Language Project Research Articles

The Lakota Language Project at Red Cloud Indian School: Turning the Tide of Native Language Loss

The Lakota Language Project at Red Cloud Indian School: Turning the Tide of Native Language Loss

Bridging the Gaps between Digital Humanities, Lexicography, and Linguistics: A TEI Dictionary for the Documentation of Mixtepec-Mixtec

This paper discusses the digital dictionary component in an ongoing language documentation project for the Mixtepec-Mixtec language (iso 639-3: mix). Mixtepec-Mixtec (Sa’an Savi ‘rain language’) is an Otomonguean language spoken by roughly 9,000–10,000 people in the Juxtlahuaca district of Oaxaca and in parts of the Guerrero and Puebla states of Mexico. Creating a digital dictionary for an under-resourced language entails a number of challenges that require unique and nuanced encoding solutions in which a delicate balance between the linguistic content, data structure, potential linked resources, and editorial metadata must be found. Herein we demonstrate how we use TEI to create a reusable, extensible, and machine readable language resource with an emphasis on how our solutions using a combination of novel and established TEI dictionary structures enable us to address our specific needs for Mixtepec-Mixtec and also provide a relevant roadmap for similar under-resourced language projects.

Students’ Perceptions of a Student-Produced Video Project in the General English Language Course at Srinakharinwirot University, Thailand

The research was conducted to study students’ perceptions of a student-produced video project (SPV project) in the context of the General English Language Course at Srinakharinwirot University in Thailand. First year students with a pre-intermediate level of English language proficiency, who were enrolled in the General English Language course, were assigned to work on a SPV project that required them to make a short video related to content learnt in class. There were four main objectives of the SPV project which were: (1) to provide an environment that allows students to grasp a deeper understanding of the topic learnt in class; (2) to enhance English language proficiency as well as creativity and problem-solving skills; (3) to promote the use of Information and communication technology (ICT) in language teaching and learning and (4) to provide a collaborative working environment among students. There were 450 students who participated in this project. A questionnaire on the perceptions of the SPV project was administered to 107 students. It covered three aspects (1) the improvement of students’ English language proficiency and life skills, (2) the use of technological tools and (3) collaboration among peers. Questionnaires results were statistically analyzed and reported in descriptive statistics. Findings indicated that students had positive perceptions toward the SPV projects in all three aspects. The aspect that received the highest mean value was that of collaboration among peers. This paper advocates the use of SPV projects as feasible and adaptable language projects suitable for the language learning in the 21st century.

Spelling reformers and artificial language advocates

AbstractThis article explores the shifting relations that took place from the last decades of the 19th to the first years of the 20th century between two of the most innovative language movements of the time: the spelling reform and the artificial language movements. The article focuses on the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany and France. Although both movements shared a similar language ideology which run counter to the organicist perception of language and emphasized its democratic function, the article shows how the shifting political environment in which they operated affected their relation. The article identifies three stages. In a first stage, and convinced that the reform of the spelling and the promotion of an artificial, neutral language were not mutually exclusive projects, the spelling reformers were favorably inclined towards artificial language projects. In a second stage relations began to skew when some reformers advocated for the “natural Esperanto” solution, which implied the promotion of a small language to the status of the international lingua franca. In the last stage, when nationalist sentiments and international rivalries mounted, the spelling reformers broke ties with the artificial language movement and worked to improve as much as possible the international standing of their own languages.

Using English to teach English: Classroom English competence of English language teachers in Vietnam

The National Foreign Language Project 2020 (Project 2020) has been laying its emphasis on the development of general English language proficiency and English language teaching methods of English language teachers in Vietnamese schools. This article argues that these focuses might overlook an area which is essential for these teachers to use English efficiently in the classrooms: the development of classroom English proficiency. This argument is corroborated by a case study with qualitative data collected from videotaping 113 teachers in their microteaching sessions. It reveals certain limitations in their classroom English competence, especially linguistic and strategic competence. The article concludes by putting forward certain suggestions for Project 2020 as well as future studies to explore other facets of this competence.

Reconciliation through language learning? A case study of the Turas Irish language project in East Belfast

ABSTRACTLanguage is frequently present in the conflictual symbolic politics of violent inter-group conflict. In Northern Ireland, the Irish language has long been contested and has been drawn into the maelstrom of cultural conflict since the 1998 Good Friday Agreement; hence the improbability of an Irish language learning/teaching initiative, operating since 2011, based in Protestant, pro-British East Belfast. This article offers the first academic analysis of the “Turas” project, focusing on understanding its reconciliation contribution. Firstly, the article examines why language is so often contested in identity group competition. Secondly, findings of qualitative research inside Turas regarding the means and meanings associated with the project are reported. Thirdly, drawing on the case study, the article argues that language learning offers three distinct reconciliatory opportunities: revising destructive understandings of history; challenging exclusivist territorializations of group memory; and facilitating critical reflection on self, and empathy for other.

