Monolingual Systems Research Articles

Pre-service teachers’ agency to enact multilingual pedagogies: A longitudinal case study

Students with migrant backgrounds continue to underperform across European education systems, highlighting the need for teachers to be prepared for multicultural and multilingual schools. However, even teachers who are open to multilingual pedagogies report being restricted by monolingual language policies, language beliefs and assessment schemes. Hence, it is necessary to investigate the conditions for pre-service teachers to exercise their agency in enacting multilingual pedagogies within monolingual education systems. Through a longitudinal case study involving interviews with five pre-service teachers at the outset and completion of their teacher education in Norway, the study explores the following research question: To what degree has teacher education provided the necessary conditions for pre-service teachers to exercise their agency in enacting multilingual pedagogies within a monolingual education system? A thematic analysis comparing responses given at the onset and completion of their teacher education suggests that the pre-service teachers had altered their beliefs, acquired more knowledge and reported more skills in working with multilingual learners. Moreover, they had developed a greater ability to imagine alternative approaches to multilingualism and become more flexible in these approaches. The longitudinal and qualitative research design offers a detailed picture of pre-service teachers’ development over the course of their teacher education.

Ethnic identity construction through multimodal linguistic landscape at Ban Arunotai in Thailand

ABSTRACT Thailand is a country where ethnic diversity and multilingualism are deeply embedded in the cultural landscape, and understanding the construction of ethnic identity provides crucial insights into its social dynamics. This study investigates how ethnic identities are constructed and negotiated through multimodal resources within the linguistic landscape of Ban Arunotai, a multiethnic village in Chiang Mai. Utilizing a comprehensive multimodal framework, the research analyzes how public signage combines linguistic, visual, auditory, and spatial elements to articulate and reshape identity. The findings reveal a hierarchical structure of languages and modes, where dominant languages are visually prioritized, while minority languages serve more localized, symbolic functions. Moreover, a shift from static, monolingual systems to fluid, multilingual repertoires among speakers reflects broader sociocultural changes shaped by translanguaging practices. By framing public signs as dynamic resources in the active formation and reinforcement of ethnic identities, this study offers significant implications for understanding identity politics and social integration in multilingual settings.

EHMMQA: English, Hindi, and Marathi multilingual question answering framework using deep learning

Abstract Multilingual question answering (MQA) is an effective access to multilingual data to provide accurate and precise answers, irrespective of language. Although a wide range of datasets is available for monolingual QA systems in natural language processing, benchmark datasets specifically designed for MQA are considerably limited. The absence of comprehensive and benchmark datasets hinders the development and evaluation of MQA systems. To overcome this issue, the proposed work attempts to develop the EHMQuAD dataset, an MQA dataset for low-resource languages such as Hindi and Marathi accompanying the English language. The EHMQuAD dataset is developed using a synthetic corpora generation approach, and an alignment is performed after translation to make the dataset more accurate. Further, the EHMMQA model is proposed to create an abstract framework that uses a deep neural network that accepts pairs of questions and context and returns an accurate answer based on those questions. The shared question and shared context representation have been designed separately to develop this system. The experiments of the proposed model are conducted on the MMQA, Translated SQuAD, XQuAD, MLQA, and EHMQuAD datasets, and EM and F1-score are used as performance measures. The proposed model (EHMMQA) is collated with state-of-the-art MQA baseline models for all possible monolingual and multilingual settings. The results signify that EHMMQA is a considerable step toward the MQA system utilizing Hindi and Marathi languages. Hence, it becomes a new state-of-the-art model for Hindi and Marathi languages.

Language Ideologies and the Use of Mother Tongues as the Medium of Instruction and Learning in Junior Primary Schools: A Case Study of Parents and Teachers in a Namibian School

