Multilingual Resources Research Articles

Politics of Language in COVID-19: Multilingual Perspectives from South Africa

ABSTRACT This study is based on a discourse analysis of official COVID-19 addresses by South African national government ministers with a focus on linguistic choices. While access to healthcare is an obvious issue of social justice during the pandemic, language plays a covert role in processes of access and inequality. Linguistic understanding influences social participation and during an epidemic crisis, access to language plays a significant role in improving responses of affected individuals. Although English is widely accepted as a common lingua franca in the country, it excludes those who are not proficient in the language. In this article, we analyse code-switching practices, translanguaging, and increasing African language usage among ministers of parliament during official COVID-19 speeches and briefings. We argue that the growing use of multilingual resources among South African politicians carries ramifications on language politics, i.e. a shift away from an unquestioned monolingual discourse purporting English as ‘the’ lingua franca which has in the past characterised most national speeches. From this new multilingual perspective, the pandemic has effected an inward orientation rather than the previously dominating concern with international relations.

Students’ multilingual repertoires-in-use for meaning-making: Contrasting case studies in three multilingual constellations

Mathematics education for multilingual classrooms calls for instructional approaches that build upon students’ multilingual resources. However, so far, students’ multilingual resources and the interplay of their components have only partly been disentangled and rarely compared between different multilingual contexts. This article suggests a conceptualization of multilingual repertoires-in-use as characterized by (a) what students use of certain languages, registers, and representations as sources for meaning-making in mathematics classrooms and (b) their processes of how they connect certain languages, registers, and representations. This qualitative learning-process study compares students’ multilingual repertoires-in-use in three contexts: Spanish-speaking foreign language learners of German in Colombia, Turkish- and German-speaking students born in Germany, and Arabic-speaking German language beginners recently immigrated to Germany. The analysis reveals the biggest differences not only in what the students use, but how they connect languages, registers, and representations. Some of these differences can partly be traced back to different classroom cultural practices. These findings suggest extending the conceptual framework for multilingual repertoires-in-use and including it in a social theoretical perspective. Thus, these findings have important practical consequences for multilingual mathematics classrooms: The instructional approach of relating languages, registers, and representations needs to be applied more flexibly, taking into account students’ different starting points. When doing so, students’ connection processes should be supported and explicated more systematically in order to fully exploit the students’ repertoires.

Sensory ecologies and semiotic assemblages during British Sign Language interpreted weather forecasts

ABSTRACT We present a study examining broadcast British Sign Language (BSL) interpreted weather forecasts. These are filmed against a green screen with a superimposed composite image broadcast including maps and satellite information, etc. that can be indexed. We examine the semiotic resources used when interacting with the available visible on-screen information to the viewing audiences. The forecasters and interpreters tailor their multimodal communicative practice to the sensory ecology (Kusters, 2017) of the audiences they serve. That is to say that, speakers/hearers hear the spoken monolingual linguistic resources while seeing the gestural resources of the forecaster; BSL signers/watchers view the multilingual linguistic resources (both categorical and gradient) and co-sign gestural resources, subsequently watching the gestural resources of the forecaster and the interpreter-presenter. We identify that while similar gestural resources are used by the weather presenters and the in-vision interpreter-presenters, the temporal alignment of the semiotic assemblages (Pennycook & Otsuji, 2017) of linguistic and gestural resources are different. The assumed normative practices of the deaf audience appear to significantly contribute to the consecutive use of semiotic resources that we see presented in BSL by in-vision interpreter-presenters. In addition to simultaneous assemblages, favoured by the weather forecaster presenters, they also create consecutive semiotic assemblages.

