Flat, flatter, flattest: the English Heritage wetland surveys in retrospect

Since 1973, English Heritage has supported four major regional surveys of England's wetlands- in the Somerset Levels, the Fens of Eastern England, the wetlands of the northwest of England and the Humber wetlands. Each of these projects developed a range of methods and techniques particular to the landscape that was studied and the results from the surveys reflect this diversity of approach. This paper compares and contrast these approaches, and evaluates their effect on the overall results of each of these surveys.

English Heritage wetlands strategy

English Heritage Wetlands Strategy: includes Lists A, B and C from the Heritage Management of England's Wetlands Project

Finding the 'first voice' in rural England: the challenges of safeguarding intangible heritage in a national museum

This paper is an attempt to explore the challenges of defining intangible heritage and ‘community’ in England. It uses as its case study the Museum of English Rural Life, University of Reading: an urban museum with a rural theme. The paper examines current theoretical discourse around the concept of the ‘first voice’ and debate about the role of museums in the preservation of intangible heritage. It then examines the relevance of these concepts to the identification of ‘rural’ intangible heritage stake holders in England. In this way, it shows the potential for concepts of intangible heritage to influence national museums. However, by applying theory and practice which is designed to support work with well-defined ‘originating communities’ to a national museum, it also highlights the challenges of initiating community engagement in a multicultural society.

A prolegomenon to the construct of the native speaker: heritage speaker bilinguals are natives too!

This Forum challenges the generally accepted position in the linguistic sciences—conscious or not—that monolingualism and nativeness are essentially synonymous in an exclusive way. We discuss two consequences of our position that naturalistic bilinguals and multilinguals exposed to a language in early childhood are also native speakers: (i) that bi-/multilinguals have multiple native languages;and (ii) nativeness can be applicable to a state of linguistic knowledge that is characterized by significant differences to the monolingual baseline.

Image retrieval techniques for THz applications in cultural heritage

Techniques to retrieve reliable images from complicated objects are described, overcoming problems introduced by uneven surfaces, giving enhanced depth resolution and improving image contrast. The techniques are illustrated with application to THz imaging of concealed wall paintings.

Teaching and learning Chinese: heritage language classroom discourse in Montreal

This paper explores issues of teaching and learning Chinese as a heritage language in a Chinese heritage language school, the Zhonguo Saturday School, in Montreal, Quebec. With a student population of more than 1000, this school is the largest of the eight Chinese Heritage Language schools in Montreal. Students participating in this study were from seven different classes (grade K, two, three, four, five, six, and special class), their ages ranging from 4 to 13 years. The study took place over a period of two years between 2000 and 2002. Focusing on primary level classroom discourse and drawing on the works of Vygotsky and Bakhtin, I examine how teachers and students use language to communicate, and how their communication mediates teaching, learning and heritage language acquisition. Data sources include classroom observations, interviews with students and their teachers, students’ writings, and video and audio taping of classroom activities. Implications for heritage language development and maintenance are discussed with reference to the findings of this study.

Ultimate attainment in the use of collocations among heritage speakers of Turkish in Germany and Turkish–German returnees

In this paper we show that heritage speakers and returnees are fundamentally different from the majority of adult second language learners with respect to their use of collocations (Laufer & Waldman, 2011). We compare the use of lexical collocations involving yap- “do” and et- “do” among heritage speakers of Turkish in Germany (n = 45) with those found among Turkish returnees (n = 65) and Turkish monolinguals (n = 69). Language use by returnees is an understudied resource although this group can provide crucial insights into the specific language ability of heritage speakers. Results show that returnees who had been back for one year avoid collocations with yap- and use some hypercorrect forms in et-, whilst returnees who had been back for seven years at the time of recording produce collocations that are quantitatively and qualitatively similar to those of monolingual speakers of Turkish. We discuss implications for theories of ultimate attainment and incomplete acquisition in heritage speakers.

Exploring the source of differences and similarities in L1 attrition and heritage speaker competence: evidence from pronominal resolution

Several studies of different bilingual groups including L2 learners, child bilinguals, heritage speakers and L1 attriters reveal similar performance on syntax-discourse interface properties such as anaphora resolution (Sorace, 2011 and references therein). Specifically, bilinguals seem to allow more optionality in the interpretation of overt subject pronouns in null subject languages, such as Greek, Italian and Spanish while the interpretation of null subject pronouns is indistinguishable from monolingual natives. Nevertheless, there is some evidence pointing to bilingualism effects on the interpretation of null subject pronouns too in heritage speakers’ grammars (Montrul, 2004) due to some form of ‘arrested’ development in this group of bilinguals. The present study seeks to investigate similarities and differences between two Greek–Swedish bilingual groups, heritage speakers and L1 attriters, in anaphora resolution of null and overt subject pronouns in Greek using a self-paced listening with a sentence-picture matching decision task at the end of each sentence. The two groups differ in crucial ways: heritage speakers were simultaneous or early bilinguals while the L1 attriters were adult learners of the second language, Swedish. Our findings reveal differences from monolingual preferences in the interpretation of the overt pronoun for both heritage and attrited speakers while the differences attested between the two groups in the interpretation of null subject pronouns affect only response times with heritage being faster than attrited speakers. We argue that our results do not support an age of onset or differential input effects on bilingual performance in pronoun resolution.