In the Namibian education system, teaching in the junior primary is supposed to be done in the learners’ mother tongue. However, there is always controversy on adopting a language to be used as a medium of instruction (MoI) due to the multi-ethnic and multilingualism of the Namibian society. To make matters worse, parents equally cast doubt on enrolling their children in schools that uses mother tongue as an MoI. Framed within the qualitative case-study orientation, this research investigated: parents’ and teachers’ language ideologies and beliefs; the factors that informed the embodied and expressed language ideologies and beliefs of parents’ and teachers’; and how these dominant language ideologies and belief systems informed parents’ and teachers’ choice of language of instruction and the general implementation of the language policy in a Namibian school. The study found that both parents and teachers harbored monolingual ideological belief systems that did not only construct and perpetuate an “English-only” language zone but also banished all mother tongue languages from the school premises. Not only do the findings point to the hegemonic positioning of the English language in the minds of parents, teachers, and school principals as the only language that can lead to success, but its violation was punishable in a derogatory manner. The study concludes that, among others, parents, teachers, and school principals’ language ideologies and beliefs were shaped and informed by the prevailing English language hegemony. The liberal and duality stance of the Namibian language policy, and its decentralization, partly resulted in parents, teachers, and school principals’ neglect of the multilingualism and heterogeneity that the very same policy purports to advocate. The study recommends raising parents’ and teachers’ awareness of embracing the heteroglossia of language practices and for the ministry of education to consider a more inclusive language policy.

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.

Dynamic Models of Multilingualism on the Territory of Western Ukraine

The purpose of the article is to study lexical units, with the help of which it becomes possible to build up the models of multilingualism, which are dominant among the population on the territory of Western Ukraine.
 Methods. Theoretical methods – categorical and structurally-functional analysis of the texts, the methods of systematization, modeling, generalization; empirical ones – the analysis of lexical units, the experiment. For the purpose of studying the models of multilingualism we used “The Methodology of studying the models of multilingualism on the territory of Western Ukraine (by the influence of Russian, English and German” (Mykhalchuk & Ivashkevych, 2022).
 Results. Dynamic models of multilingualism on the territory of Western Ukraine are: the Model of Balanced Ambilingualism and the Model of Unbalanced or Asymmetric Bilingualism. There are two types of Balanced Ambilingualism: (1) the Model of Ambilingual Balanced Bilingualism. It emphasizes that both language systems are developed to the highest level of perfect mastery of the language as mastering a native one; (2) the Model of Non-Ambilingual Balanced Bilingualism implies that both language systems aren’t at the same level of their development. Unbalanced or Asymmetric Bilingualism is presented by two sub-models: (1) Transitional Bilingualism; (2) Stable Dominant Multilingualism.
 Conclusions. Any multilingual system is not reduced to the summation of different monolingual systems. Multilingual psycholinguistic systems of the person are open ones. The bilingual’s metalinguistic abilities show a strengthening effect when the person is studying not only the second, but also the third or more languages. Accumulating such advantages as cognitive variability (mobility), metalinguistic abilities, metapragmatic and sociocultural “awareness”, multilinguals also accumulate some disadvantages: a deficit in the level of language proficiency due to interlanguage interactions; limitations in language acquisition and language efforts.

Ideological and Theoretical Considerations to Postcolonial Education in the Lusophone Countries

This special issue stems from two thematic panels on language and education in the Lusophone world which took place in 2019—one at the University of Santiago de Compostela, and the other at the University of Sheffield. The issue examines the tensions between the linguistic diversity in the Lusophone world and the largely monolingual education systems that remain in place to this day. Taking the education system as a key site for both the reproduction and the contestation of inequality, the issue reflects on how deeply ingrained monolingual and monoglossic ideologies serve to marginalise local languages and local varieties of Portuguese, and the implications of this for access to and participation in education, and for broader questions of social mobility and social justice. As such, in this issue we take a critical approach and contend that linguistic research and insights from Lusophone countries can make a crucial contribution to understanding key social, ideological, and political power struggles and help to bridge the perennial gap between theory and practice in language and education contexts. Para a versão em português clique no botão de download à direita.

Speech and multilingual natural language framework for speaker change detection and diarization

Speaker Change Detection (SCD) is the problem of splitting an audio-recording by its speaker-turns. Many real-world problems, such as the Speaker Diarization (SD) or automatic speech transcription, are influenced by the quality of the speaker-turns estimation. Previous works have already shown that auxiliary textual information (for mono-lingual systems) can be of great use for detection of speaker-turns and the diarization systems’ performance. In this paper, we suggest a framework for speaker-turn estimation, as well as the determination of clustered speaker identities to the SD system, and examine our approach over a multi-lingual dataset that consists of three mono-lingual datasets—in English, French, and Hebrew. As such, we propose a generic and language-independent framework for the SCD problem that is learned through textual information using state-of-the-art transformer-based techniques and speech-embedding modules. Comprehensive experimental evaluation shows that (i) our multi-lingual SCD framework is competitive enough when compared to a framework over mono-lingual datasets, and that (ii) textual information improves the solution’s quality compared to the speech signal-based approach. In addition, we show that our multi-lingual SCD approach does not harm the performance of SD systems.