Flourishing in a Second Language (FL2)

Abstract This paper presents findings from the Flourishing in a Second Language (FL2) project – a language curriculum for first-year university students which integrates Positive Psychology (Seligman, 2002), Transition Pedagogy (Kift, 2009a), and CLIL principles (Coyle, 2006). The project aims to create learning experiences that are personally relevant, and that facilitate alignment between learners’ interests, linguistic goals, and cognitive challenges posed by the tasks, in order to increase the perceived value of language learning and sustain students’ motivation. More specifically, the project involves re-designing language learning activities typically found in beginners’ level classes, to include strategies and contents believed to facilitate transition, as well as enhance students’ psychological, emotional, and social wellbeing. In this paper, we evaluate the trial implementation of the FL2 activities integrated into the beginners’ curriculum at two different universities. Feedback obtained from language experts and practitioners in language education and Positive Psychology is also briefly discussed.

Preface

Other| December 01 2017 Preface Marianna Di Paolo Marianna Di Paolo marianna di paolo is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology and founding chair of the Department of Linguistics at the University of Utah and a research associate at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. Recent collaborative publications include “The Peripatetic History of Middle English *ɛ̄—” (in Reader in Sociophonetics [de Gruyter, 2010]), Sociophonetics: A Student’s Guide (Routledge, 2011), and Languages and Dialects in the U.S.: Focus on Diversity and Linguistics (Routledge, 2014). She has chaired the Linguistic Society of America’s Committee on Ethnic Diversity in Linguistics, launched the Best Practices in Sociophonetics workshops, and served on the Utah State Supreme Court Committee on Model Utah Jury Instructions–Civil. As director of the Shoshoni Language Project (SLP), she oversees the Wick R. Miller Collection. The SLP develops Shoshoni language curricula (preK–12 and university), dictionaries, and bilingual books; provides teacher training; and has offered the Shoshone/Goshute Youth Language Apprenticeship Program. The SLP is a recipient of the National Indian Education Association’s William G. Demmert Cultural Freedom Award. E-mail: dipaolo@anthro.utah.edu. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Publication of the American Dialect Society (2017) 102 (1): vii–xxii. https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-4295178 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Marianna Di Paolo; Preface. Publication of the American Dialect Society 1 December 2017; 102 (1): vii–xxii. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-4295178 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsAmerican Dialect SocietyThe Publication of the American Dialect Society Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2017 American Dialect Society2017 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Academia Cuauhtli: (re)locating the spiritual, if crooked, path to social justice

This essay doubles as a critique of the brutal violence visited upon the immigrant community in Austin, Texas, in the wake of Donald Trump’s presidency, and a deeply personal account related to the establishment of Academia Cuauhtli, a language and culture revitalization project in Austin, Texas. It narrates our origins as a community-anchored, partnership-based effort that has culminated in a Saturday academy for east Austin fourth graders attending four elementary schools. With implications for community empowerment, culturally relevant social justice pedagogy, and spirituality, it illustrates what is possible when individual biography or circumstance intersects with caring friendships, politically astute community members, social justice initiatives, and a candid expression of need by community-anchored teachers. This timely and crooked path to social justice has situated those whose lives we touch with the kind of sustenance we all need to face the most significant political and policy challenge of our lives.

Enhancing disciplinary literacies: languages of schooling and whole-school language projects in Spain

AbstractEuropean language policy focusing on the development of the languages of schooling is opening new paths to best fit the necessities of students, whether in bilingual or monolingual communities. Bilingual education is no longer an exclusive entity, but is increasingly becoming mainstreamed. In doing so, it can promote the consolidation of linguistic competence in all languages in the curriculum. Thus, in parallel with proposals whose aim is primarily to improve the use of disciplinary literacies in the foreign language used as the vehicle of instruction, there are programmes which seek to strengthen the foreign language, the mother tongue, and perhaps a second foreign language, through the use of subject-specific literacies (pluriliteracies) in all the languages. An example of this strategy can be found in some regions of Spain, with the decision to promote the academic language in distinct areas and in different languages through implementation of whole-school language projects. This article describes the forces and mechanisms underlying the proposal, its characteristics and practical application, and ultimately addresses the relevance of the scheme as a valuable tool to surpass the traditional objectives of bilingual education programmes and to enhance the attainment of pluriliteracies in the curriculum.

