Celia's Blog

Welcome to my blog everyone! I'm a Linguistics research student at the University of Essex. Keep an eye on this blog if you want to find out more about student life at Essex, trips, events and whatever catches my attention https://www.essex.ac.uk/langling/staff/profile.aspx?ID=2675

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Colchester food festival!!

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Answers to your questions

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English countryside!

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Professor Ianthi Tsimpli (University of Cambridge) at one of the plenary sessions today @LangUe3016!

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LinC summer school

The LinC summer school and workshop  will be held at Cardiff University from August 31 to September 2 2016.  We offer a choice of two courses which are being run in parallel:

Introduction to Systemic Functional Linguistics

SFL and languages other than English, including topics such as typology, translation, language description and annotation.  

Please view the website for complete details: http://blogs.cardiff.ac.uk/linc/linc-summer-school-and-workshop/2016-linc-summer-school-and-workshop/

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CRELLA summer research seminar

he CRELLA Summer Research Seminar will be held on Thursday, July 7th on the theme of 'Teachers' assessment literacy enhancement' at the Centre for Research in English Language Learning and Assessment (CRELLA), University of Bedfordshire (Putteridge Bury Campus), UK. 9:45    Registration & Coffee

10:00    Welcome 10:15-11:00    "Language assessment in the global education policy landscape" by Rebecca Hughes (Director of International Education, British Council / Honorary Professor of Applied Linguistics and International Education, University of Nottingham) 11:00-11:45    "Learning Oriented Assessment: a systemic approach" by Neil Jones (formerly Assistant Director, Research and Validation, Cambridge English Language Assessment) 11:45-12:15    "Developing a language assessment literacy survey for use across different contexts" by Luke Harding (Senior Lecturer, Lancaster University) & Benjamin Kremmel (University of Innsbruck / University of Nottingham) 12:15    Lunch 13:15-13:45    "Teachers Assessment Literacy Enhancement Needs Analysis" by Tony Green (Professor in Language Assessment, CRELLA, University of Bedfordshire) 13:45-14:15    "The impact of teachers’ concerns on assessment innovation" by Liz Hamp-Lyons (Distinguished Professor of Education and Language, the Open University of Hong Kong) 14:15    Coffee 14:30-15:15    "Making a Difference:  Exploring the impact of the Tempus- ProSET Project" by Ludmila Kozhevnikova (Assistant Professor of Foreign Language Education, Samara State University) 15:15-16:00    "The balancing act of assessment – Enhancing learning and fairness" by Gudrun Erickson (Professor of Education in Language and Assessment, University of Gothenburg) 16:00    Round-up 16:15    Hail & Farewell For the full programme with abstracts, please visit our website: http://www.beds.ac.uk/crella/seminars

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Bilingual People International Language Recruitment Fair

Date: 18th June Location: Marriott International Hotel, Inge-Beisheim-Platz 1, 10785 Berlin, Germany  Registration link: http://www.bilingualpeople.de/candidate/register/ Less than 2 weeks to go for the Language Bilingual People International Recruitment Fair, REGISTER NOW! Whether you are Bilingual/ Multilingual and are looking to use your language skills in a new career in Germany, or a German speaking professional looking to relocate throughout Europe, don’t miss our Bilingual People International Recruitment Fair which returns to Berlin this year again on the 18th June 2016, which is in less than two weeks! Whether you are looking for an opportunity to start an international career, to immerse in a new culture, or are just looking to use your language skills in your next position, the event offers bilingual and multilingual professionals access to hundreds of available positions from leading international companies and recruitment agencies based in Berlin, Germany and across Europe, in employment sectors such as Customer Service, Accountancy & Finance, IT, Sales, Gaming/Betting, plus many more.

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The Multilingual University: The impact of linguistic diversity in higher education in English-dominant and EMI contexts ESRC seminar series

Final conference: The linguistic landscape in higher education in English dominant and EMI settings: Future directions

Friday 8 July, 9.30-18.30 & Saturday 9 July 2016, 9.30-16.00

UCL Institute of Education

Despite an established body of knowledge on linguistic diversity and bi/multilingual learners in compulsory and complementary schooling, there is little established knowledge on linguistic diversity in higher education in English-dominant and EMI (English as a Medium of Instruction) settings. All too often the linguistic diversity brought about by a culturally diverse staff and student population is ignored or treated as a problem to be fixed rather than as a resource for enriching the sector and for fostering a vibrant and fair society and intercultural understanding. In the concluding conference in the ESRC’s

The Multilingual University

seminar series, we will pull together issues arising from the seminar series related to language policies, practices, identities and ideologies in linguistically diverse contexts in higher education in English-dominant and EMI settings under the seminar themes of internationalisation, widening participation and language revitalisation. We will discuss current and future avenues of research for examining, maintaining, fostering and raising the visibility of linguistic diversity in higher education in the Anglophone world and in EMI settings and for illuminating the idea of the ‘multilingual university’ in these contexts. The conference will showcase examples of research and practice in which linguistic diversity is used as a resource.

