Sample records for multilingual information access

  1. Multilingual Information Discovery and AccesS (MIDAS): A Joint ACM DL'99/ ACM SIGIR'99 Workshop.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Oard, Douglas; Peters, Carol; Ruiz, Miguel; Frederking, Robert; Klavans, Judith; Sheridan, Paraic

    1999-01-01

    Discusses a multidisciplinary workshop that addressed issues concerning internationally distributed information networks. Highlights include multilingual information access in media other than character-coded text; cross-language information retrieval and multilingual metadata; and evaluation of multilingual systems. (LRW)

  2. A search engine to access PubMed monolingual subsets: proof of concept and evaluation in French.

    PubMed

    Griffon, Nicolas; Schuers, Matthieu; Soualmia, Lina Fatima; Grosjean, Julien; Kerdelhué, Gaétan; Kergourlay, Ivan; Dahamna, Badisse; Darmoni, Stéfan Jacques

    2014-12-01

    PubMed contains numerous articles in languages other than English. However, existing solutions to access these articles in the language in which they were written remain unconvincing. The aim of this study was to propose a practical search engine, called Multilingual PubMed, which will permit access to a PubMed subset in 1 language and to evaluate the precision and coverage for the French version (Multilingual PubMed-French). To create this tool, translations of MeSH were enriched (eg, adding synonyms and translations in French) and integrated into a terminology portal. PubMed subsets in several European languages were also added to our database using a dedicated parser. The response time for the generic semantic search engine was evaluated for simple queries. BabelMeSH, Multilingual PubMed-French, and 3 different PubMed strategies were compared by searching for literature in French. Precision and coverage were measured for 20 randomly selected queries. The results were evaluated as relevant to title and abstract, the evaluator being blind to search strategy. More than 650,000 PubMed citations in French were integrated into the Multilingual PubMed-French information system. The response times were all below the threshold defined for usability (2 seconds). Two search strategies (Multilingual PubMed-French and 1 PubMed strategy) showed high precision (0.93 and 0.97, respectively), but coverage was 4 times higher for Multilingual PubMed-French. It is now possible to freely access biomedical literature using a practical search tool in French. This tool will be of particular interest for health professionals and other end users who do not read or query sufficiently in English. The information system is theoretically well suited to expand the approach to other European languages, such as German, Spanish, Norwegian, and Portuguese.

  3. A Search Engine to Access PubMed Monolingual Subsets: Proof of Concept and Evaluation in French

    PubMed Central

    Schuers, Matthieu; Soualmia, Lina Fatima; Grosjean, Julien; Kerdelhué, Gaétan; Kergourlay, Ivan; Dahamna, Badisse; Darmoni, Stéfan Jacques

    2014-01-01

    Background PubMed contains numerous articles in languages other than English. However, existing solutions to access these articles in the language in which they were written remain unconvincing. Objective The aim of this study was to propose a practical search engine, called Multilingual PubMed, which will permit access to a PubMed subset in 1 language and to evaluate the precision and coverage for the French version (Multilingual PubMed-French). Methods To create this tool, translations of MeSH were enriched (eg, adding synonyms and translations in French) and integrated into a terminology portal. PubMed subsets in several European languages were also added to our database using a dedicated parser. The response time for the generic semantic search engine was evaluated for simple queries. BabelMeSH, Multilingual PubMed-French, and 3 different PubMed strategies were compared by searching for literature in French. Precision and coverage were measured for 20 randomly selected queries. The results were evaluated as relevant to title and abstract, the evaluator being blind to search strategy. Results More than 650,000 PubMed citations in French were integrated into the Multilingual PubMed-French information system. The response times were all below the threshold defined for usability (2 seconds). Two search strategies (Multilingual PubMed-French and 1 PubMed strategy) showed high precision (0.93 and 0.97, respectively), but coverage was 4 times higher for Multilingual PubMed-French. Conclusions It is now possible to freely access biomedical literature using a practical search tool in French. This tool will be of particular interest for health professionals and other end users who do not read or query sufficiently in English. The information system is theoretically well suited to expand the approach to other European languages, such as German, Spanish, Norwegian, and Portuguese. PMID:25448528