Approaches for Multilingual Phone Recognition in Code-switched and Non-code-switched Scenarios Using Indian Languages

In this study, we evaluate and compare two different approaches for multilingual phone recognition in code-switched and non-code-switched scenarios. First approach is a front-end Language Identification (LID)-switched to a monolingual phone recognizer (LID-Mono), trained individually on each of the languages present in multilingual dataset. In the second approach, a common multilingual phone-set derived from the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) transcription of the multilingual dataset is used to develop a Multilingual Phone Recognition System (Multi-PRS). The bilingual code-switching experiments are conducted using Kannada and Urdu languages. In the first approach, LID is performed using the state-of-the-art i-vectors. Both monolingual and multilingual phone recognition systems are trained using Deep Neural Networks. The performance of LID-Mono and Multi-PRS approaches are compared and analysed in detail. It is found that the performance of Multi-PRS approach is superior compared to more conventional LID-Mono approach in both code-switched and non-code-switched scenarios. For code-switched speech, the effect of length of segments (that are used to perform LID) on the performance of LID-Mono system is studied by varying the window size from 500 ms to 5.0 s, and full utterance. The LID-Mono approach heavily depends on the accuracy of the LID system and the LID errors cannot be recovered. But, the Multi-PRS system by virtue of not having to do a front-end LID switching and designed based on the common multilingual phone-set derived from several languages, is not constrained by the accuracy of the LID system, and hence performs effectively on code-switched and non-code-switched speech, offering low Phone Error Rates than the LID-Mono system.

Observation-based approximate dependency modeling and its use for program slicing

While dependency analysis is foundational to much program analysis, many techniques have limited scalability and handle only monolingual systems. We present a novel dependency analysis technique that aims to approximate program dependency from a relatively small number of perturbed executions. Our technique, MOAD (Modeling Observation-based Approximate Dependency), reformulates program dependency as the likelihood that one program element is dependent on another (instead of a Boolean relationship). MOAD generates program variants by deleting parts of the source code and executing them while observing the impact. MOAD thus infers a model of program dependency that captures the relationship between the modification and observation points. We evaluate MOAD using program slices obtained from the resulting probabilistic dependency models. Compared to the existing observation-based backward slicing technique, ORBS, MOAD requires only 18.6% of the observations, while the resulting slices are only 12% larger on average. Furthermore, we introduce the notion of the observation-based forward slices. Unlike ORBS, which inherently computes backward slices, MOAD’s model’s dependences can be traversed in either direction allowing us to easily compute forward slices. In comparison to the static forward slice, MOAD only misses deleting 0–6 lines (median 0), while excessively deleting 0–37 lines (median 8) from the slice.

A unified system for multilingual speech recognition and language identification

In this paper, a multilingual automatic speech recognition (ASR) and language identification (LID) system is designed. In contrast to conventional multilingual ASR systems, this paper takes advantage of the complementarity of the ASR and LID modules. First, the LID module contributes to the language adaptive training of the multilingual acoustic model. Then, the ASR decoding information acts as the confidence metric to balance the LID results. To simulate complex multilingual speech recognition situations, two types of LID strategies are conducted. For a multilingual speech recognition task in which only one language is contained in the speech stream, the language information can be directly determined based on utterance-level judgment. Under this condition, a segment-level statistical component and a two-stage update strategy are designed to assist in the utterance-level language classification. In another multilingual speech recognition task, where the speech stream contains multiple languages simultaneously, the Viterbi language state retrieval method based on neural network (NN) classification is used to perform dynamic detection of the language state. In both cases, the ASR decoding information is used to adjust the language classification results. Without prior knowledge of language identity information, the enhanced LID module achieves an accuracy of 99.3% for utterance-level language judgment and 92.4% for dynamic language detection, and the multilingual ASR system also provides performance comparable to that of monolingual ASR systems.