Keynote speakers: Jasone Cenoz (University of the Basque Country UPV/ EHU) & Durk Gorter (University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU; IKERBASQUE – Basque Foundation for Science), Kristina Hultgren (Open University), Karen M; Lauridsen (Aarhus University & IntlUni Coordinator) & Steve Marshall (Simon Fraser University)

Further details of the speakers, abstracts and programme can be found on the seminar series website at https://multilingualuniversity.wordpress.com

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Language Game volunteering opportunity

Would you like to do fun craft session with kids or help people living in Essex care homes enjoy life?

The Essex Language Games Club is collaborating with the Friends and Neighbours charity to bring together children from local schools and residents in care homes to play language games. They’re looking for volunteers to help them and the children create materials for these games.

You can support a great project, learn about language games, and learn or share craft and sewing skills. The game-creation sessions take place in a Colchester school, every Friday from 1-3pm until 1 July.

Join them for some or all of the sessions. Find out more: http://bit.ly/22nA8gn and contact our Language Games Frontrunner Pori Saikia ([email protected]) to make arrangements.

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Just paying a quick tribute to a great man (and soundtrack!)

" Give everything your best shot” and "Outrun the opponent who loses sight of the goal."

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LANGUE 2016

The Eleventh Language at the University of Essex Postgraduate Conference. Thursday 16 June 2016, 9.00 am to 5.00 pm

In the Teaching Centre (2.12, 2.13, 2.8 and 2.9). University of Essex, Colchester, UK

The Department of Language and Linguistics at the University of Essex invites you to its eleventh postgraduate conference which will be held at the University of Essex on Thursday 16 June 2016, 9.00 am to 5.00 pm.

The conference aims at bringing together postgraduate students to present and discuss current research, results and problems from any field of linguistics.

Call for Papers, Posters & Workshops

Abstracts of no more than 400 words are invited on any topic in linguistics. They should include name and institution. The deadline for receiving abstracts for oral presentations or poster presentations and workshops is Monday 14th of March 2016, 23:59 (UK Time).

Please send your abstract to https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=langue2016

All abstracts should be in accordance with the formatting guidelines laid out in the attached form.

Note that no late submissions will be accepted. All submissions will be peer-reviewed.

Proceedings

Submission to the 'Proceedings of the LangUE' will be invited from all those who present their work at the LangUE 2016. Submissions must be emailed to [email protected] by 16 June 2016, and revised papers may be submitted in the two weeks following the conference (to allow for revisions following comments/discussion at the conference). Proceedings guidelines will be available

through the website shortly. The proceedings will be published online on http://www.essex.ac.uk/langling/conferences/langue/default.aspx.

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Working with Words: Supporting understanding of discipline-specific vocabulary in IFPs.

The seventh annual InForm conference is being held at Durham University on Saturday 16 July 2016 and is themed:

Working with Words: Supporting understanding of discipline-specific vocabulary in IFPs.

Keynote speakers are:

Michael McCarthy Emeritus Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Nottingham.

Dawn Knight Senior Lecturer in Applied Linguistics at Cardiff University

Speaker Proposals

Focus is on sessions on how people select and teach academic and discipline-specific vocabulary on IFPs. In particular we are interested in receiving proposals which involve collaboration between tutors across subject areas. Those who do not teach on IFPs but are involved in EAP and have proposals that are relevant to the conference theme are also invited to submit.

The form for submitting a talk, workshop or poster proposal is here: https://www.dur.ac.uk/resources/conference.booking/InFormSpeakerProposalForm.pdf

Deadline for submitting a proposal is 30 April 2016.

Registration:

Conference Fee: £60 (includes attendance to the 1 day conference, refreshments, lunch and a copy of the conference booklet).

Book online here: https://www.dur.ac.uk/conference.booking/details/?id=520

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Speech Science Forum talks!