  4. Mi.L.A: Multilingual and Multifaceted Mobile Interactive Applications for Children with Autism

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Loizides, Fernando; Kartapanis, Iosif; Sella, Francesca; Papadima-Sophocleous, Salomi

    2015-01-01

    In this paper we present the initial stages of a project entitled Minority Language Applications (Mi.L.A) which aims to facilitate material for children with autism in a multilingual setting using interactive multimedia that increase both the awareness as well as the access to information for patients who need it. Pilot testing the applications…

  5. Resourcing speech-language pathologists to work with multilingual children.

    PubMed

    McLeod, Sharynne

    2014-06-01

    Speech-language pathologists play important roles in supporting people to be competent communicators in the languages of their communities. However, with over 7000 languages spoken throughout the world and the majority of the global population being multilingual, there is often a mismatch between the languages spoken by children and families and their speech-language pathologists. This paper provides insights into service provision for multilingual children within an English-dominant country by viewing Australia's multilingual population as a microcosm of ethnolinguistic minorities. Recent population studies of Australian pre-school children show that their most common languages other than English are: Arabic, Cantonese, Vietnamese, Italian, Mandarin, Spanish, and Greek. Although 20.2% of services by Speech Pathology Australia members are offered in languages other than English, there is a mismatch between the language of the services and the languages of children within similar geographical communities. Australian speech-language pathologists typically use informal or English-based assessments and intervention tools with multilingual children. Thus, there is a need for accessible culturally and linguistically appropriate resources for working with multilingual children. Recent international collaborations have resulted in practical strategies to support speech-language pathologists during assessment, intervention, and collaboration with families, communities, and other professionals. The International Expert Panel on Multilingual Children's Speech was assembled to prepare a position paper to address issues faced by speech-language pathologists when working with multilingual populations. The Multilingual Children's Speech website ( http://www.csu.edu.au/research/multilingual-speech ) addresses one of the aims of the position paper by providing free resources and information for speech-language pathologists about more than 45 languages. These international collaborations have been framed around the World Health Organization's International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF-CY) and have been established with the goal of supporting multilingual children to participate in society.

  6. Listening to the consumer voice: developing multilingual cancer information resources for people affected by liver cancer.

    PubMed

    Robotin, Monica C; Porwal, Mamta; Hopwood, Max; Nguyen, Debbie; Sze, Minglo; Treloar, Carla; George, Jacob

    2017-02-01

    In Australia, liver cancer incidence is rising, particularly among people born in hepatitis B-endemic countries. We sought to build an understanding of the information needs of people affected by liver cancer, to inform the design of in-language consumer information resources. We searched the World Wide Web for available in-language consumer information and conducted a literature search on consumers' information needs and their preferred means of accessing it. Qualitative data collection involved bilingual researchers conducting focus group discussions (26 participants) and in-depth interviews (22 participants) with people affected by liver cancer in English, Vietnamese, Cantonese and Mandarin. Sessions were audio-recorded, transcribed, translated and thematically analysed. The key themes and salient findings informed the development of in-language multimedia information resources. Many consumer resources did not cater for people with low literacy levels. The participants wanted more information on cancer diagnostic and treatment options, nutrition and Chinese Medicine and experienced communication challenges speaking to health professionals. While Vietnamese speakers relied entirely on information provided by their doctors, other participants actively searched for additional treatment information and commonly used the Internet to source it. We developed multilingual, multimedia consumer information resources addressing identified consumer information needs through an iterative process, in collaboration with our multilingual consumer panel. These resources are available in four languages, as separate modules accessible online and in DVD format. This process enabled the development of user-friendly patient resources, which complement health-care provider information and supports informed patient decision making. © 2016 The Authors. Health Expectations Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

  7. Local health department translation processes: potential of machine translation technologies to help meet needs.

    PubMed

    Turner, Anne M; Mandel, Hannah; Capurro, Daniel

    2013-01-01

    Limited English proficiency (LEP), defined as a limited ability to read, speak, write, or understand English, is associated with health disparities. Despite federal and state requirements to translate health information, the vast majority of health materials are solely available in English. This project investigates barriers to translation of health information and explores new technologies to improve access to multilingual public health materials. We surveyed all 77 local health departments (LHDs) in the Northwest about translation needs, practices, barriers and attitudes towards machine translation (MT). We received 67 responses from 45 LHDs. Translation of health materials is the principle strategy used by LHDs to reach LEP populations. Cost and access to qualified translators are principle barriers to producing multilingual materials. Thirteen LHDs have used online MT tools. Many respondents expressed concerns about the accuracy of MT. Overall, respondents were positive about its potential use, if low costs and quality could be assured.

