Blog
A bilingual writer corpus for research on biliteracy
The language corpus (a large, structured collection of authentic language texts) has become a valuable resource for research on language. Corpora offer large, representative samples of 'real world' language use, which can be searched for examples of words or constructions; they are often enriched with annotations so that they can be searched for particular ideas, errors or other features. However, until very recently language corpora have not been prepared with a focus on biliteracy...
Creative translanguaging in teacher education
While teaching a Children's Literature course to bilingual Emirati teacher candidates in an Early Childhood Education program in an English-medium university in the United Arab Emirates, we were keen to incorporate a first-language dimension into the course. While the course content and textbook drew upon 'global' literature for children in English, they did not refer much to Arabic (the first language of the teacher candidates in the class) nor to local culture. We took a course assignment from a Children's Literature course that required students to create a picture storybook in English for young learners, and recast it as a translingual task wherein Arabic (both standard and vernacular forms) and English were blended together to tell a contemporary story for young bilingual Emirati learners...
Digital reading, social media and the Change Laboratory approach
This strand of Zayed University's Languaging research cluster sets out to tell a new story about academic reading in the Arab region. It looks at the role of digital reading in higher education, and in particular the multimodal affordances that social media has to offer bilingual readers. 'Multimodal' refers to the different modes of a particular text or event (for example: graphic, linguistic, audio, image, video, hypertext, etc.); and social media such as Instagram or Snapchat include a mix of these modes. Considering the positive attitudes to digital reading and social media in the UAE in contrast to a resistance to academic reading in the Arab region, social media may offer the potential to help students engage with academic reading, through sharing images, discussion and interaction...
Surrey meets Syracuse: collaborative research meeting in Upstate New York
A recent international research visit demonstrated how membership of a research cluster such as this one can facilitate scholarship and personal relationships...
Translanguaging in South African Higher Education
South Africa in recent years has seen a student protest movement which has sought to 'decolonise' the university - epitomized by the #RMF protests in 2015 to remove the statue of Cecil Rhodes, a British imperialist, from the campus of the University of Cape Town. Our unit, the Humanities Education Development Unit at the University of Cape Town, has been responding to these student calls through a series of research projects and curriculum changes which have sought to find ways to decolonize the humanities (arts and social sciences) curriculum and pedagogy at our university...
Will students get better scores on a math test if the language of the test is simplified? Probably not.
As ESL learners, our students are required to have an acceptable level of English proficiency in speaking, writing, reading, and listening for university admission. It is also a fact that students have been exposed to English in their earlier schooling and in their communities. However, it becomes very obvious that this level of proficiency and exposure may be inadequate to tackle university-level studies, and many students struggle. Typically, instructors see these academic performance deficiencies primarily in test results. It is logical then for instructors to wonder whether simplifying the language used on tests could help students do better on these assessments...
A textbook for ESL media writers
Dr. Effrosyni Georgiadou and I are working on developing a textbook for students who learn writing for the media in English as their second language. This textbook is meant to teach ESL writers how to write for news audiences. At the same time, the textbook addresses the most common English grammar errors we see in students' work here in the UAE. Pictures are our main tool for helping ESL writers in mastering their trade...
Monolingual immersion versus translanguaging in the Arabic foreign language classroom
As part of the LHEBC cluster, a research team at Syracuse University, USA recently concluded a 10-week, longitudinal study on effective ways to teach Arabic as a foreign language to English-speaking beginners in a community-based setting in the USA. The study targeted Modern Standard Arabic, with a major focus on oral-aural skills, vocabulary, and some basic grammar. Writing activities employed transliteration using the Roman alphabet. Two courses, each with 20 students, were taught contrasting a monolingual immersive pedagogy (as close to exclusive use of Arabic as possible) versus a translanguaging pedagogy, in which the use of Arabic was complemented by use of English at the instructor's discretion for classroom functions such as activity instructions, grammar and vocabulary explanations, and cultural notes...
Student talk in seminars: Does the tutor's attitude matter?
In my current research I am investigating how a tutor's attitudes towards talk and interaction, especially by students, influences their instructional practices in university seminars. I am interested particularly in classroom talk which is dialogic - that is, talk which is reciprocal (students and teachers listen actively to each other), collective (students and teachers address tasks together), supportive (students speak without fear of embarrassment), cumulative (students and teacher build on each other's ideas) and purposeful (teacher uses talk in pursuit of educational goals) (Alexander, 2006). Research suggests that dialogic talk supports deeper learning of content (Hardman, 2016) and helps to shape knowledge through processes such as hypothesizing and debating (Barnes, 2010). To get a picture of the diversity in talk and instructional practices in seminars across disciplinary areas, consider first of all the excerpts below taken from two seminars at a university in the UK...
Why "languaging"?
We have called this cluster of research projects "Languaging and higher education in bilingual contexts"; and you might be wondering: is 'languaging' a real word? How is it different from 'language'? Although language is often viewed as a 'thing' which sits in dictionaries, in grammar books or in the heads of native speakers, the term 'languaging' has been used in recent years to get us to look again at language as a process - as a way of achieving goals, of taking action, of relating to the world around us. This notion of language as action has roots in de Saussure's (1915) idea of 'parole', or Chomsky's (1965) 'performance', but it brings to the forefront the importance of how language is used in daily life, together with other means, in the "process of making meaning and shaping knowledge and experience" (Swain, 2006, p. 98). When students graduate, we want...