Cross Language Information Retrieval (CLIR): A Survey of Approaches for Exploring Web Across Languages

In the era of globalization, internet being accessible and affordable has gained huge popularity and is widely being used almost everywhere by Government, private organizations, companies, banks, etc. as well as by individuals. It has empowered its users to contribute to the creation of information on web enabling them to use their native languages which consequently has drastically increased the volume of web-accessible documents available in languages other than English. This exponential growth of information on the internet has also induced several challenges before the information retrieval systems. Most of the present monolingual information retrieval systems can retrieve documents in the language of query only, missing the information in other languages that may be more relevant to the user. The need of information retrieval systems to become multilingual has given rise to the research in Cross Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) which can cross the language barriers and retrieve more relevant results from documents in different languages. This article is a review of motivation, issues, work and challenges related to various CLIR approaches. Starting with the most fundamental approaches of translation, it is attempted to study and present a review of more advanced approaches for enhancing the retrieval results in CLIR proposed by various researchers working in this domain.

Economy and funding of European minority language media: Reality and impact of digitalization and economic crisis

This article investigates the economy of monolingual media systems in nine European minority language communities during 2009–2015, a period of strong economic crisis and accelerated digitalization. The main areas of study are three: The economic volume or weight of those media systems and its variation between 2009 and 2015; the current funding structure of the four media types (press, radio, TV and cybermedia); and the qualitative evaluation of media editors and managers on the effect of those two crises as well as the significance of the public aid. The nine European minority languages are Basque, Welsh, Galician, Irish, Breton, Frisian, Sámi, Corsican and Scottish-Gaelic. As for the findings, it can be highlighted that the economic volume or revenue of European minority language media is close to five hundred million euros per year, of which over ninety per cent is public funding, mostly devoted to broadcasting media. The conclusion set forth is that public funding should not be framed as aid but as a social, cultural and economic investment.

Investigation of multilingual and mixed-lingual emotion recognition using enhanced cues with data augmentation

In the past decade, research for improving man–machine communication has focused on emotion recognition using audio cues. Several effective monolingual, multilingual, and cross-corpus speech emotion recognition (SER) systems have been developed; however, they are limited to recognizing emotions from databases of monolingual discourse, primarily in either categorical or dimensional emotion space. For multilingual countries and federations such as India, Russia, and the European Union, these limitations can be problematic. Furthermore, in an environment of mixed diversified languages, the performance of existing models is unclear. To address these issues, we propose an innovative mixed-lingual SER system that considers five diverse languages, including dialect variability. Mixed-lingual corpora are developed from available standard speech emotion databases. Furthermore, a compact feature set having a unique set of speech feature functionals with a distinctive set of enhanced perceptual features and modified H-coefficients is proposed. Against existing large feature sets, the proposed compact feature set is robust and effective to perform the dual task of significantly recognizing different emotions from multilingual SER systems also, along with the mixed-lingual SER systems in both emotion spaces of categorical and dimensional. In the proposed SER system, to overcome the skewness of SER system performance for recognizing certain emotions, a data augmentation method is then incorporated. Furthermore, the proposed SER system is designed to efficiently recognize even the extreme emotions of boredom, disgust, sadness, and surprise in both emotion spaces. The proposed SER system is compared to existing SER systems, and the comparison results demonstrate that the proposed system outperformed existing systems.

Tamil Character Recognition, Translation and Transliteration System

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is the machine conversion of handwritten or typed data into machine encoded scripts. English, is the informal link to all the regional languages in India and is used to publish reports, papers, magazines and records. Monolingual systems are incapable of doing so, thus increasing the need of bilingual frameworks. We have created a character recognition system that converts the user’s input in the Tamil language to English. Additionally, we can also perform transliteration of Tamil to English and vice versa. The bilingual OCR system, “MOZHI VALLAAN,” which has an accuracy of 94%, will be used.

Towards End-to-End Multilingual Question Answering

Multilingual question answering (MLQA) is a critical part of an accessible natural language interface. However, current solutions demonstrate performance far below that of monolingual systems. We believe that deep learning approaches are likely to improve performance in MLQA drastically. This work aims to discuss the current state-of-the-art and remaining challenges. We outline requirements and suggestions for practical parallel data collection and describe existing methods, benchmarks and datasets. We also demonstrate that a simple translation of texts can be inadequate in case of Arabic, English and German languages (on InsuranceQA and SemEval datasets), and thus more sophisticated models are required. We hope that our overview will re-ignite interest in multilingual question answering, especially with regard to neural approaches.