  8. Local Health Department Translation Processes: Potential of Machine Translation Technologies to Help Meet Needs

    PubMed Central

    Turner, Anne M.; Mandel, Hannah; Capurro, Daniel

    2013-01-01

    Limited English proficiency (LEP), defined as a limited ability to read, speak, write, or understand English, is associated with health disparities. Despite federal and state requirements to translate health information, the vast majority of health materials are solely available in English. This project investigates barriers to translation of health information and explores new technologies to improve access to multilingual public health materials. We surveyed all 77 local health departments (LHDs) in the Northwest about translation needs, practices, barriers and attitudes towards machine translation (MT). We received 67 responses from 45 LHDs. Translation of health materials is the principle strategy used by LHDs to reach LEP populations. Cost and access to qualified translators are principle barriers to producing multilingual materials. Thirteen LHDs have used online MT tools. Many respondents expressed concerns about the accuracy of MT. Overall, respondents were positive about its potential use, if low costs and quality could be assured. PMID:24551414

  9. We Are Lost: Measuring the Accessibility of Signage in Public General Hospitals

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Schuster, Michal; Elroy, Irit; Elmakais, Ido

    2017-01-01

    Hospital signage is a critical element in the patients' and visitors understanding of directions, instructions and warnings in the facility. In multilingual environments organizations need to make sure that the information is accessible in the languages of the people who consume their services. As part of a large-scale study that examined the…

  10. TUW @ TREC Clinical Decision Support Track

    DTIC Science & Technology

    2014-11-01

    and the ShARe/CLEF eHealth Evaluation Lab [8,3] running in 2013 and 2014. Here we briefly describe the goals of the first TREC Clinical Decision...Wendy W. Chapman, David Mart́ınez, Guido Zuccon, and João R. M. Palotti. Overview of the share/clef ehealth evalu- ation lab 2014. In Information Access...Zuccon. Overview of the share/clef ehealth evaluation lab 2013. In Information Access Evaluation. Multilinguality, Multimodality, and Visualization

  11. Lost in translation? A multilingual Query Builder improves the quality of PubMed queries: a randomised controlled trial.

    PubMed

    Schuers, Matthieu; Joulakian, Mher; Kerdelhué, Gaetan; Segas, Léa; Grosjean, Julien; Darmoni, Stéfan J; Griffon, Nicolas

    2017-07-03

    MEDLINE is the most widely used medical bibliographic database in the world. Most of its citations are in English and this can be an obstacle for some researchers to access the information the database contains. We created a multilingual query builder to facilitate access to the PubMed subset using a language other than English. The aim of our study was to assess the impact of this multilingual query builder on the quality of PubMed queries for non-native English speaking physicians and medical researchers. A randomised controlled study was conducted among French speaking general practice residents. We designed a multi-lingual query builder to facilitate information retrieval, based on available MeSH translations and providing users with both an interface and a controlled vocabulary in their own language. Participating residents were randomly allocated either the French or the English version of the query builder. They were asked to translate 12 short medical questions into MeSH queries. The main outcome was the quality of the query. Two librarians blind to the arm independently evaluated each query, using a modified published classification that differentiated eight types of errors. Twenty residents used the French version of the query builder and 22 used the English version. 492 queries were analysed. There were significantly more perfect queries in the French group vs. the English group (respectively 37.9% vs. 17.9%; p < 0.01). It took significantly more time for the members of the English group than the members of the French group to build each query, respectively 194 sec vs. 128 sec; p < 0.01. This multi-lingual query builder is an effective tool to improve the quality of PubMed queries in particular for researchers whose first language is not English.

