Review of recent research (1998-2012) in German for Academic Purposes (GAP) in comparison with English for Academic Purposes (EAP): cross-influences, synergies and implications for further research

This state-of-the-art review reports on the major studies conducted in the field of Deutsch als Wissenschaftssprache (academic German) since the late 1990s. To begin with, the current position of German as a language of academic communication nationally and internationally will be discussed, focusing especially on the challenges posed by the status of English as a lingua franca. Subsequently, the major research undertaken since the late 1990s will be reviewed and its contribution to the development of teaching materials evaluated. Since studies on academic German have been influenced, to some extent, by research in English for Academic Purposes (EAP), this paper also attempts to dovetail developments in EAP in order to highlight commonalties and differences. The final sections will discuss some potential synergies and implications for further research in both fields.

“Action Research into Pre-sessional Students' Differentiation of Assessments: Using Findings to Improve Courses”

Conference proceedings papaer in Whong, M. (Ed.), Proceedings of the 2007 BALEAP conference: English in a globalising world: English as an academic lingua franca,. Bern: Peter Lang.

Engelska utanför och i skolan

SammanfattningSyftet med denna studie är att undersöka relationen mellan några av de engelska texter elever på grundskolan i årskurs 8 möter i sin vardag och de texter de möter i skolans engelskundervisning och vad det kan få för betydelse för undervisningen i skolan.Följande frågeställningar ligger till grund för undersökningen:•Vilka olika slags engelska texter möter elever i sin vardag?•Vilka slags texter möter de i skolans undervisning?•Vilka likheter och olikheter finns det mellan den engelska eleven möter utanför skolan med den engelska de möter i skolan?•Vilka fördelar och nackdelar finns det med att eleverna möter mycket engelska utanför skolan? •Vilka kan konsekvenserna tänkas bli för undervisningen i engelska i skolan? Den metod jag använde mig av var en enkätundersökning med 22 elever från ”Fast Track-klass” årskurs 8 klass och sedan jämföra resultat med en undersökning som Skolverket genomfört och som heter English – here and there and everywhere.De resultat jag kom fram till var att eleverna har väldigt mer kontakt med engelska utanför skolan än i skolan. Eleverna ser mycket ofta på engelskspråkig TV/video, kassetter/CD och film med eller utan svensk textremsa. Eleverna lyssnar på enormt mycket musik med engelska texter varje vecka. Engelska är också det dominerande språket på Internet och i dataspel vilket spelar en stor roll i ungdomarnas kultur idag.

Abilities and Cultural Understanding through Literature in the EFL Classroom : - A Literature Review

The English language can be seen as a lingua franca of contemporary times. Its spread and use in the globalized world has affected most levels of society and it can be argued that, in current times, English is synonymous with communication. This need for communication has shaped the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) syllabus, which is evident in the Swedish national steering documents for the educational system. For the upper secondary school these documents show an emphasis on communication, on cultural understanding, and also on the use of literature within the EFL classroom. The need to possess communicative abilities and cultural understanding, in connection with the use of literature, has sparked an interest to investigate if and how literature itself can be used as a tool to develop and improve EFL students’ communicative skills and cultural understanding. This literature review thesis analyzes five international research articles from different geographical parts of the Globe. The findings are categorized, compared, synthesized, and finally discussed in order to answer the research questions asked, and also compared with the English subject syllabus for the Swedish upper secondary school. The findings indicate that the analyzed articles share a consensus, to a varied degree, regarding the positive aspects of literature use in the EFL setting. The arguments are that communicative skills and cultural understanding are intertwined - enabling each other to exist, develop, and improve. One cannot exist fully without the other, and literature is a good tool to use to develop and improve these abilities. Literature can help develop all skills needed to acquire and produce both written and spoken English, and it also enables cultural understanding and a broadening of the mind. Where the articles differ somewhat is in the ideas of why literature is a good tool, how to implement literature in the classrooms, and what some of the negative aspects might be. The thesis also brings the lack of Swedish studies within EFL to the readers’ attention, as well as the need to do more research focusing on the students’ perspectives towards literature use in the EFL setting.

