Contact as a Policy Mechanisim in Integrated schools in Israel and Northern Ireland

Policy initiatives in inter-group education evolved in Northern Ireland and Israel at around the same
time. In each jurisdiction, the emphasis is on improving relations between protagonist groups in
ethnically divided societies. Central to this objective and at the core of integrated education
(Northern Ireland) and bilingual/bi-national education (Israel) is sustained contact in a shared
learning environment. Based on qualitative research in four schools, this paper examines the nature
of the contact experience in two integrated schools in Northern Ireland and two bilingual/binational
schools in Israel. Through comparative analysis, and with reference to contact theory, it
illuminates some of the contextual and process variables that seemingly mediate the quality and
moderate the effectiveness of contact in each school setting.

'From Neo-Latin to Vernacular: Marvell's Bilingualism and Renaissance Pedagogy'

This chapter contextualises Marvell's Latin poetry in relation to seventeenth-century pedagogical theory and practice, with particular focus on bilingual textbooks, double translation methodology, and etymological alertness. An analysis of several Marvellian case-studies serves to highlight the influence of pedagogical bilingualism upon his poetic creativity.

'The Adorning of My Native Tongue: Linguistic Metamorphosis in Milton'

This chapter, in a prize-winnng volume, examines Milton's bilingual practices in relation to his translation of Horace, Odes 1, 5 and the 1645 volume as a whole. Drawing upon seventeenth-century pedagogical practice and methodology it examines the potential importance of his schooling and university exercises to the methodology of Paradise Lost.

Tracing Inspiration in Proverbial Material: From 'The Royal Dictionary' (1699 & 1729) of Abel Boyer to 'The English-Irish Dictionary' (1732) of Begley-McCurtin.

This metalexicographic study examines the relationship between the proverbial material in The English-Irish Dictionary (1732) of Begley and McCurtin, Abel Boyer’s The Royal Dictionary (First edition 1699, second edition 1729), and Nathaniel Bailey’s An Universal Etymological English Dictionary (1721). It will show, for the first time, that both the English macrostructure and microstructure of the proverbial entries in Begley and McCurtin (1732) were reproduced directly from Boyer’s dictionary and, in spite of claims to the contrary, the impact of Bailey’s (1721) dictionary was negligible. Furthermore, empirical data gleaned from a comparative linguistic analysis of the various editions of The Royal Dictionary prior to 1732, will prove that it was the second official edition (1729) that was used as the framework for The English-Irish Dictionary. A quantitative and qualitative analysis of the nature of the proverbial entries will also outline the various translation strategies that were used to compose the Irish material— particularly literal translation—and show that there are extremely high-levels of borrowings from Boyer (1729), both in terms of the English entries under the lemma, and the French entries in the comment.

Marvell's Latin Poetry and the Art of Punning

This chapter analyses Marvell’s linguistic ingenuity as exemplified by his Latin poetic corpus. Here, it is argued, a pseudo Lucretian sensitivity to the parallelism between the structure of Latin words and the structure of the world co-exists with a linguistic methodology that is essentially Marinesque. Close examination of the Latin poems as a whole assesses the nature and significance of etymological play, paronomasia, puns on juxtaposed Latin words, on place names, and on personal names. It is suggested that such devices demonstrate ways in which the neo-Latin poetic text can serve both as a linguistic microcosm of the literary contexts in which they are employed, and as a re-invention of the artifice, extravagant conceits, and baroque wit of Marinism. The result is a neo-Latin ‘echoing song’ that is both intra- and intertextual. Through bilingual punning and phonological wit Marvell plays with a classical language only to demonstrate its transformative potential. The chapter concludes by offering a new reading of Hortus in relation to the garden sections of Marino’s L’Adone, in which an extravagantly luscious setting confounds the senses and is mirrored linguistically by word-clusters and labyrinthine punning.

Religious Political Parties and the Limits of Political Liberalism

Political parties have only recently become a subject of investigation in political theory. In this paper I analyse religious political parties in the context of John Rawls’s political liberalism. Rawlsian political liberalism, I argue, overly constrains the scope of democratic political contestation and especially for the kind of contestation channelled by parties. This restriction imposed upon political contestation risks undermining democracy and the development of the kind of democratic ethos that political liberalism cherishes. In this paper I therefore aim to provide a broader and more inclusive understanding of ‘reasonable’ political contestation, able to accommodate those parties (including religious ones) that political liberalism, as customarily understood, would exclude from the democratic realm. More specifically, I first embrace Muirhead and Rosenblum’s (Perspectives on Politics 4: 99–108 2006) idea that parties are ‘bilingual’ links between state and civil society and I draw its normative implications for party politics. Subsequently, I assess whether Rawls’s political liberalism is sufficiently inclusive to allow the presence of parties conveying religious and other comprehensive values. Due to Rawls’s thick conceptions of reasonableness and public reason, I argue, political liberalism risks seriously limiting the number and kinds of comprehensive values which may be channelled by political parties into the public political realm, and this may render it particularly inhospitable to religious political parties. Nevertheless, I claim, Rawls’s theory does offer some scope for reinterpreting the concepts of reasonableness and public reason in a thinner and less restrictive sense and this may render it more inclusive towards religious partisanship.

Neural basis of language switching in the brain: fMRI evidence from Korean-Chinese early bilinguals

Using fMRI, we conducted two types of property generation task that involved language switching, with early bilingual speakers of Korean and Chinese. The first is a more conventional task in which a single language (L1 or L2) was used within each trial, but switched randomly from trial to trial. The other consists of a novel experimental design where language switching happens within each trial, alternating in the direction of the L1/L2 translation required. Our findings support a recently introduced cognitive model, the 'hodological' view of language switching proposed by Moritz-Gasser and Duffau. The nodes of a distributed neural network that this model proposes are consistent with the informative regions that we extracted in this study, using both GLM methods and Multivariate Pattern Analyses: the supplementary motor area, caudate, supramarginal gyrus and fusiform gyrus and other cortical areas.