  12. AAC services for multilingual populations: South African service provider perspectives.

    PubMed

    Tönsing, Kerstin M; van Niekerk, Karin; Schlünz, Georg I; Wilken, Ilana

    In South Africa, many persons in need of augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) come from multilingual backgrounds. There is as yet a limited evidence base (locally and internationally) for the provision of AAC services to multilingual populations. The perspectives of service providers can assist in gaining an understanding of current practices and the factors that influence these. The study aimed to obtain the perspectives of AAC service providers about practices in providing AAC systems and AAC intervention to clients from multilingual backgrounds. Fifteen AAC service providers were purposefully chosen to participate in one of three focus groups - two face-to-face and one online focus group. Data from the face-to-face focus groups was transcribed verbatim. Thematic analysis was used to identify themes and subthemes in the data. Four overarching themes were identified, namely (a) current practices, (b) factors influencing current practices, (c) service provides' orientation towards different language options in AAC intervention, and (d) needs and desired developments regarding AAC technology. This paper reports on the first three themes. Service providers reported their practices to range from a focus on L1 exclusively, L2 exclusively, to a multilingual (sequential or simultaneous) approach. The South African language context, family language preferences and choices, service provider skill and knowledge, as well as AAC technology were identified as factors influencing their practices. Although many viewed access to multiple languages through AAC as positive, they also expressed concerns and reservations about providing multilingual AAC services. Although service providers in general saw the need to give clients from multilingual backgrounds access to multiple languages using AAC, this did not always translate into multilingual AAC practices. Both extrinsic factors (e.g. the lack of appropriate AAC devices, software and apps giving access to non-English languages) and intrinsic factors (service providers' language competency and their beliefs about the cognitive demands of multilingual AAC systems) influenced their practices and choices. Appropriate AAC service delivery to multilingual populations in South Africa would require not only appropriate AAC technology developments, but also research evidence to establish the efficacy of multilingual AAC interventions for clients with a variety of characteristics. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

  13. Designing a Multilingual Terminology Bank for United States Translators.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Morton, Sara E.

    1978-01-01

    A multilingual terminology bank, a data base consisting of multilingual terminology which acts as a computerized dictionary, is accessible to translators on-line or through hard-copy printouts. Surveys, interviews, and reviews of the literature have been used to design a bank suitable for a small institution. Design specifications are discussed.…

  14. Dentist-patient communication in the multilingual dental setting.

    PubMed

    Goldsmith, C; Slack-Smith, L; Davies, G

    2005-12-01

    Communication between dentists and patients can be exceptionally challenging when the patient and the dentist do not speak the same language, as is frequently the case in multicultural Australia. The aim of this study was to describe the issues involved in dealing with limited-English speaking patients in order to formulate recommendations on how to improve dental communication. A cross sectional study was performed using a postal survey to Australian Dental Association member dental practitioners in Western Australia. Responses were collated and data analysis was performed using SPSS 11.5 for Windows. Most respondents encounter language-related communication barriers weekly or monthly, and the most satisfactory method of communication is informal interpreters. Despite reporting satisfaction working with professional chairside interpreters or dental staff interpreters, most respondents did not use them. The most common alternative communication methods were diagrams and models. Endodontics and periodontics provided the greatest challenge in communication. Informed consent was reportedly compromised due to language barriers by 29 per cent of respondents. Recommendations to improve communication included access to interpretation services, dentist technique/attitude to communication and patient preparedness for English-speaking encounters. Many respondents do not utilize the preferential communication methods, creating a potential compromise to both informed consent and the patients' best interests. The use of professional interpreters is recommended, and discussion should be supplemented with means of non-verbal communication. Dentists require access to lists of multilingual dentists and greater awareness of interpretation services to improve multilingual dentist-patient communication.

  15. Multilingual Language Policy and School Linguistic Practice: Globalization and English-Language Teaching in India, Singapore and South Africa

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Hornberger, Nancy; Vaish, Viniti

    2009-01-01

    This paper explores tensions in translating multilingual language policy to classroom linguistic practice, and especially the paradoxical role of and demand for English as a tool of decolonization for multilingual populations seeking equitable access to a globalizing economy. We take an ecological and sociolinguistic approach, depicting tensions…

  16. Internet Presentation of Departments of Pediatric Surgery in Germany and Their Compliance with Recommended Criteria for Promoting Services and Offering Professional Information for Patients.