Ellipsis as a marker of interaction in spoken discourse

In this article, we discuss strategies for interaction in spoken discourse, focusing on ellipsis phenomena in English. The data comes from the VOICE corpus of English as a Lingua Franca, and we analyse education data in the form of seminar and workshop discussions, working group meetings, interviews and conversations. The functions ellipsis carries in the data are Intersubjectivity, where participants develop and maintain an understanding in discourse; Continuers, which are examples of back channel support; Correction, both self- and other-initiated; Repetition; and Comments, which are similar to Continuers but do not have a back channel support function. We see that the first of these, Intersubjectivity, is by far the most popular, followed by Repetitions and Comments. These results are explained as consequences of the nature of the texts themselves, as some are discussions of presentations and so can be expected to contain many Repetitions, for example. The speech event is also an important factor, as events with asymmetrical power relations like interviews do not contain so many Continuers. Our clear conclusion is that the use of ellipsis is a strong marker of interaction in spoken discourse.

Representations of culture in EIL : Cultural representation in Swedish EFL textbooks

The English language has become an international language and is globally used as a lingua franca. Therefore, there has been a shift in English-language education toward teaching English as an interna-tional language (EIL). Teaching from the EIL paradigm means that English is seen as an international language used in communication by people from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds. As the approach to English-language education changes from the traditional native-speaker, target country context, so does the role of culture within English-language teaching. The aim of this thesis is to in-vestigate and analyse cultural representations in two Swedish EFL textbooks used in upper-secondary school to see how they correspond with the EIL paradigm. This is done by focusing on the geograph-ical origin of the cultural content as well as looking at what kinds of culture are represented in the textbooks. A content analysis of the textbooks is conducted, using Kachru’s Concentric Circles of English as the model for the analysis of the geographical origin. Horibe’s model of the three different kinds of culture in EIL is the model used for coding the second part of the analysis. The results of the analysis show that culture of target countries and "Culture as social custom" dominate the cultural content of the textbook. Thus, although there are some indications that the EIL paradigm has influ-enced the textbooks, the traditional approach to culture in language teaching still prevails in the ana-lysed textbooks. Because of the relatively small sample included in the thesis, further studies need to be conducted in order to make conclusions regarding the Swedish context as a whole.

Topic- and mode-sensitive interaction strategies : Functions of ellipsis in oral communication

In this article, we discuss ellipsis as an interactive strategy by analysing the author’s textchat corpus and the VOICE corpus of English as a Lingua Franca. It is found that there were fewer repetitions in the textchat data, and this is explained as a consequence of the textchat mode. Textchat contributions are preserved as long as the chat is active or has been saved, and therefore users can scroll through and review the discussion, compared to the more fleeting nature of oral conversation. As a result, repetition is less necessary. The frequency of other functions identified could be attributed to the topic of discourse. Discussions involve much ellipsis used to develop discourse, although some were self-presentations with repetition used to confirm details. Back-channel support and comments were often low because speakers instead used forms like yeah as supportive utterances.

The Long Game: Hamas, The IRA, and the Politics of Radicalization in Palestine and Northern Ireland

The value of a comparative study of the two conflicts stems from a remarkable similarity in the structural organization of political violence by its most influential practitioners: the IRA and Hamas. At the core, I have merely tried my best to approach a beguiling question in a fresh, dynamic way. The stultifying discourse of conflict that serves as lingua franca for the Israeli‐Palestinian issue has largely reduced strategic debate to how best the conflict can be managed – not ended. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s focus on “economic peace” and unwillingness to commit to a two‐state solution – the consensus that has governed peacemaking for decades – belies such thinking. The Clinton Administration’s cadre of Mideast negotiators operated amidst the most rapid institutionalization of Palestinian democracy in history ‐ yet remained obsessed with Israeli‐Arab “confidence‐building” measures, doing little to legitimize the gains of Oslo. So long as Palestinians continue to view the creation of Israel as “al‐Nakba” – the catastrophe – whilst successive Israeli governments refuse to grant their aspirations any legitimacy, there can be no progress. Peace requires empathy, a substantial compromise in the context of internecine conflict. The “long war” both conflicts have become mandates an equally expansive, broad‐based and labor‐intensive approach – a demanding process that can only be called The Long Game.

Mercadores de sentidos: a comunicação de vendedores ambulantes com estrangeiros por meio da intercompreensão multilíngue

This paper aims, starting with the studies of languages in contact and communicative competence, to locate and describe the interlanguage, a linguistic phenomenon observed in the interaction between beach sellers and foreign tourists. We seek to discover whether those interacting use some kind of pidgin, or some code as a lingua franca. We also seek to identify the manner in which the features of communicative competence are presented by analyzing the various competences that composes it - linguistic, sociolinguistic, pragmatic and psycholinguistic. The analysis of speech acts, the maxims and conversational implicatures given in the corpus were important to verify whether those interacting were successful in their attempt at multilingual intercomprehension.