МАНІПУЛЮВАННЯ ОБРАЗОМ «КИЇВСЬКОЇ РУСІ» В АНГЛОМОВНИХ ПУБЛІКАЦІЯХ РОСІЙСЬКОГО МЕДІА-РЕСУРСУ RUSSIA TODAY (RT)

The article presents the results of the first analysis of linguistics strategies in representing and manipulating with the image of the medieval state “Kyivan Rus” in English-language publications of the Russia Today (RT), a multilingual Russian media resource propagating ideological views of the contemporary Russian state. The claims of the neoimperial Russian iscourse to exert an exclusive historical and political right over the ancient state of Kyivan Rus has been revealed. The application of the relevant media frames helped to identify linguistic and rhetorical tools aimed at building the planned ideology and ruling the reception of non-critical readers. The conducted analysis of the narratives based on the main contexts of using the image of “Kyivan Rus” in RT-publications helped to discover the list of the basic language strategies of manipulation with historical concepts, in particular the strategies of attacking and insulting the opponent, argumentum ad authority, dominating close-ended questions, or imposing forged relations between the signifier and its far-fetched interpretation. The context of the contemporary Russia and the context of the contemporary Ukraine were distinguished in the RT’s publications on Kyivan Rus. The research analysis confirms a targeted use of rhetorical tools by Russain media in order to voluntarily disrupt the historical discourse for neo-imperial objectives. The implemented study has also helped to clarify the immense difficulty of the Russian ideologists to prove their unique possessive legacy over the Kyivan Rus state, which is the direct predecessor of the Ukrainian state. The latter explains the aggressive and abusive nature of the publications in the Russia Today, undoubtedly oriented at non-critical readers. Further analysis of other English-language media messages will be useful to deepen the understanding of the exploited linguistic and rhetorical strategies in the contemporary ideological and political discourse.

The International Comparable Corpus: Challenges in building multilingual spoken and written comparable corpora

This paper reports on the efforts of twelve national teams in building the International Comparable Corpus (ICC; https://korpus.cz/icc) that will contain highly comparable datasets of spoken, written and electronic registers. The languages currently covered are Czech, Finnish, French, German, Irish, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Slovak, Swedish and, more recently, Chinese, as well as English, which is considered to be the pivot language. The goal of the project is to provide much-needed data for contrastive corpus-based linguistics. The ICC corpus is committed to the idea of re-using existing multilingual resources as much as possible and the design is modelled, with various adjustments, on the International Corpus of English (ICE). As such, ICC will contain approximately the same balance of forty percent of written language and 60 percent of spoken language distributed across 27 different text types and contexts. A number of issues encountered by the project teams are discussed, ranging from copyright and data sustainability to technical advances in data distribution.

A Systems Approach to Addressing Covid-19 Health Inequities

Summary Racial and ethnic minorities are dying from Covid-19 at alarmingly high rates, which demands immediate action. Health system leaders cannot allow other priorities to interfere with a commitment to address health inequities. Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) has embedded strategies to mitigate health inequities in its Covid-19 Command Center. A key strategy is the creation of interactive dashboards, which are reviewed daily and allow disaggregation by race, ethnicity, language, and ZIP Code. Of the first 45,954 patients tested for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) at VUMC, 2,310 had limited English proficiency (LEP). The positivity rate for patients with LEP was 26% compared with 6% for patients with English as a primary language. In addition to alerting local and state health departments of these higher rates, we created multilingual resources, assessed our interpreter services capacity, and engaged trusted community organizations. Early lessons learned at VUMC may help others implement a systems approach and immediately begin addressing Covid-19 health equity.

Multilingual corps institute of Slavic Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences – CLARIN PL. Polish-Lithuanian Parallel Corpus “2” and Polish-Ukrainian Parallel Corpus

Background. This article describes the Clarin-PL consortium, which represents the Polish contribution to the CLARIN ERIC European research infrastructure. The aims and tasks of both CLARIN ERIC and Clarin-PL are presented.Purpose. Presentation of the achievements of researchers from the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences in the field of creating and developing multilingual corpora, including tagging and parallelizing texts.Methods. The team of the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences adopted common assumptions for the construction of multilingual corpora of the Slavic and Baltic languages. Namely, the corpora contains selected modern texts that represent all functional styles to the greatest extent. Mutual translations are preferred.Results. The article presents a description of selected multilingual resources created by Clarin-PL and made available online via the Clarin-PL website, which a team from the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IS PAN) played a key role in creating. These resources are two expanded multilingual corpora of parallel contemporary texts: the Polish-Lithuanian Parallel Corpus 2 and the Polish-Ukrainian Parallel Corpus. Due to the fact that IS PAN played a leading role in the development of the multilingual corpora in the Clarin-PL consortium, it was decided to present an outline of corpus linguistics development in IS PAN.Discussion. The European Clarin-ERIC infrastructure is steadily developing. Scattered resources (previously created and newly emerging) are combined into a coherent whole. The Polish Consortium Clarin-PL primarily creates and develops resources and tools for the Polish language. The aim of these works is to provide the recipient with the highest possible quality of corpora compatible with constantly changing standards, allowing for the versatile use of tools.Manuscript received 02.09.2020