    PubMed

    Farhat, Naim; Zoeller, Christoph; Petersen, Claus; Ure, Benno

    2016-08-01

    Introduction The presentation of health institutions in the internet is highly variable concerning marketing features and medical information. We aimed to investigate the structure and the kind of information provided on the Web sites of all departments of pediatric surgery in Germany. Furthermore, we aimed to identify the degree to which these Web sites comply with internet marketing recommendations for generating business. Method The Web sites of all pediatric surgery units referred to as departments on the official Web site of the German Society of Pediatric Surgery (GSPS) were assessed. The search engine Google was used by entering the terms "pediatric surgery" and the name of the city. Besides general data eight content characteristics focusing on ranking, accessibility, use of social media, multilingual sites, navigation options, selected images, contact details, and medical information were evaluated according to published recommendations. Results A total of 85 departments of pediatric surgery were included. On Google search results 44 (52%) ranked number one and 34 (40%) of the department's homepages were accessible directly through the homepage link of the GSPS. A link to own digital and/or social media was offered on 11 (13%) homepages. Nine sites were multilingual. The most common navigation bar item was clinical services on 74 (87%) homepages. Overall, 76 (89%) departments presented their doctors and 17 (20%) presented other staff members with images of doctors on 53 (62%) and contact data access from the homepage on 68 (80%) Web sites. On 25 (29%) Web sites information on the medical conditions treated were presented, on 17 (20%) details of treating concepts, and on 4 (5%) numbers of patients with specific conditions treated in the own department per year. Conclusion We conclude that numerous of the investigated online presentations do not comply with recommended criteria for offering professional information for patients and for promoting services. Only less than one-third of the departments of pediatric surgery in Germany offer information about the medical conditions they treat. Features, which may influence the decision of patients and parents such as ranking, accessibility, use of social media, multilingual sites, navigation options, selected images, and contact information were differently lacking on many Web sites. Georg Thieme Verlag KG Stuttgart · New York.

  17. IFLA General Conference, 1986. Pre-Conference Seminar on Automated Systems for Access to Multilingual and Multiscript Library materials: Problems and Solutions. Papers.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions, The Hague (Netherlands).

    A seminar which considered problems and solutions regarding automated systems for access to multilingual and multiscript library materials was held as a pre-session before the IFLA general conference in 1986. Papers presented include: (1) "Romanized and Transliterated Databases of Asian Language Materials--History, Problems, and…

  18. The Politics of Languages in Education: Issues of Access, Social Participation and Inequality in the Multilingual Context of Pakistan

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Tamim, Tayyaba

    2014-01-01

    This paper, based on some findings of a wider three-year study, sets forth the issue of languages used and taught in education as a dimension of inequality and highlights its implications for widening participation and access in the multilingual context of Pakistan. The paper takes secondary education in private and government schools in Pakistan…

  19. Building Specialized Multilingual Lexical Graphs Using Community Resources

    NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

    Daoud, Mohammad; Boitet, Christian; Kageura, Kyo; Kitamoto, Asanobu; Mangeot, Mathieu; Daoud, Daoud

    We are describing methods for compiling domain-dedicated multilingual terminological data from various resources. We focus on collecting data from online community users as a main source, therefore, our approach depends on acquiring contributions from volunteers (explicit approach), and it depends on analyzing users' behaviors to extract interesting patterns and facts (implicit approach). As a generic repository that can handle the collected multilingual terminological data, we are describing the concept of dedicated Multilingual Preterminological Graphs MPGs, and some automatic approaches for constructing them by analyzing the behavior of online community users. A Multilingual Preterminological Graph is a special lexical resource that contains massive amount of terms related to a special domain. We call it preterminological, because it is a raw material that can be used to build a standardized terminological repository. Building such a graph is difficult using traditional approaches, as it needs huge efforts by domain specialists and terminologists. In our approach, we build such a graph by analyzing the access log files of the website of the community, and by finding the important terms that have been used to search in that website, and their association with each other. We aim at making this graph as a seed repository so multilingual volunteers can contribute. We are experimenting this approach with the Digital Silk Road Project. We have used its access log files since its beginning in 2003, and obtained an initial graph of around 116000 terms. As an application, we used this graph to obtain a preterminological multilingual database that is serving a CLIR system for the DSR project.