Tratamento terminográfico de termos em inglês do comércio Internacional em dicionários franceses

Brazil has a strong trading relationship with several countries, including France, which has intensified these links in recent years and intends to do so yet further. Legal documents regulate this operation, resulting in a set of terms which designate concepts specific to this area. Communication between Brazilian and French buyers and sellers is intense and does not permit the occurrence of errors in understanding orders for merchandise nor in terms of purchase and sale. It is therefore very important that agents of International Trade between Brazil and France should have access to a specialised terminographic tool in the area, containing the relevant terms used in French and Portuguese. This type of work does not currently exist; we therefore decided to make a contribution and draw up a proposal for a bilingual French-Portuguese dictionary in this specialised area. During our research, we registered a significant presence of English terms in International Trade texts originally written in Portuguese and in French, which may be explained by the fact that English currently has the role of global lingua franca. However, it is well known that France operates a policy of linguistic protectionism, making the use of French obligatory in all sectors of activity in France. This generated an area of doubt: how should one deal with English terms in a bilingual French-Portugese dictionary? In order to begin the search for an answer to this question, we decided to see what treatment was given to English terms in the area of International Trade in some French dictionaries. In this paper we shall present the principal results obtained during our research.

Bitext alignment: building and evaluating a bilingual corpus and translation memory of academic course descriptions

Following the internationalization of contemporary higher education, academic institutions based in non-English speaking countries are increasingly urged to produce contents in English to address international prospective students and personnel, as well as to increase their attractiveness. The demand for English translations in the institutional academic domain is consequently increasing at a rate exceeding the capacity of the translation profession. Resources for assisting non-native authors and translators in the production of appropriate texts in L2 are therefore required in order to help academic institutions and professionals streamline their translation workload. Some of these resources include: (i) parallel corpora to train machine translation systems and multilingual authoring tools; and (ii) translation memories for computer-aided tools. The purpose of this study is to create and evaluate reference resources like the ones mentioned in (i) and (ii) through the automatic sentence alignment of a large set of Italian and English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) institutional academic texts given as equivalent but not necessarily parallel (i.e. translated). In this framework, a set of aligning algorithms and alignment tools is examined in order to identify the most profitable one(s) in terms of accuracy and time- and cost-effectiveness. In order to determine the text pairs to align, a sample is selected according to document length similarity (characters) and subsequently evaluated in terms of extent of noisiness/parallelism, alignment accuracy and content leverageability. The results of these analyses serve as the basis for the creation of an aligned bilingual corpus of academic course descriptions, which is eventually used to create a translation memory in TMX format.

Tradurre per le aziende: localizzazione del sito web di Tecnopress S.a.s.

La presente tesi magistrale si inserisce nell’ambito del progetto Language Toolkit e nasce in particolare dalla collaborazione tra il presente autore e l’azienda Tecnopress S.a.s. Nell’ottica dell’internazionalizzazione della propria attività l’azienda ha richiesto che il proprio sito web venisse sottoposto ad un processo di localizzazione dall’italiano verso l’inglese. Sulla base di queste premesse si è deciso di dividere il lavoro in tre parti: una fase teorica, una fase preparatoria e una fase pratica. La prima fase si è occupata di gettare le basi teoriche necessarie per affrontare consapevolmente l’incarico assegnato. Alla luce delle conclusioni della fase teorica è stata constatata l’esigenza di modificare la natura dell’intervento che si era preventivato di effettuare sul sito web. Fulcro della localizzazione è infatti il locale, ovvero la combinazione di regione socioculturale e lingua presa a riferimento per un processo di localizzazione web. Nelle richieste avanzate dall’azienda figuravano esclusivamente indicazioni relative alla lingua (l’inglese), non già alla regione socioculturale su cui modellare l’intervento di localizzazione del sito. Si è rivelato pertanto necessario procedere autonomamente alla definizione di un locale per il presente progetto, che è stato fatto coincidere con la macrozona europea e cui è stato associato un modello ibrido di English Lingua Franca e Simplified Technical English. Il focus dell’intervento non è stato dunque una regione geografica circoscritta ma una realtà socioculturale molto più ampia e variegata: l’adozione di un locale così ampio e il rispetto dell’indicazione sulla lingua hanno portato il presente autore a optare per un intervento di standardizzazione web. Chiude il presente lavoro una fase operativa, durante la quale sono state create le risorse necessarie al progetto (si segnala in particolare un corpus su misura) e sono state effettuate la standardizzazione e una serie di considerazioni traduttive.