Incident-Driven Machine Translation and Name Tagging for Low-resource Languages

We describe novel approaches to tackling the problem of natural language processing for low-resource languages. The approaches are embodied in systems for name tagging and machine translation (MT) that we constructed to participate in the NIST LoReHLT evaluation in 2016. Our methods include universal tools, rapid resource and knowledge acquisition, rapid language projection, and joint methods for MT and name tagging.

Vietnamese EFL High School Teachers’ Self-assessment of their English Language Proficiency in Relation to the Official Assessment Test Results

The current study explored how Vietnamese EFL high school teachers self-assessed their current English proficiency. It also compared teachers’ self-ratings with the results they obtained in the Project 2010 test, which was used to assess English level of EFL teachers across Vietnam as part of the implementation of the National Foreign Language Project 2020. The data were drawn from 15-item online questionnaire with 94 teacher participants. The findings revealed that teachers perceived themselves as being more proficient in skills of writing and reading, compared to listening, spoken production (e.g., making presentations) and spoken interaction (e.g., making conversations). Most of them rated their current English proficiency level lower than the level they achieved in the Project 2020 test. The findings offer information about the language aspects that teachers were least proficient, which can be used to specify what support they actually desire from in-service training courses. Also, as teachers are at the centre of the Project 2020, their perceptions of their own English proficiency provide insightful input to enhance the effectiveness of this educational reform.

Outcomes of Korean Fishing Villages’ Everyday Korean Language Project and Outcome Utilization Strategies

Outcomes of Korean Fishing Villages’ Everyday Korean Language Project and Outcome Utilization Strategies

Analyzing Accessibility of Wikipedia Projects Around the World

This study, conducted by the Internet Monitor project at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, analyzes the scope of government-sponsored censorship of Wikimedia sites around the world. The study finds that, as of June 2016, China was likely censoring the Chinese language Wikipedia project, and Thailand and Uzbekistan were likely interfering intermittently with specific language projects of Wikipedia as well. However, considering the widespread use of filtering technologies and the vast coverage of Wikipedia, our study finds that, as of June 2016, there was relatively little censorship of Wikipedia globally. In fact, our study finds there was less censorship in June 2016 than before Wikipedia’s transition to HTTPS-only content delivery in June 2015. HTTPS prevents censors from seeing which page a user is viewing, which means censors must choose between blocking the entire site and allowing access to all articles. This finding suggests that the shift to HTTPS has been a good one in terms of ensuring accessibility to knowledge. The study identifies and documents the blocking of Wikipedia content using two complementary data collection and analysis strategies: a client-side system that collects data from the perspective of users around the globe and a server-side tool to analyze traffic coming in to Wikipedia servers. Both client- and server-side methods detected events that we consider likely related to censorship, in addition to a large number of suspicious events that remain unexplained. The report features results of our data analysis and insights into the state of access to Wikipedia content in 15 select countries.

Review Article

In response to a crescendo of public and scholarly interest, over the last two decades there has been a noticeable and mostly welcome surge in publications that focus on language documentation, conservation, and revitalization. Early and high impact contributions in Hale et al. (1992) included a now seminal article by Michael Krauss which called for urgent action to prevent linguistics from going down in history as the ‘only science that presided obliviously over the disappearance of 90% of the very field to which it is dedicated’ (Krauss 1992:10). There then followed a discussion on the topic by Ladefoged (1992) and a prompt reply by Dorian (1993) that situated the issue of language endangerment as one deserving of sustained academic attention. Alongside swelling bookshelves that speak to the urgency of this work, major research programs funded by private philanthropic organizations and research councils were also being established at this time. The Foundation for Endangered Languages (FEL) was founded in 1995, followed a year later by the Endangered Language Fund (ELF). With the establishment of the Dokumentation Bedrohter Sprachen program (DoBeS) in 2000, the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project (HRELP) in 2002, and the Documenting Endangered Languages (DEL) program funded by the US government in 2005, the last two decades bear witness to a steady increase in support, funding, and visibility for the documentation and preservation of endangered languages.

Time Optimal Synthesis Based Upon Sequential Abstraction and Its Application to Cluster Tools

The Ramadge–Wonham supervisory control paradigm has been shown effective in dealing with logic control. Nevertheless, time-related performance is always one of the major concerns in industry. Current methods for synthesizing time optimal supervisors are incapable of dealing with large discrete-event systems (DESs) with massive state spaces. This paper proposes an approach for finding a time optimal accepting trace for large DESs based upon sequential language projection, and pruning. The algorithms are tested on a linear cluster tool to show their effectiveness.

