency is limited, and disqualify their existing language resources and skills. Three vignettes will illustrate this. The first one demonstrates the presence and influence of Putonghua in an eastern coastal city through a story told by a migrant child; the second vignette reveals how a migrant worker's regional accent is misrecognised in the interactions with the locals; and the third vignette illustrates how a migrant worker is polyglot in one language and how this polyglot repertoire is organised indexically in relation to layered and stratified spaces. Therefore the monoglot ideologies often disqualify some peoples linguistic resources; many migrant workers nevertheless develop a polyglot repertoire and navigate such obstacles

Space, Scale and Accents: constructing migrant identity in Beijing

This paper draws on the recently theorised notions of space and scale in sociolinguistics to investigate the complexity and micro-variation of the Chinese language in the context of mass internal migration, and the way in which sociolinguistic process shed light on the construction of migrant identities. In spite of the enormously rich diversity in Chinese languages, images of linguistic stability and homogeneity overlie the societal diversity that characterises every real social environment. The monoglot ideologies focused on Putonghua often present obstacles for migrant workers whosePutonghua proficiency is limited, and disqualifies their existing language resources and skills. Three vignettes will illustrate this. The first one demonstrates the presence and influence of Putonghua in an eastern coastal city through a story told by a migrant child; the second vignette reveals how a migrant worker’s regional accent is misrecognised in the interactions with the locals; and the third vignette illustrates how a migrant worker is polyglot in one language and how this polyglot repertoire is organised indexically in relation to layered and stratified spaces. Therefore the monoglot ideologies often disqualify some people’s linguistic resources; many migrant workers nevertheless develop a polyglot repertoire and navigate such obstacles.

International standard for a linguistic annotation framework

This paper describes the Linguistic Annotation Framework under development within ISO TC37 SC4 WG1. The Linguistic Annotation Framework is intended to serve as a basis for harmonizing existing language resources as well as developing new ones.

The role of knowledge-based technology in language applications development

The automatic processing of written texts is being tackled by a variety of scientific disciplines. Within Computer Science the area of Natural Language Processing is deeply concerned with the problem of developing software systems that include language analysis functionalities to solve real problems. During the last decade the main contributions faced the problem in a more engineering way taking into account several available technologies from different areas, in order to develop a suitable framework allowing the integration of different techniques and resources required to solve natural language processing problems. Knowledge Engineering is increasingly regarded as a means to complement traditional formal models by adding symbolic modelling and inference capabilities in a way that facilitates the introduction and maintenance of linguistic experience. Also there has been an important effort in resources development, so reusability is a key question shared by Language Applications. In this paper we present a cognitive approach that allows the design of linguistic applications that integrates different formalisms, reuses existing language resources and supports the implementation of the required control in a flexible way. Also several related work showing the current state of the knowledge based engineering technology is included. Finally, in order to show the suitability of knowledge-based technology in linguistic engineering, a case study dealing with the automatic generation of database conceptual models from Spanish short texts is included.

Supporting children’s home languages in mainstream educational programs

Abstract If we are to ensure that language and communication skills for national needs are developed through education, then we cannot afford to neglect the existing language resources which Australia’s children bring to early childhood and primary school programs. Conservation of these resources can range along a continuum from home language support in mainstream educational programs to full bilingual education programs. The greatest range of national needs will be met through full bilingual education. However, in the current educational and political climate, such programs are unlikely to expand. In such a climate, it is important to ensure that no avenue of linguistic conservation is neglected. The Home Language Support Project, described in this paper, is one attempt to help mainstream teachers include children’s home languages in educational programs. The Project is described briefly, and one of the questions which arose during its implementation is discussed -language delivery patterns in home language support programs and the issue of code switching.

Storage of Usage Information on Research Resource Metadata Database: Corpus Construction Using Academic Articles

Recently, language resources have become indispensable for linguistic researches. However, existing language resources are seldom fully utilized because their variety of usage is not well known, indicating that their intrinsic value is not recognized very well either. Regarding this issue, lists of usage information might improve language resource searches and lead to their efficient use. In this research, therefore, we collect a list of usage information for each language resource from academic articles to promote the efficient utilization of language resources. This paper describes the construction of a text corpus annotated with usage information (UI corpus). In particular, we automatically extract sentences containing language resource names from academic articles. Then, the extracted sentences are annotated with usage information by two annotators in a cascaded manner. We will show that the UI corpus contributes to efficient language resource searches, by combining the UI corpus with a metadata database of language resources and comparing the number of language resources retrieved with and without the UI corpus.