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School of Linguistics and English Language Newsletter 2005 - 06

Hi there..

Just a brief note to update you all on the latest happenings within the department involving both staff and students..

Dr Deuchar obtained a grant from the British Academy for a project on code-switching.

Dr Deuchar is co-leader (with Dr Colin Baker), of the Bilingualism Research Group, which is part of the University of Wales Institute for Social and Cultural Affairs.

Dr Deuchar was interviewed on Radio Cymru in February at the start of a lecture series on Bilingualism.

Dr Williams ran a one week workshop on “Reading in a second language”, in the Philippines. The workshop was held in Cebu (the second city), and participants came from all over the Philippines, a country with over 80 languages. The workshop was sponsored by the British Council and the National Educators Academy of the Philippines and supported by the Reading Association of the Philippines. Pictures above from the workshop.

Dr Pam MacDonald organised the “Language and Language Use in a Bilingual Context” – Colloquium at Gregynog for staff and students. Supported by the Cemlyn Jones Trust and the British Association for Applied Linguistics (BAAL). An interesting programme, lively lectures, good food and a gorgeous setting in Gregynog, all contributed to a great weekend for both staff and students. Hopefully to be repeated in the near future!!

Pictures below: Gregynog in Mid-Wales owned by the University of Wales.

Pictures below: Students enjoying the collouium at Gregynog

Publication of "The screening effects of English in Sub-Saharan Africa", by Dr Eddie Williams. In "Den fleirspraklege utfordringa" (The Multilingual Challenge) Helge Sandoy, Endre Brunstad, Jon Erik Hagen and Kari Tenfjord (eds.) Oslo: Novus Press. pp. 28-53.

Dr Williams gave a paper on "The effect of the vehicular language on classroom participation in Malawi" at the joint 3rd International ADALEST Conference and 5th Malawian National Language Symposium at Mangochi in Malawi. ADALEST stands for the Association for the Development of African Languages in Education, Science and Technology. The international participation at this very lively conference of around 150 people, included Professor Ayo Bamgboche, a pioneer of languages in education in Nigeria. The Conference was funded by the German Government international development agency, GTZ (Gesellschaft fur Technische Zusammenarbeit). Dr Williams was subsequently invited to become a member of the ADALEST Board of Advisors.

Publication of "Research and Policy on Language in Education in Africa" by Dr Eddie Williams. In NORRAG News, Number 34, Special Issue on language politics and the politics of language. pp. 34-37. (for information see: http://www.norag.org).

Dr Williams gave a repeat presentation of his paper "The effect of the vehicular language on classroom participation in Malawi" at the Afri-track colloquium during the BAAL Annual Conference held at Kings College London from 9th-11th September. As secretary of BAAL (British Association of Applied Linguistics), he also attended the Annual General Meeting of BAAL which was held during the conference.

April 2005: Dr Eddie Wiliams gave an invited keynote plenary at the Fifth Annual English Language Teaching Conference, hosted by Sultan Qaboos University in the Sultanate of Oman. The theme of the Conference was reading and the talk given by Dr Williams was entitled, Reading, Language Learning and Thinking. His visit was funded by the British Council and Sultan Qaboos University. During the conference he met Alaa al Musali, currently registered as his PhD supervisee in the Department.

August 2005: A new corpus of spoken Welsh and Welsh-English code-switching is now available to researchers as part of the Talkbank database, to be found at http://talkbank.org/data/LIDES (click on Bangor.zip). It consists of about 2.5 hours of recordings of informal conversations involving groups or pairs of speakers in North-West Wales and about 2.5 hours of excerpts from BBC Radio Cymru programmes. The data can be used for research on Welsh-English code-switching as well as general research on spoken Welsh.

The corpus was transcribed at the University of Wales, Bangor, as part of a small research project led by Prof Margaret Deuchar, funded by the British Academy, entitled "Structural aspects of Welsh-English code-switching". The main theoretical aim of the project was to test Myers-Scotton's (2002) Matrix Language Frame (MLF) model of code-switching with Welsh-English data. For further information contact Prof Margaret Deuchar (m.deuchar@bangor.ac.uk).

September 2005: Professor Margaret Deuchar began work on a new research project. It is entitled "Code-switching and convergence in Welsh: a universal versus a typological approach" and is funded by a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (£315,922) over a five year period, from 2005-2010. The project currently employs two part-time research assistants, Marika Fusser and Nesta Roberts, a part-time secretary, Ellen Kimpton, and a part-time technician, Gary Smith. In addition, there are two PhD students attached to the project, Peredur Davies and Jonathan Stammers.

In this project about 40 hours of informal conversations between Welsh-English bilingual speakers will be recorded, transcribed and analysed and deposited in an international electronic archive (Talkbank) for other scholars to use.