Facilitation of information literacy through a multilingual MOOC considering cultural aspects

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the rationale, technical framework, content creation workflow and evaluation for a multilingual massive open online course (MOOC) to facilitate information literacy (IL) considering cultural aspects.Design/methodology/approachA good practice analysis built the basis for the technical and content framework. The evaluation approach consisted of three phases: first, the students were asked to fill out a short self-assessment questionnaire and a shortened adapted version of a standardized IL test. Second, they completed the full version of the IL MOOC. Third, they were asked to fill out the full version of a standardized IL test and a user experience questionnaire.FindingsThe results show that first the designed workflow was suitable in practice and led to the implementation of a full-grown MOOC. Second, the implementation itself provides implications for future projects developing multilingual educational resources. Third, the evaluation results show that participants achieved significantly higher results in a standardized IL test after attending the MOOC as mandatory coursework. Variations between the different student groups in the participating countries were observed. Fourth, self-motivation to complete the MOOC showed to be a challenge for students asked to attend the MOOC as nonmandatory out-of-classroom task. It seems that multilingual facilitation alone is not sufficient to increase active MOOC participation.Originality/valueThis paper presents an innovative approach of developing multilingual IL teaching resources and is one of the first works to evaluate the impact of an IL MOOC on learners' experience and learning outcomes in an international evaluation study.

Constructing Playful Talk through Translanguaging in English Medium Instruction Mathematics Classrooms

Abstract Recent studies on English-Medium-Instruction (EMI) classroom interaction have begun to look at the role of translanguaging as a pedagogical practice in supporting participants to exploit multilingual and multimodal resources to facilitate content teaching and learning. The present study contributes to this growing body of literature by focusing on playful talk in multiple languages and modalities in EMI mathematics classrooms in a secondary school in Hong Kong. Based on the data collected from a linguistic ethnography, we analyze how the teacher constructs playful talk in order to achieve various pedagogical goals including building rapport, facilitating content explanation and promoting meaningful communication with students. The analysis demonstrates that translanguaging appears to be a critical resource and that several social factors, including the teacher’s personal belief, history, sociocultural, and pedagogical knowledge, play a role in constructing playful talk. The playful talk transforms the classroom into a translanguaging space, which in turn allows the teacher and students to perform a range of creative acts and experiment with a variety of voices to facilitate the meaning making and knowledge construction processes.

“Quierojuksar en lajulaftenito” – Playfulness and metalinguistic awareness in translingual family interactions

AbstractThis article explores playfulness and creativity in translingual family interactions. In particular, it focuses on how and to what ends adolescents mobilize multilingual resources in family interactions. It investigates the cases of two multilingual families with adolescent children (13–18 years old). The families have different linguistic backgrounds, but have in common that one of the parents have migrated from a Spanish-speaking Latin-American country to Northern-Norway, and that Spanish represents a linguistic resource and a heritage language in the families. The data consists of self-recorded family interactions (29 recordings, ca. 5 h.) and were collected over the course of one year. By analysing interactions where the adolescents employ Spanish features, the article offers insights into how adolescents negotiate the position of the heritage language Spanish in the family. A close, turn-by-turn analysis demonstrates that the adolescents in a creative and playful manner employ a multitude of linguistic resources to fulfil interactional achievements: Through metalinguistic talk and playful translingual practices, the adolescents challenge and negotiate identities and family roles, exert agencies, and demonstrate metalinguistic awareness and sociolinguistic control.