  20. Multilingual Thesauri for the Modern World - No Ideal Solution?

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Jorna, Kerstin; Davies, Sylvie

    2001-01-01

    Discusses thesauri as tools for multilingual information retrieval and cross-cultural communication. Considers the need for multilingual thesauri and the importance of explicit conceptual structures, and introduces a pilot thesaurus, InfoDEFT (Information Deutsch-English-Francais Thesaurus), as a possible model for new online thesauri which are…

  1. Multilingual and Multimodal Composition at School: "ScribJab" in Action

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Dagenais, Diane; Toohey, Kelleen; Bennett Fox, Alexa; Singh, Angelpreet

    2017-01-01

    In this article, we explain how recent research on multilingualism, multilingual education, and multimodality informs our thinking about the use of "ScribJab," a multilingual iPad application and website ("ScribJab.com"), which enables users to compose, illustrate, and narrate stories in two languages. Drawing on excerpts from…

  2. Mother Tongue First Multilingual Education among the Tribal Communities in India

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    MacKenzie, Pamela J.

    2009-01-01

    India's rich multilingual, multicultural society creates a complex challenge to the Government as it attempts to address the educational needs of its tribal communities. Although access to schools has increased and enrolment rates are improving, the dropout rates are still alarmingly high and achievement levels are low compared to their non-tribal…

  3. Rejecting Babel: Examining Multilingualism without Citizenship in the U.S. Postnational Scenario

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Barros, Sandro R.

    2017-01-01

    Despite the long history of multilingualism in the U.S., language rights debates have tended to center almost exclusively on the acquisition of English as an issue of equity for citizens who are speakers of other languages. Policies advanced in the name of "access" and "equity" continue to frame English as the only viable means…

  4. How One School Has Developed a Metalinguistic Toolkit for Supporting Multilingual Students as Writers

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Humphrey, Sally L.

    2015-01-01

    In this article, I report on the first stage of a whole school literacy project," Embedding Literacies in the KLAs" (ELK), which aims to support multilingual learners to access the literacies they need for high stakes curriculum learning. As it is "quality teaching" that has been found to have the greatest impact on student…

  5. Multilingual Immigrants' French and English Acquisition in Grade 6 French Immersion: Evidence as Means to Improve Access

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Mady, Callie

    2018-01-01

    This study seeks to examine the success of voluntary immigrants in Grade 6 French immersion with a double comparison to Canadian-born (a) Anglophones and (b) multilingual students (children of voluntary immigrants). The findings, that show the immigrant students to outperform the other two groups in French and English, are explored through a…

  6. Utility of two cancer organization websites for a multiethnic, public hospital oncology population: comparative cross-sectional survey.

    PubMed

    Nguyen, Katherine D; Hara, Belinda; Chlebowski, Rowan T

    2005-07-01

    While information websites have been developed by major cancer organizations, their appropriateness for patients in multiethnic, multilingual public hospital settings has received limited attention. The objective of the study was to determine the utility of cancer information websites for a public hospital patient population. A 70-item questionnaire was developed to evaluate cancer information seeking behavior, Internet access and use, and content appropriateness of two cancer information websites: People Living with Cancer from the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) and Breast Cancer Info from the Susan Komen Breast Cancer Foundation (SKF). Interviews were conducted with consecutive consenting oncology patients seen in a public hospital oncology clinic. Fifty-nine persons participated in the survey. The response rate was 80%. Participants were Caucasian (25%), African American (19%), Hispanic (42%), and Asian/Pacific Islander (11%). English was the primary language in 53% of participants, 56% had a high school education or less, and 74% had an annual income less than US 35000 dollars. With respect to computer and Internet use, 71% had computer access, and 44% searched for cancer information online, with more being interested in obtaining online information in the future (63%). Participants who had computer access were likely to be English speaking (P = .04). Those less likely to have previously used a computer tended to have a lower annual income (P = .02) or to be males aged 55 years or older (P < .05). When shown sample content from the two websites, almost all participants stated that it was "easy to understand" (ASCO 96%, SKF 96%) and had "easy to understand terms" (ASCO 94%, SKF 92%). Somewhat fewer respondents agreed that the websites provided "information they could use" (ASCO 88%, SKF 80%) or that they would return to these websites (ASCO 73%, SKF 68%). The majority planned to "discuss website information with their oncologists" (ASCO 82%, SKF 70%). Multiethnic, multilingual cancer patients at a public county hospital commonly had Internet access and found the content of two websites representative of major cancer organizations to be both understandable and useful.