The next Speech Science Forum talk will take place next Wednesday, 2nd March at 4pm in Room G10, Chandler House, UCL.

Speaker: Janet Pierrehumbert (University of Oxford)

Title: Real Words, Possible Words, and New Words

Abstract:

" Words that are possible in a language, but have no associated meanings, provide a window into people’s mental representations of language sound structure. They are heavily used by psycholinguists for experiments on language acquisition and lexical processing. Some such words are adopted as new words — indeed people acquire and create new words throughout their lives.

In this talk, I will first review some classic results about how people judge novel words and create new words, highlighting the following findings: Wordlikeness judgments are gradient, and reflect the statistical phonotactics of the language. When faced with novel word forms, people infer both a phonological analysis and a morphological analysis: their judgments are based on the best available morphological analysis. Morphemes that are recognised in many known words recombine to make new words, providing the dominant source of lexical innovation. These findings mean that the lexical system is probabilistic and has more than one level of representation.

Then, I will present three new collaborative projects aimed at further understanding of exactly how such a system is built and used: A statistical algorithm for bootstrapping the lexicon by segmenting the speech stream into word candidates (w. Robert Daland). An algorithm for using top down information (a small number of known words) to seed the morphological analysis of Tagalog and Zulu (w. Peter Baumann). A computational and experimental project to develop a new pseudoword database, which will be released as PseudoLex, and understand how phonotactic and morphological information interact in wordlikeness ratings for the items in it (w. Jeremy Needle and Jen Hay)."

There will be wine and nibbles provided after the talk at the atrium.

The SSF schedule for this and next term can be found on our website:

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/pals/research/shaps/speech-sci-forum

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EPALE: Electronic Platform for Adult Learning in Europe

To mark International Women’s Day on March the 8th EPALE, the European Commission’s 'Electronic Platform for Adult Learning in Europe’ (https://ec.europa.eu/epale) will be holding an online discussion: “How can adult learning help to address gender inequality?”. As well as the discussion there will be a landing page series of reports and blogs from adult educators on the issue of gender and adult education.  I will post the url of this as soon as it is ready. It would be great if members of this list could contribute. If you want to post comments and interact with colleagues across Europe you will need to register first (https://ec.europa.eu/epale/en/user/register).  You can see last month's discussion of Prison Education as an introduction to EPALE and to get an idea of what to expect (https://ec.europa.eu/epale/en/discussions/epale-prison-education-week). In April there will be a week dedicated to Migrant Education – more on that nearer the time.

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A performance at the Lakeside theatre!

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Fourth Annual Roundtable on Forensic Linguistics and Phonetics

The Fourth Annual Roundtable on Forensic Linguistics and Phonetics will be held from the 26th to the 28th of August 2016 in Mainz, Germany.  The Roundtable is sponsored by the Germanic Society of Forensic Linguistics (GSFL).  The purpose of this conference is to provide FL/FP researchers, educators, and practitioners the opportunity to share their work in an interdisciplimary, supportive, and respectiful scholarly environment.   Paper and poster submissions are cordially welcome on any area of FL/FP.  Examples of possible presentation topics include the following: FORENSIC LINGUISTICS (speaker identification; authorship identification, verification, and attribution; plagiarism detection; linguistic profiling; corpus analysis of forensic texts such as courtroom transcripts, police protocols, suicide letters, confessions, ransom notes, threatening letters, etc.); FORENSIC PHONETICS (speaker discrimination; perceptual speaker identification; foreign/second language speaker identification; formant measurement, dynamics, and pattern identification; automated speaker recognition; intra- and interspeaker variation); LANGUAGE AND THE LAW ( language minorities and the law;ear witnesses and lineups; courtroom interpreting and translating; multilingualism and the legal system; legal discourse and legal texts; interviewing and interrogation practices; deception detection); FL/FP AND EDUCATION (developing FL/FP programs and curricula; FL/FP instructional materials; interdisciplinary challenges and promises; teaching ethical standards; establishing scientific codes of practice). To encourage continuing interest in FL/FP, a special Student Day will be held for undergraduates and graduates who are interested in researching and working within this field.  All interested participants are requested to submit a 250 word abstract by June 10, 2016 via the GSFL website <http://www.gsfl.info/roundtable--16.html> If you have any questions about the Roundtable or the GSFL, please do not hesitate to contact, Dr. I. M. Nick <[email protected])