The multilingual workplace realities of Polish truckers: A case study in the Netherlands

AbstractAlthough international truckers are essential to the European supply chain, we know little about how they deal with their frequent multilingual workplace interactions. This paper examines the effects of participants’ Individual Multilingual Repertoires (Pitzl, Marie-Luise. 2016. World Englishes and creative idioms in English as a lingua franca.World Englishes35(2). 293–309.https://doi.org/10.1111/weng.12196) on their behavior and attitude toward multilingual interactions. Five Polish truckers and six Dutch logistics professionals were observed and interviewed. An ethnographic case study approach allowed us to consider interactions from multiple perspectives. Findings from the study reveal that some, but not all, Polish truckers struggle to interact in the most common lingua francas in the Netherlands: English and German. We show that some of the Dutch logistics professionals have a low opinion of foreign drivers’ linguistic abilities, which impairs the potential to find shared multilingual resources, and ultimately to improve communication skills. Results of the study contribute to an understanding of the dynamics of multilingual interactions in the workplace. Practical suggestions for logistics professionals and future research are identified.

Highlights: Multilingual Safety Resources, Pd-Catalyzed Cross-Coupling Reactions, Ethylene Glycol Purification, and More

Highlights: Multilingual Safety Resources, Pd-Catalyzed Cross-Coupling Reactions, Ethylene Glycol Purification, and More

Translanguaging in L3 Spanish Classrooms: Practices and Attitudes

Abstract. Research into pedagogical translanguaging in second/foreign language education has largely been focused on the interplay between two languages, one of which is usually English. Little attention has been paid to the practice of trilingual translanguaging (translanguaging between three languages), and how this can be helpful in the acquisition of a third language. This study, conducted in two Spanish as a third language classrooms in a Chinese university, aims to explore teachers’ translanguaging practices as well as the teachers’ and students’ attitudes to these practices. Analysis of data collected through audio-assisted classroom observation, interviews, and questionnaires reveals that teachers proactively and flexibly mobilize their multilingual resources in classroom talk. Students in general express positive attitudes towards teachers’ translanguaging practices, and express a wish to experience a greater amount of bilingual translanguaging between English (L2) and Spanish (L3). Meanwhile, having access to the views of L3 learners on teachers’ classroom talk proves to be a crucial component in the understanding of how L3 teaching and learning can take place in the most effective way. This study calls for further research into translanguaging practice in multilingual classrooms and its impact on students’ learning.

Hidden language ‘battles’ in the diaspora

AbstractFollowing a critical sociolinguistics approach to language maintenance in the diaspora, this paper investigates interplaying linguistic identities and ideologies towards home and host languages among four case-study Pakistanis living in Catalonia, a Catalan/Spanish-speaking European society. By drawing on fieldnotes, interviews, naturally-occurring conversations and visual materials gathered in a Barcelona call shop, it shows how informants invest in Spanish as the ‘integration’ language, despite being categorised as ‘deficient’ users of it. They present themselves as ‘native’ speakers of Urdu, which indexes modern ‘Muslimness’ and ‘Pakistaniness’, while Punjabi users, associated with the ‘yokels’, are silenced. English is ambivalently taken-up as an intra-group sign of educational status and political power and as an anti-Muslim ‘coloniser’ language. Overall, these stratifying sociolinguistic behaviours reveal how Pakistanis’ home/host multilingual resources get re-ideologised through linguistic hierarchisations which foster the maintenance of majority languages only, dismissing minority language speakers, in unchartered transnational contexts where these are already ‘delanguaged’.

“Do you understand (me)?” negotiating mutual understanding by using gaze and environmentally coupled gestures between two deaf signing participants

Abstract In this paper we explore the use of multimodal and multilingual semiotic resources in interactions between two deaf signing participants, a researcher and an asylum seeker. The focus is on the use of gaze and environmentally coupled gestures. Drawing on multimodal analysis and linguistic ethnography, we demonstrate how gaze and environmentally coupled gestures are effective semiotic resources for reaching mutual understanding. The study provides insight into the challenges and opportunities (deaf) asylum seekers, researchers, and employees of reception centres or the state may encounter because of the asymmetrical language competencies. Our concern is that such asymmetrical situations may be created and maintained by ignoring visual and embodied resources in interaction and, in the case of deaf asylum seekers, by unrealistic expectations towards conventionalized forms of international sign.