  7. Promoting Multilingual Communicative Competence through Multimodal Academic Learning Situations

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Kyppö, Anna; Natri, Teija

    2016-01-01

    This paper presents information on the factors affecting the development of multilingual and multicultural communicative competence in interactive multimodal learning environments in an academic context. The interdisciplinary course in multilingual interaction offered at the University of Jyväskylä aims to enhance students' competence in…

  8. Epistemonikos: a free, relational, collaborative, multilingual database of health evidence.

    PubMed

    Rada, Gabriel; Pérez, Daniel; Capurro, Daniel

    2013-01-01

    Epistemonikos (www.epistemonikos.org) is a free, multilingual database of the best available health evidence. This paper describes the design, development and implementation of the Epistemonikos project. Using several web technologies to store systematic reviews, their included articles, overviews of reviews and structured summaries, Epistemonikos is able to provide a simple and powerful search tool to access health evidence for sound decision making. Currently, Epistemonikos stores more than 115,000 unique documents and more than 100,000 relationships between documents. In addition, since its database is translated into 9 different languages, Epistemonikos ensures that non-English speaking decision-makers can access the best available evidence without language barriers.

  9. Complex Networks in Different Languages: A Study of an Emergent Multilingual Encyclopedia

    NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

    Pembe, F. Canan; Bingol, Haluk

    There is an increasing interest to the study of complex networks in an interdisciplinary way. Language, as a complex network, has been a part of this study due to its importance in human life. Moreover, the Internet has also been at the center of this study by making access to large amounts of information possible. With these ideas in mind, this work aims to evaluate conceptual networks in different languages with the data from a large and open source of information in the Internet, namely Wikipedia. As an evolving multilingual encyclopedia that can be edited by any Internet user, Wikipedia is a good example of an emergent complex system. In this paper, different from previous work on conceptual networks which usually concentrated on single languages, we concentrate on possible ways to compare the usages of different languages and possibly the underlying cultures. This also involves the analysis of local network properties around certain coneepts in different languages. For an initial evaluation, the concept "family" is used to compare the English and German Wikipedias. Although, the work is currently at the beginning, the results are promising.

  10. The Accommodation of Multilingualism through Blended Learning in Two Information Technology Classes

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Olivier, Jako

    2013-01-01

    The South African society can be described as culturally diverse and multilingual. However, despite the advantages of mother-tongue education, English is often chosen as the language of learning and teaching at the cost of the other official languages. This article proposes that multilingualism, through the use of languages other than English in…

  11. Interchanging lexical information for a multilingual dictionary.

    PubMed

    Baud, R H; Nyström, M; Borin, L; Evans, R; Schulz, S; Zweigenbaum, P

    2005-01-01

    To facilitate the interchange of lexical information for multiple languages in the medical domain. To pave the way for the emergence of a generally available truly multilingual electronic dictionary in the medical domain. An interchange format has to be neutral relative to the target languages. It has to be consistent with current needs of lexicon authors, present and future. An active interaction between six potential authors aimed to determine a common denominator striking the right balance between richness of content and ease of use for lexicon providers. A simple list of relevant attributes has been established and published. The format has the potential for collecting relevant parts of a future multilingual dictionary. An XML version is available. This effort makes feasible the exchange of lexical information between research groups. Interchange files are made available in a public repository. This procedure opens the door to a true multilingual dictionary, in the awareness that the exchange of lexical information is (only) a necessary first step, before structuring the corresponding entries in different languages.

  12. Preferences for (In)Formal Language: Correlations with Attitudes toward Linguistic Variation, Multilingualism, Tolerance of Ambiguity, and Residence Abroad

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    van Compernolle, Rémi A.

