Abstand, Ausbau, creativity and ludicity in Australian English

The social history of a language or variety, and its emergence, consolidation and stabiliza tion, allow us to combine the formal data of the language (principally its sound structure, grammar and lexis) with the external conditions in which they have evolved. The advance of Australian English in terms of its differentiation (Kloss's abstand) and elaboration of roles (Kloss's ausbau) pose problems of chronology, periodization, description and expla nation. This paper extends the conventional scope of abstand and ausbau to the analysis of the social history of Australian English. It argues that two factors are central to the emerging identification of Australian English: creativity, in the sense of morphological innovation, especially here in diminutives like reffo ('refugee') and pollie ('politician'); and in ludicity, defined as a deep-rooted playfulness with language. While these character istics are only part of the overall dynamics of the social history of Australian English, the evidence is sufficiently extensive to warrant further investigation. An earlier version of this paper was given at the Mitchell Symposium at Macquarie University on 26 April 2002 under the title ‘E pluribus plures? Diversity and integrity in Australian English’. I am grateful to members of the Symposium, and to two anonymous reviewers, for valuable comments and criticism

The place of writing in first grade Kuwaiti english education : a sociological case study

A hybridized society, Kuwait meshes Islamic ideologies with western culture. Linguistically, English exists across both foreign language and second language nomenclatures in the country due to globalization and internationalization which has seen increasing use of English in Kuwait. Originally consisting of listening, speaking, reading and writing, the first grade English curriculum in Kuwait was narrowed in 2002 to focus only on the development of oral English skills, and to exclude writing. Since that time, both Kuwaiti teachers and parents have expressed dissatisfaction with this curriculum on the basis that this model disadvantages their children. In first grade however, the teaching of pre-writing has remained as part of the curriculum. This research analyses the parameters of English pre-writing and writing instruction in first grade in Kuwaiti classrooms, investigates first grade English pre-writing and writing teaching, and gathers insights from parents, teachers and students regarding the appropriateness of the current curriculum. Through interviews and classroom observations, and an analysis of curriculum documents, this case study found that the relationship between oral and written language is more complex than suggested by either the Kuwaiti curriculum reform, or international literature concerning the delayed teaching of writing. Intended curriculum integration across Kuwait subjects is also far more complex than first believed, due to a developmental mismatch between English pre-writing skills and Arabic language capabilities. Findings suggest an alternative approach to teaching writing may be more appropriate and more effective for first Grade students in the current Kuwait curriculum context. They contribute also to an emerging interest in the second and foreign language fields in the teaching of writing to young learners.

Peer to peer English/Chinese cross-language information retrieval

Peer to peer systems have been widely used in the internet. However, most of the peer to peer information systems are still missing some of the important features, for example cross-language IR (Information Retrieval) and collection selection / fusion features. Cross-language IR is the state-of-art research area in IR research community. It has not been used in any real world IR systems yet. Cross-language IR has the ability to issue a query in one language and receive documents in other languages. In typical peer to peer environment, users are from multiple countries. Their collections are definitely in multiple languages. Cross-language IR can help users to find documents more easily. E.g. many Chinese researchers will search research papers in both Chinese and English. With Cross-language IR, they can do one query in Chinese and get documents in two languages. The Out Of Vocabulary (OOV) problem is one of the key research areas in crosslanguage information retrieval. In recent years, web mining was shown to be one of the effective approaches to solving this problem. However, how to extract Multiword Lexical Units (MLUs) from the web content and how to select the correct translations from the extracted candidate MLUs are still two difficult problems in web mining based automated translation approaches. Discovering resource descriptions and merging results obtained from remote search engines are two key issues in distributed information retrieval studies. In uncooperative environments, query-based sampling and normalized-score based merging strategies are well-known approaches to solve such problems. However, such approaches only consider the content of the remote database but do not consider the retrieval performance of the remote search engine. This thesis presents research on building a peer to peer IR system with crosslanguage IR and advance collection profiling technique for fusion features. Particularly, this thesis first presents a new Chinese term measurement and new Chinese MLU extraction process that works well on small corpora. An approach to selection of MLUs in a more accurate manner is also presented. After that, this thesis proposes a collection profiling strategy which can discover not only collection content but also retrieval performance of the remote search engine. Based on collection profiling, a web-based query classification method and two collection fusion approaches are developed and presented in this thesis. Our experiments show that the proposed strategies are effective in merging results in uncooperative peer to peer environments. Here, an uncooperative environment is defined as each peer in the system is autonomous. Peer like to share documents but they do not share collection statistics. This environment is a typical peer to peer IR environment. Finally, all those approaches are grouped together to build up a secure peer to peer multilingual IR system that cooperates through X.509 and email system.