The EU Policy on Institutional Multilingualism: Between Principles and Practicality

This article brings to light several inconsistencies within the narrative of the EU policy on institutional multilingualism. The EU has invoked fundamental EU principles of democracy, equality and transparent government, to publically bolster the need for its institutions to communicate and operate in the languages of its citizens. However, these principles do not allow for the pragmatic and budgetary arguments that the EU uses to justify the in reality limited number of official and de facto working languages of its institutions. The article argues that this disagreement could be resolved if the narrative of the EU's language policy would include the objective that all European citizens master any of the languages that the EU institutions use. In that light, the article recommends that further research is done into the question whether the EU should accept or even encourage the spontaneous development of English as a de facto pan-European lingua franca.

The sociolinguistic situation of ǂHoan, a moribund 'Khoisan' language of Botswana

In 2010, we conducted a sociolinguistic survey on the moribund 'Khoisan' language ǂHoan (Ju-ǂHoan), spoken in Botswana at the fringe of the Kalahari Desert. The survey aimed at investigating language use, degrees of multilingualism and language attitude among the ǂHoan speakers. Data collection was done on the basis of a questionnaire. We found that the positive language attitude of individuals towards ǂHoan often conflicts with the community's attitude towards this language, resulting in a split of actual language use between the family and more formal situations. All ǂHoan speakers are at least bilingual speaking the local lingua franca Kgalagadi (Bantu) besides ǂHoan. Most of them are in fact even trilingual, speaking Gǀui (Khoe-Kwadi) in addition to ǂHoan and Kgalagadi. Most of our results stand in line with an earlier sociolinguistic survey on ǂHoan by Batibo (2005a) which was carried out in 2003. In comparing Batibo's results to ours, changes in the sociolinguistic situation of ǂHoan as well as differences between the different villages will be pointed out.

A variationist approach to the examination of insertion and deletion of /h/ in Kosraean English

I report on language variation in the unresearched variety of English emerging on Kosrae, Federated States of Micronesia. English is spoken as the inter-island lingua franca throughout Micronesia and has been the official language of FSM since gaining its independence in 1986, though still retaining close ties with the US through and economic “compact” agreement. I present here an analysis of a corpus of over 90 Kosraean English speakers, compiled during a three month fieldwork trip to the island in the Western Pacific. The 45 minute sociolinguistically sensitive recordings are drawn from a corpus of old and young, with varying levels of education and occupations, and off-island experiences. In the paper I analyse two variables. The first variable is the realisation of /h/, often subject to deletion in both L1 and L2 varieties of English. Such occurrences are commonly associated with Cockney English, but also found in Caribbean English and the postcolonial English of Australia. For example:  Male, 31: yeah I build their house their local huts and they pay me /h/ deletion is frequent in Kosraean English, but, perhaps expectedly, occurs slightly less among people with higher contact with American English, through having spent longer periods off island. The second feature under scrutiny is the variable epenthesis of [h] to provide a consonantal onset to vowel-initial syllables.  Male, 31: that guy is really hold now This practice is also found beyond Kosraean English. Previous studies find h-epenthesis arising in L1 varieties including Newfoundland and Tristan de Cunha English, while similar manifestations are identified in Francophone L2 learners of English. My variationist statistical analysis has shown [h] insertion:  to disproportionately occur intervocalically;  to be constrained by both speaker gender and age: older males are much more likely to epenthesis [h] in their speech;  to be more likely in the onset of stressed as opposed to unstressed syllables. In light of the findings of my analysis, I consider the relationship between h-deletion and h-epenthesis, the plausibility of hypercorrection as a motivation for the variation, and the potential influence of the substrate language, alongside sociolinguistic factors such as attitudes towards the US based on mobility. The analysis sheds light on the extent to which different varieties share this characteristic and the comparability of them in terms of linguistic constraints and attributes. Clarke, S. (2010). Newfoundland and Labrador English. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press Hackert, S. (2004). Urban Bahamian Creole: System and Variation. Varieties of English Around the World G32. Amsterdam: Benjamins Milroy, J. (1983). On the Sociolinguistic History of H-dropping in English in Current topics in English historical linguistics: Odense UP