Edulingualism: linguistic repertoires, academic tasks and student agency in an English-dominant university

ABSTRACT This article reports on a study that examined how a group of plurilingual students use their linguistic repertoires to achieve a number of purposes such as performing identity, learning and socialising, and negotiating with structure in an English-dominant university. In order to capture the dynamic relationship between language-as-resource, academic tasks and agency in this particular context, the article proposes ‘edulingualism’ as a conceptual and analytic lens. To this end, the article examines multiple data sets (narratives, reflective accounts, recorded interactions and texts) that show how, by mobilising their multilingual resources, these students achieve their purposes and take ownership of their learning experiences within a monolingual learning space.

Mobilizing foreign language students for multilingual crisis translation in Shanghai

Abstract This paper examines the multilingual translation efforts of a group of university student volunteers during the COVID-19 outbreak in Shanghai. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews of the volunteer team leader, team members, and a local community health worker. Findings identified time constraints, limited language proficiency, and limited technical knowledge as the major challenges confronting the university volunteers. In order to overcome the challenges, they worked in close collaboration and used translingual and network strategies to facilitate prompt and high-quality crisis translation. Findings suggest that foreign language university students in local universities may serve as readily available multilingual resources and can be mobilized in prompt response to the grassroots multilingual needs of the local community in times of crisis. The paper ends with implications for measures and strategies to enhance effective emergency language service and crisis communication for global multilingual cities.

Multilingual communication experiences of international students during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract While an increasing literature on multilingualism addresses the key role of language in access to social resources, including crisis communication, little attention has been paid to practices of English-mediated multilingualism. Based on semi-structured interviews with 10 international students from South Asia and Southeast Asia receiving their higher education in China, the study reveals what language-related challenges international students encounter, how they mobilize their multilingual resources to enhance their access to crisis communication and build a shared community, and how their multilingual competences are valorized and enacted in the shifting paradigm of the China-oriented new economy addressing mutual accountability in South-South cooperation. The study suggests that English-mediated multilingualism in China fails to bridge the needs of international students of diverse backgrounds. The study also calls attention to the shifting paradigm of multilingual studies and the necessity of addressing the real world problems of health communication in a diverse context.

Providing multilingual logistics communication in COVID-19 disaster relief

Abstract Translation is an important means of enabling access to information in an emergency response. Increasingly, volunteer translators have been using social media platforms to self-organize and carry out urgent translation tasks that effectively complement official disaster relief efforts. However, the role of crowdsourced translations and the capacity of volunteer translators in reducing the impact of disasters remain underestimated and therefore understudied. Based on semi-structured interviews with five volunteer translators and online observation of their translation practices, this study investigates the role of a volunteer-driven crowdsourced translation effort in facilitating the donation and procurement of medical supplies between Wuhan and the world. By addressing the real challenges of urgent crisis communication in Wuhan in the early stages of the pandemic, this study draws attention to the need to integrate information and communication technologies with multilingual resources for disaster relief. In addition, it calls for the inclusion of multilingual logistics in national emergency preparation, response and recovery plans.

Metalinguistic discourses on translanguaging and multimodality

Abstract This article explores metalinguistic discourses of black African immigrants (BAIs) in Johannesburg on how they mobilize multilingual and multimodal resources in their communicative practices to pass as South Africans (SAs), concealing their identities as non-SAs to avert violent xenophobic attacks. Drawing data from semi-structured interviews and group discussions with BAIs, the article investigates how BAIs report on creatively, strategically using translanguaging and multimodality in performance of ingroup membership as local black SAs, blurring the boundaries between “outsiders” and “insiders.” BAIs use passing as a social identity management strategy, to negotiate their putative identity and resist ascription of the foreigner-outsider categorization and attendant social meanings. Besides language(s), BAIs use modes of corporeal practice (embodiment, clothing semiosis, skin-bleaching) as legitimating markers of belonging. The article argues that using passing unsettles the distinction between local/insider/citizen and migrant/outsider/non-citizen – concepts framed around a nation-state – revealing tensions, contradictions, and complexities in the politics of identity in Johannesburg.