Będę singielką jak moja mama, czyli o cywilizacyjnych zmianach w języku dzieci w wieku przedszkolnym

„I will be a single-woman like my Mummy”, or about civilization changes in language using by pre-school childrenThe main aim of this paper is to show how two immediately successive generations of pre-school children own — thanks to language — the rules of participation in social life and knowledge of the surrounding world. These two generations were the ones, who in the years 1980–83 were at a pre-school age and are now parents of children of the same age in 2010–2013. The analysis of the lexical score and language consciousness conducted from a thirty years’ perspective gave unexpected results which suggest the need to revise Baudouin de Courtenay’s thesis, according to which children’s language is a kind of projection of adult users language representing the next generation. Made confrontations done show how many new words which were not used by the previous generation, i.e. parents appear in the lexical score and in consciousness of today pre-schools.

The Question of Capacity: Why Enculturated and Trained Animals have much to Tell Us about the Evolution of Language.

For more than a century researchers have used enculturated animals-those extensively trained or reared by humans-to explore the effects of learning and environment on the capacities for linguistic abilities outside of the human line. Unfortunately, due to many controversies, the findings of these studies frequently have been dismissed or outright ignored. However, experimental exploration of the capacities of nonhumans is the only option to determine which, if any, language-associated capacities are unique to humans. Researchers continue to publish findings from language projects that move our understanding forward, including descriptions of capacities, such as gestural comprehension, declarative communication, and categorization, that are frequently considered to be specific biological adaptations.

The Swift and Secret Messenger: John Wilkins’s Mercury and the Paradoxes of Language

Abstract John Wilkins’s Mercury or the Secret and Swift Messenger: Showing How a Man May with Privacy and Speed Communicate His Thoughts to a Friend at Any Distance was first published in 1641. As a book on cryptography presenting a variety of secret means of communication at a distance it seems to have appeared at just the right time, when the biblical curse of the confusion of tongues was doubled by the curse of political confusion on the brink of the English civil war. However, the book seems to be more than just a detailed account of methods of secret writing; its topic gives the author a chance to present his views on language which he would later develop in his life’s work An Essay towards Real Character and a Philosophical Language published in 1668. The Essay had received much greater critical attention than the early pamphlet, which is usually referred to as merely a prelude to an account of his universal language project. Indeed, in the little book on cryptography, Wilkins already demonstrated his awareness of the conventional character of language and its role within the system of human interactions, as well as advertised a project of philosophical language that would enhance communication between all nations and remedy the curse of Babel. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that the value of the pamphlet lies also in the insight that it gives into the seventeenth-century debates on the nature of language and into arguments which were often provided, in equal measure, by theology, Hermetic lore, mythology, literature and early modern science. Wilkins’s meticulous recording of the contradictory views and propositions on language produces a sense of methodological inconsistency that leads to ambiguities and paradoxes. However, in the medley of concepts and the collection of linguistic “curiosities” that Mercury presents, a careful reader will discern the growing mistrust of language as a means of representing reality and as a foundation of knowledge, which was one of the symptoms of the general crisis of representation leading to an epistemological shift that started in the seventeenth century.

AN APPRAISAL OF PLAIN LANGUAGE IN THE SOUTH AFRICAN BANKING SECTOR

The Consumer Protection Act 68 of 2008 (CPA) came into full force in April 2011. An important corollary of this Act, and the National Credit Act 34 of 2005, is the obligation that consumer documents must be in plain language. It has long been debated whether it is possible to make legal documents available in plain language for lay consumption. The aim of this study is to investigate the successes and failures of the plain language project five years after the CPA became operational. This study relies on data collected through focus group interviews with bank employees in both language units and legal divisions. Findings indicate that, in general, both legal and language practitioners concur that legal documents can be simplified under certain conditions, although consensus has not been reached about the degree of simplification and the types of legal documents that can be simplified. Interviewees experience difficulty with the vagueness of the plain language obligation. Findings also show that legal practitioners are concerned about prejudicing the legal status of documents and are reluctant to deviate from traditional styles of drafting. According to the language practitioners interviewed, legal practitioners use this as an excuse to avoid plain language, and lack of clear enforcement measures for non-compliance results in window-dressing and paying lip service to the intent of the plain language obligation. Findings also reveal that the location of the language services unit in the institution has a marked effect on the successful implementation of plain language in the banking sector. Banks prefer a combination of approaches to plain language, but no testing is done on real consumers. Among others, poor coordination, outsourcing, lack of (ongoing) training, limited use of indigenous languages and the absence of dedicated plain language style guides impact success. Based on the findings of this study, a model for plain language in the financial services and other industries is proposed.