The project will also evaluate two competing models of linguistic description of code-switching. One of the models is claimed to be universally applicable to virtually all data, while the other predicts several possible patterns which may vary according to factors like the type of languages concerned and how long they have been in contact. This project will break new theoretical and empirical ground in determining which approach is most viable in accounting for Welsh-English code-switching data and for any evidence of convergence to English in Welsh as a result of contact-induced language change.

The PhD project students will use the data to address issues such as the relation between code-switching and social factors such as age, gender and education, and how the Welsh-English data compare with those collected from other pairs of languages, e.g. English-Spanish or Arabic-French. Work done by the two PhD students will help to determine to what extent the findings from this project are language-specific or governed by extra-linguistic factors.

September 2005: My name is Anna Badman and I am a former Linguistics student of the University of Wales, Bangor. I graduated last July. I am writing because I wish to thank you for your dedication to Linguistics and the contagious enthusiasm you show for your subject. I studied both the Forensic Linguistics module and the English and Globalistion module in my last year at Bangor and both modules inspired me. I fully intended to take up an MA in Forensic Linguistics at Cardiff University, but felt myself drawn instead to take up a job working for Wycliffe Bible Translators. This firm works at translating the bible for lesser known or minority languages. In some projects the first task is to develop an orthography, as they will not have been written down previously. The task I have been given is to train nationals to teach reading, writing and numeracy skills,to others. I will also be involved in collecting local information so that culturally relevant material such as folk-tales, local history and fables, may be developed. I feel priviledged to play some small part in this work and to be able to give more power and freedom to speakers of this minority language. Thank you Frank for all your support and Eddie for your inspirational lectures in mapping out education through a second language medium in Africa.

June 9th 2006: One Day Workshop in memory of Professor Alan R. Thomas.

On Friday 9th June, Professor Margaret Deuchar and Dr Eddie Williams will be travelling to Cardiff University, to attend a one day workshop in memory of Professor Alan Thomas, who worked in the department and was well known for his influential work on the Welsh Language and Welsh Dialects. He died on 6th April, 2005. Professor Deuchar and Marika Fusser, will be talking about "Code Switching and the future of the Welsh Language" and Dr Williams will be giving a talk entitled:"Post-colonialisation of the mind? What language attitudes in Wales tell us".

In early July,2006, members of the AHRC project on Welsh-English code-switching will be attending the 16th Sociolinguistics Symposium in Limerick, Republic of Ireland. Professor Margaret Deuchar and Peredur Davies will be giving a paper entitled:"Using Lides to test alternative models of code-switching". In this paper we report on our experience using the LIDES system for the transcription and coding of Welsh-English code-switching data, with a view to testing alternative models of code-switching. We focus here on the issues arising from using the transcripts to test Myers-Scotton's (2002) Matrix Language Frame (MLF) Model and Muysken's (2000) typological model. Both models pose the following challenges for transcription and coding: a) to identify the language source of each word or morpheme of the data; and b) to identify clause structure. In relation to a) we report on the criteria we used to identify and code the language source in our Welsh-English data, and on problems that we faced. In relation to b) we discuss the use of the LIDES tools to identify clause boundaries and thus isolate the units of analysis needed to test both models. We note the problems arising with the tools available and in making decisions about how to handle complex clauses involving subordination. Finally, we report on the development of a quantitative method to test each model and on our preliminary results. We note that the MLF model seems to work well, though it only applies to intra-clausal switching and depends on word order differences and rich morphology. The typological model has a broader scope but is more tricky to quantify. We discuss the implications for future research.

References: Muysken,P/ (2000). Bilingual Speech: A Typology of Code-Mixing. Cambridge: CUP

Myers-Scotton, C. (2002). Contact Linguistics:bilingual encounters and grammatical outcomes. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

7-10 November 2006: Professor Margaret Deuchar has been invited to attend the "Cradle of Language Conference" in Spier,Stellenbosch, South Africa. The theme of the conference is the evolutionary emergence of human language in Africa. The objectives of the Conference are:

to reassess the merits and limitations of the view that human language emerged in Africa
to consider new evidence and/or arguments for or against the view that langauge emerged in Africa

Professor Deuchar will be giving a paper entitled: "Code-switching and language evolution" and the abstract of her paper follows:

This paper will examine the role of code-switching in language contact and consequent language evolution with special reference to Welsh-English bilingualism. Welsh is one of the oldest languages in Britain, but is currently spoken only in a gegraphically remote area by those who are bilingual in Welsh and the dominant language, English. This bilingualism leads to overt language contact in the form of code-switching from Welsh to English. With reference to informal conversational data, collected from Welsh-English speaakers, this paper will show how both monolingual and bilingual utterances exhibit the effect of contact with English. The implications of these findings for our understanding of language contact as a mechanism of language evolution will be discussed.