Understanding Of Multilingualism Research Articles

Learning and using multiple languages: Experiences of adults with ADHD

Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder that impacts many areas of a person's life. So far little is known on how ADHD affects the learning and usage of additional languages. The present study investigates what potential challenges and benefits adults with ADHD experience in second language (L2) learning, and what strategies they have developed to offset ADHD-related differences in cognition and behaviour. As part of a larger questionnaire, 59 participants with ADHD provided written responses, answering questions on how ADHD has influenced their learning and use of multiple languages. After a multiple-step classification process, three overarching topics were identified: (1) the effects of cognition on language learning and use; (2) how different language components and language modalities are affected by ADHD; and (3) what language learning strategies adults with ADHD apply. In our analysis, we present authentic quotes from individuals with ADHD and place them into the larger context of research on neurodivergence and L2 acquisition. Our results highlight the great heterogeneity in learning experiences and pathways in adults with ADHD. Interestingly, many respondents embrace their neurodiversity and develop individual strategies to enhance L2 proficiency. Our research aims to contribute to a better understanding of multilingualism within neurodiverse populations.

Knowledge mapping of translanguaging in education: A scientometric analysis using CiteSpace

The study of translanguaging in education has drawn increasing attention from scholars, particularly in the past decade. The present research conducted a comprehensive scientometric analysis using the CiteSpace application to investigate the multifaceted phenomenon of translanguaging in the context of education. It addresses the pressing need for quantitative review efforts in the domain of translanguaging in education by employing visualization as an innovative means of presenting bibliometric data. This paper analyzes 680 relevant journal articles published between 2010 and 2022, identifies three phases in the development of translanguaging research, and highlights topics such as bilingual education, higher education, and language-in-education policy. The primary findings, presented through statistical analyses and succinct commentaries, are organized into four sections to address the research questions including 1) general situation, 2) leading geographical locations, 3) co-citation analysis, and 4) keywords co-occurrence analysis. The findings reveal the importance of exploiting students' linguistic repertoires and home languages in education to enhance learning and promote a sense of belonging. This review offers valuable resources for subsequent research in the domain of translanguaging in education that is founded on a better understanding of multilingualism and its significance in contemporary educational landscapes.

AltDiffusion: A Multilingual Text-to-Image Diffusion Model

Large Text-to-Image(T2I) diffusion models have shown a remarkable capability to produce photorealistic and diverse images based on text inputs. However, existing works only support limited language input, e.g., English, Chinese, and Japanese, leaving users beyond these languages underserved and blocking the global expansion of T2I models. Therefore, this paper presents AltDiffusion, a novel multilingual T2I diffusion model that supports eighteen different languages. Specifically, we first train a multilingual text encoder based on the knowledge distillation. Then we plug it into a pretrained English-only diffusion model and train the model with a two-stage schema to enhance the multilingual capability, including concept alignment and quality improvement stage on a large-scale multilingual dataset. Furthermore, we introduce a new benchmark, which includes Multilingual-General-18(MG-18) and Multilingual-Cultural-18(MC-18) datasets, to evaluate the capabilities of T2I diffusion models for generating high-quality images and capturing culture-specific concepts in different languages. Experimental results on both MG-18 and MC-18 demonstrate that AltDiffusion outperforms current state-of-the-art T2I models, e.g., Stable Diffusion in multilingual understanding, especially with respect to culture-specific concepts, while still having comparable capability for generating high-quality images. All source code and checkpoints could be found in https://github.com/superhero-7/AltDiffuson.

Pre-service teachers’ attitudes about teaching and learning in multilingual classrooms. Insights from the Austrian-wide summer school programme in 2021

ABSTRACT COVID-19-related school closures have caused educational disadvantages for school children around the world. Against this background, many countries have introduced catch-up programmes to counteract the growing educational inequality. The Austrian summer school was offered as such a supportive measure and primarily targeted learners with learning gaps, lower language skills, and German as an additional or second language (L2). In addition, pre-service teachers (PSTs) were, and still are, mainly involved in teaching during summer school. This study examines the extent to which PSTs believe they have the requisite knowledge and skills concerning linguistically and culturally responsive approaches to teach in multilingual classrooms to support students in catching up with potential learning losses. For this purpose, an online survey study was conducted during the nationwide implementation of the Austrian summer school 2021. Altogether, 109 PSTs in Western and Northeastern Austria were surveyed before and after participating in the summer school. The results show that despite their lack of knowledge and skills around linguistically responsive teaching approaches, PSTs experienced the summer school as a positive learning opportunity that improved their understanding of multilingualism and, according to their own assessments, supported their teaching skills in linguistically and culturally diverse contexts.