Language barriers and epistemic injustice in healthcare settings.

Contemporary realities of global population movement increasingly bring to the fore the challenge of quality and equitable health provision across language barriers. While this linguistic challenge is not unique to immigration contexts and is likewise shared by health systems responding to the needs of aboriginal peoples and other historical linguistic minorities, the expanding multilingual landscape of receiving societies renders this challenge even more critical, owing to limited or even non-existing familiarity of modern and often monolingual health systems with the particular needs of new linguistic minorities. The centrality of language to health beliefs, attitudes, practices, cultural scripts, and conceptual frameworks emphasizes its pivotal role in the healthcare process, and consequently in the adverse effects of treatment that is language-insensitive and unaware. Such an attitude on the part of medical authorities risks considerable epistemic injustice in the form of a (mis)judgement of patients' intelligence, credibility, and rationality based on the language that they speak and the manner in which they speak it, consequently impacting the quality and equity of care provided. This danger, I argue, may be effectively countered by fostering among the participants in the healthcare process a sense of epistemic humility through greater metalinguistic awareness. Outlining a range of operative steps that can be used to facilitate this. I argue that the reality of language barriers in the healthcare process, while not entirely eliminable, may nevertheless be successfully addressed, in order to mitigate the challenge of quality and equitable healthcare provision in multilingual societies.

Emigration in Estonian Literature: “Self” and “Other” in the Context of European Literature

The experience of emigration generated a new paradigm in Estonian culture and literature. After World War II Sweden became a new homeland for many people. Estonian culture and literature suddenly became divided into two parts. The political terror imposed restrictions on literature in homeland and the national ideology limited literature in the initial years of exile. Both were closed communities and were monolingual systems in a cultural sense because these systems avoided dialogue and the influence of other signs. It was a traumatic experience for nation and culture where the totalitarian political power and trauma have allied. The normal cultural communication was destroyed. But the most important thing at this time was memory, not just memory but entangled memory, which emigrants carried with them to the new homeland and which influenced people in Estonia. The act of remembering becomes crucial in the exile cultures.Estonian literature in exile and in the homeland presents the fundamental images of opening or closing, escaping or staying, and of flight or fight. Surrealism as well as fantasy and science fiction as the literary styles reveal what is hidden in the unconscious of a poet or a person or even in the collective memory of a nation. Surrealism has played a certain role in our literature, but it has been different from French surrealism, it is a uniquely Estonian surrealism. At the same time Estonia was already a new homeland for many refugees from Russia who had escaped during the Revolution of 1917 and World War I. August Gailit and Oskar Luts wrote about that issue in different literary works. Luts entangled different memories in his novel Tagahoovis (In the Backyard, 1933): the memories of Estonians and the memories of Russian emigrants. He also entangled historical narratives about World War I, the Russian revolution and the young Estonian state in the 1920s. Luts wrote about common people who interpret historical narratives. The novel was also published in exile in 1969 in Toronto.

Striving Toward Equitable Biliteracy Assessments in Hegemonic School Contexts

American schools today display unprecedented levels of diversity in regard to the linguistic, socioeconomic, and cultural backgrounds of their student population. Increasingly, more American students are also emergent bilingual learners. Despite this fact, most of the standardized assessments used by schools have been designed and normed for English monolingual students. The lack of specific assessments created for emergent bilinguals provides teachers and other stakeholders with only a partial and often inaccurate view of the students’ literacy growth as they develop proficiency in two languages. In this theoretical article, the authors explore how three complex characteristics of emergent biliteracy development interact: bilingual language proficiency, domains of language use, and language dominance. Then, they describe how teachers and school district leaders can begin to create more equitable assessment practices that are more closely aligned with the unique characteristics of biliteracy development admist largely hegemonic, monolingual school systems.

The late Qing “national language” issue and monolingual systems: Focusing on political diplomacy

ABSTRACTEstablished as a multiethnic and multilingual empire, the Qing dynasty used Manchu, Chinese, and other languages in its government. Influenced by nationalism, the court attempted to establish Manchu as the “national language.” Yet over time, the “national language movement” resulted in Chinese being adopted as the “national language.” Occurring in the twilight years of the Qing, this transition reflected the moribund fate of the Qing empire against the rising tide of Chinese nationalism at the turn of the twentieth century.