Transnational teacher educators’ critical reflection on multilingualism

ABSTRACT This study explored two teacher educators’ understanding of multilingualism and a change in their perception from monolingual native speakerism to multilingualism. Through exchanging the narrative about learning to be a professional and being a teacher educator in ESL and EFL settings, they deepened their understanding of multilingualism and heightened their critical awareness of monolingualism in their local contexts thereby gaining critical insights into the roles of language ideologies. The findings of the study were twofold. Firstly, native speakerism was still working as a dominant view in teacher education and had a great impact on nonnative English teachers’ identities and their teaching confidence. Secondly, critical reflection through narrative writing allowed the participants to reflect on the hidden sociopolitical influences of native speakerism that shape their perceptions and perspectives and reconstruct their identities as multilingual teacher educators. The findings imply the benefits of collaborative narrative for critical reflection on ideologies about race and language and for building empowered professional identities.

Multilingualism in incarnational ministry: A quest to reach the neglected

Language is a critical tool for communication. This article uses the autoethnographic methodology to describe the author’s experience of language acquisition, which has influenced his understanding of multilingualism in incarnational ministry. He belongs to a missional order, InnerCHANGE, that uses an incarnational approach to ministry. InnerCHANGE understands incarnational ministry as a mission to meaningfully identify with people its members live among. InnerCHANGE’s membership is of diverse backgrounds culturally. Multilingualism within the order and in ministry contexts in a way that makes communication smooth is still an ideal rather than a reality. This article asks how multilingualism could positively contribute to InnerCHANGE’s quest for a meaningful incarnational approach. It found out that multilingualism could be a tangible act of equity and justice. It could also be a way to affirm diversity in a world that is constantly on a quest for a lingua franca, a contradiction to the event of Pentecost found in Acts 2. Finally, it could be an act of solidarity towards the valorisation of languages that some people see as inferior. It concludes by stressing that black Africans should be at the forefront of valorising their native languages in proudly using them and producing knowledge that could be shared with fellow Africans and non-Africans.Contribution: This article intends to contribute to the ongoing debate on the relation of the gospel to culture. Its focus is on language, which is one of the components of a culture.

“Their Voice Should Be Allowed to Be Heard:” The Rhetorical Power of the University of New Mexico’s Bilingual Student Newspaper

In 1902, the congressional sub-committee on territories visited New Mexico to assess its fitness for statehood. Their subsequent report recommended against statehood, in part because too much Spanish was spoken throughout the territory. This historical moment provided a rhetorical exigency for the students at the University of New Mexico to use their student newspaper as a site for negotiating citizenship in a border space. By incorporating Spanish into their English-language newspaper, these students challenged monolingual notions of literacy and advocated for a multilingual understanding of American citizenship.

Developing multilingual practices in early childhood education through professional development in Luxembourg

ABSTRACT This paper investigates seven early education practitioners’ attitudes toward multilingual activities and translanguaging as well as their actual practices in Luxembourg. They took part in a professional development comprising a course, coaching, and regular meetings to deepen their understanding of multilingualism and language learning, and enable them to implement activities in multiple languages. The findings, drawn from questionnaires, observations, and interviews, show that all practitioners opened up toward multilingual activities and translanguaging, increased activities in such languages, and translanguaged frequently. The practitioners analyzed their beliefs and practices, connected theory and practice, constructed new knowledge, developed positive attitudes and changed their practice. This study is the first one to investigate the attitudes and practices of professionals in formal and non-formal education settings as well as the effect of professional development in Luxembourg. It also addresses the research gap regarding professional development on multilingualism in early childhood.

Affordance theory and multiple language learning and teaching

ABSTRACTThis article argues that the concept of affordances as put forward by James J. Gibson can make a major contribution to our understanding of multilingualism. It can throw some light on multilingualism in general as well as on specific aspects like successful and unsuccessful transfer, the challenges involved in teaching for multilingualism, opportunities for enhancing learner autonomy as well as for creating a sound basis for lifelong and lifewide learning, the particular importance of cooperative learning in multilingual settings, the pivotal role of motivation in multiple language learning, the effects of the political and social context on the emergence, maintenance or decay of multilingualism and the possibility of developing new quality criteria for multilingualism research. Affordance theory with its focus on the individual, the environment and the emergent character of language learning opportunities is particularly well-suited for dealing with the complexity of individual and societal multilingualism. As affordances are located between past experience and potential future action affordance theory takes prior learning experiences, future learning opportunities as well as situational motivational factors into account.

Emerging trilingual literacies in rural India: linguistic, marketing, and developmental aspects

This paper examines emerging forms of multilingualism and multiliteracy in rural India (where the term ‘literacy’ is used broadly here to include digital media literacy and marketing literacy as well as literacy in the traditional sense of the knowledge of a writing system). Here forces of globalization and digital communication have created unique communication circumstances that have a serious bearing on our understanding of multilingualism and on theoretical and practical issues concerning literacy in developing and rural societies. The newly emerging form of bimodal communication (man-machine and verbal-visual) is a product of a new village institution called an e-Choupal, a meeting place housing a computer with Internet access, where local farmers meet to learn about developments in farming, crop prices, etc., on the basis of contact with the world beyond the village through the use of computers. Traditionally, communication between members of the rural population and members of the mainstream population has been limited to the use of a mainstream variety – in this case, either Indian English or Standard Hindi – rather than the nonmainstream varieties of the rural population. In many cases in this as well as in other societies, this circumstance has lead to an instance of subtractive bilingualism in which the rural varieties have become less used and, eventually, extinct. In an e-Choupal, the local rural dialect plays a central role in communication between the manager of the e-Choupal and the e-Choupal's rural clientele, thus providing a case of additive multilingualism for the rural population through which the rural varieties will play a major role and will therefore have a chance to avoid extinction. Not only does the use of the local variety improve accuracy of communication, it also creates a high level of trust between the manager and the clientele based on shared sociolinguistic identity. This shared identity leads to a high level of success in the functioning of the e-Choupal as a center for the diffusion of innovations as predicted by Rogers’ general framework for the study of such centers; the paper proposes an analysis in terms of this framework. In addition, we analyze this case in terms of three contemporary theoretical research traditions – Social Identity Theory, Communication Accommodation Theory, and Markedness Theory.

Language and Participation

In this piece, I tackle a current subject of popular controversy - whether growing multilingualism in the United States imperils the future of American democracy. I offer a positive theory, centered on the value of democratic participation, of how a society like the United States should approach the multilingualism of its population. I conclude that embracing bilingualism in individuals and multilingualism in society is more likely to make linguistic pluralism socially functional and to sustain the vitality of public and social institutions than demanding public monolingualism. I begin by demonstrating that current approaches to language diversity in constitutional democracies, including our own, are largely remedial in nature. They focus either on ensuring the survival of particular minority groups historically present and marginalized in a given nation-state, or on helping immigrants overcome language barriers as they assimilate into the dominant language of the society in question. On its own, this remedial conception cannot ensure that linguistic diversity complements, rather than undermines, democratic institutions, because it does not account for the variety of linguistic interests present in a multiethnic society. I then address this limitation by offering an alternative, participatory theory of language difference. I base my conception of participation on principles of decentralized decisionmaking. This focus requires considering how to expand the individual's associative options and improve access to the mid-level social institutions where we live out most of our lives, such as the workplace and the public schools. In accommodating speakers of multiple languages in a given institution, we should focus on promoting social investment by individuals and groups, as well as preserving individual control over matters of deeply personal concern, rather than on the survival of particular languages or cultures. In developing this framework, I draw from the experiences of other multilingual societies and legal systems, but I present the United States as a case study to explain what a participatory approach would look like in practice. I focus on the major sites of language conflict in the United States - the political arena, the debate over official English, the workplace, and the public schools - and argue that a multilingual understanding of these sites and the legal rules that structure them best promotes participation.

An intercultural approach to implementing multilingualism at Rhodes University, South Africa

The work of intercultural communication theorists such as Ting-Toomey (1999) and Gudykunst (2003) has informed curriculum design and teaching methodology of the courses developed for teaching isiXhosa for vocational purposes to second language (L2) learners. This seems to be an appropriate theoretical paradigm within multilingual South Africa, where intercultural communication is becoming a daily reality for a growing portion of the population. We make use of this theory to introduce and develop experiential understanding of multilingualism at Rhodes University in various departments and, more generally, on campus. The interventions described in this article were developed within the South Africa - Norway Tertiary Education (SANTED) multilingualism programme at Rhodes University. The programme is a joint venture between the Norwegian government and the South African Department of Education. It is hosted by the African Language Studies Section in Rhodes University's School of Languages, within the Faculty of Humanities. Its aim is (i) to promote multilingualism through L2 teaching in the faculties of Pharmacy and Law, (ii) to develop bilingual material that will facilitate access to tertiary education for members of previously marginalised communities, and (iii) to promote scholarship and research on multilingualism in these contexts.

ISBD adaptation to semantic web of bibliographic data in linked data

Linked data is the current paradigm. All works, projects and applications have it as main tool, because of its potentiality. In linking data, the selected information, authorized, validated, recorded and structured in their databases for long time by cultural institutions as libraries, necessarily is going to play an important role. The work carried out by IFLA ISBD Review Group has had this goal in mind, to make possible that the information in our databases will be in the cloud, that is, “enhance the portability of bibliographic data in the semantic web environment and the interoperability of the ISBD with other content standards” as said in the Purpose of Consolidated ISBD, 2010. Many voices have spoken about the obscure language for users that represent the library language. Linked data can help in making it understandable. To reach this big objective much more, work than converting information in linked data is necessary. Declarations in RDF, definitions, and translations are essential to make really multilingual understanding, not only English semantic web.

Language identities, ideologies, and policy relevance

By examining specific articles on the subject, this commentary explores how language policies and use in Luxembourg individually and collectively inform the complex intersections of multilingualism/ecology, identities/agency and nationalism/ideology. These studies suggest theoretical and policy implications by investigating the topics of agency, ideology and ecology as these unfold in everyday situated practices. The papers specifically offer contributions to our understanding of multilingualism, transnational identities, and nationalism. The commentary concludes by suggesting the need for policies relevant to diverse linguistic and ethnic identities which, thus, foster educational and social equity.

Diminishing Intergroup Discordance through Cross-Cultural Communication Courses

Multilingual and multicultural societies are very often conflict-driven, and can be characterized by ethnolinguistic and cultural differentiations, social inequality etc. Discordance factor (D-factor) indicates dissonance, a lack of confidence, perceived inequity and animosity between two ethnic groups living together on one territory. The D-factor consists of four components: 1) the extent of legitimacy of the interethnic situation, 2) the extent of mutual lack of confidence, 3) the extent of mutual cooperativeness and 4) the extent of outgroup dehumanization. To measure these indicators, a questionnaire comprising 17 claims was created. In this paper I will discuss the findings of a pilot study carried out among Estonian and Russian-speaking students of Tallinn University. The purpose of the pilot study was to test whether statements adequately measure the factors that play a role in intergroup discordance such as legitimacy, confidence, cooperativeness and dehumanization. I will discuss how the D-factor is related to cross-cultural communication and how it could be reduced via majority and minority educational processes. I will argue that: 1) an understanding of multilingualism and multiculturalism ought to be developed that addresses the collective and individual needs of majority and minority students; 2) special courses in psychology and ethnosociology should be arranged to help majority and minority students to understand linguistic and cultural diversity. 1

Multilingual literacies in transnational digitally mediated contexts: an exploratory study of immigrant teens in the United States

This study explores the literacy practices that are involved in transnational social and information networking among youths of immigrant backgrounds in the United States. In particular, it investigates the ways in which young migrants of diverse national origins in the United States are utilising digital media to organise social relationships with friends and families, and engage with news and media products across the United States and their native countries. Based on results of interviews with 35 adolescents of diverse national origins, and survey data with a larger group of youths, this paper shows that digital media have become major tools and avenues for these young people to maintain and develop relations with people, media, and events across territorial boundaries. Within their digital networks, the youths mobilise multiple languages to conduct interpersonal relationships and seek out ideas and information from various sources in their ‘home’ and ‘host’ societies, and sometimes across a larger diaspora. We suggest that such literacy practices of a transnational scope provide a basis for re-assessing our understanding of multilingualism as both community and transnational resources and envisioning societal education that recognises and leverages such transnational resources in the literacy education of our young people.

Sprachdiagnostik bei Mehrsprachig Aufwachsenden Kindern

During the last years the testing and promoting of the competence in the languages of children of immigrants has become an interesting interdisciplinary domain and an important field of activity for the education policy in Germany. In the meantime, a great number of specific tests for investigating the competence of speech exist in Germany. Many of them have been evaluated on the basis of several methods. Most of them are characterized by an easy handling because performance and analysis can be done within a relatively short time. On the other hand, most of these procedures are not standardized and neglect theories of language development; moreover, they disregard the multilingual living conditions and the competence in languages of children. This can cause problems for the planning, the execution and effectiveness of the advancement. These difficulties could be avoided when bearing in mind a well-integrated understanding of multilingualism when considering the faculty of speech of a multilingual child; the child, however, should be regarded as an entireness and being investigated by one single method. In this case, all structures, rules of grammer and elements of each of the spoken languages should be compiled, including the specific conditions of socialization and living. These requirements concerning the diagnosis of the language still contain several unfulfilled conditions like the collecting of empiric results and the development of theoretical approaches concerning specific problems as to the “normal” and the “noticeable” linguistic development course resp. as well as the learning of the second language.

Multilingualism in England

A great deal has happened in the study and understanding of multilingualism in England since it was last considered inARAL(Reid 1985). To examine these changes, this review will concentrate on the dynamic and contested relationships among 1) educational policy, 2) academic discourse, and 3) everyday sociolinguistic practice. Our account is limited to England and to its newer heritage languages; due to limitations of space, it also does not provide any detailed discussion of particular languages. For fuller sociolinguistic discussion of thirty one of these, we refer the reader to Alladina and Edwards (1991), a major step forwards in the documentation of linguistic diversity in the British Isles which provides an idea of the wide but uneven spread of multilingualism across a range of institutional sites (including, for example, press and broadcasting as well as education).