    2017-01-01

    Drawing on data collected via a web-based survey, the study investigates the relationship between preferences for (in)formal language and attitudes toward linguistic variation among a large group of monolingual and multilingual adults (n = 379). Also explored are the links between preferences for (in)formal language and several secondary…

  13. Can multilinguality improve Biomedical Word Sense Disambiguation?

    PubMed

    Duque, Andres; Martinez-Romo, Juan; Araujo, Lourdes

    2016-12-01

    Ambiguity in the biomedical domain represents a major issue when performing Natural Language Processing tasks over the huge amount of available information in the field. For this reason, Word Sense Disambiguation is critical for achieving accurate systems able to tackle complex tasks such as information extraction, summarization or document classification. In this work we explore whether multilinguality can help to solve the problem of ambiguity, and the conditions required for a system to improve the results obtained by monolingual approaches. Also, we analyze the best ways to generate those useful multilingual resources, and study different languages and sources of knowledge. The proposed system, based on co-occurrence graphs containing biomedical concepts and textual information, is evaluated on a test dataset frequently used in biomedicine. We can conclude that multilingual resources are able to provide a clear improvement of more than 7% compared to monolingual approaches, for graphs built from a small number of documents. Also, empirical results show that automatically translated resources are a useful source of information for this particular task. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

  14. Interchanging Lexical Information for a Multilingual Dictionary

    PubMed Central

    Baud, RH; Nyström, M; Borin, L; Evans, R; Schulz, S; Zweigenbaum, P

    2005-01-01

    Objective To facilitate the interchange of lexical information for multiple languages in the medical domain. To pave the way for the emergence of a generally available truly multilingual electronic dictionary in the medical domain. Methods An interchange format has to be neutral relative to the target languages. It has to be consistent with current needs of lexicon authors, present and future. An active interaction between six potential authors aimed to determine a common denominator striking the right balance between richness of content and ease of use for lexicon providers. Results A simple list of relevant attributes has been established and published. The format has the potential for collecting relevant parts of a future multilingual dictionary. An XML version is available. Conclusion This effort makes feasible the exchange of lexical information between research groups. Interchange files are made available in a public repository. This procedure opens the door to a true multilingual dictionary, in the awareness that the exchange of lexical information is (only) a necessary first step, before structuring the corresponding entries in different languages. PMID:16778996

  15. [Identification and sampling of people with migration background for epidemiological studies in Germany].

    PubMed

    Reiss, K; Makarova, N; Spallek, J; Zeeb, H; Razum, O

    2013-06-01

    In 2009, 19.6% of the population of Germany either had migrated themselves or were the offspring of people with migration experience. Migrants differ from the autochthonous German population in terms of health status, health awareness and health behaviour. To further investigate the health situation of migrants in Germany, epidemiological studies are needed. Such studies can employ existing databases which provide detailed information on migration status. Otherwise, onomastic or toponomastic procedures can be applied to identify people with migration background. If migrants have to be recruited into an epidemiological study, this can be done register-based (e. g., data from registration offices or telephone lists), based on residential location (random-route or random-walk procedure), via snowball sampling (e. g., through key persons) or via settings (e. g., school entry examination). An oversampling of people with migration background is not sufficient to avoid systematic bias in the sample due to non-participation. Additional measures have to be taken to increase access and raise participation rates. Personal contacting, multilingual instruments, multilingual interviewers and extensive public relations increase access and willingness to participate. Empirical evidence on 'successful' recruitment strategies for studies with migrants is still lacking in epidemiology and health sciences in Germany. The choice of the recruitment strategy as well as the measures to raise accessibility and willingness to participate depend on the available resources, the research question and the specific migrant target group. © Georg Thieme Verlag KG Stuttgart · New York.

  16. Managing an Open Access, Multi-Institutional, International Digital Library: The Digital Library of the Caribbean

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Wooldridge, Brooke; Taylor, Laurie; Sullivan, Mark

    2009-01-01

    Developing an Open Access, multi-institutional, multilingual, international digital library requires robust technological and institutional infrastructures that support both the needs of individual institutions alongside the needs of the growing partnership and ensure continuous communication and development of the shared vision for the digital…

  17. Latent morpho-semantic analysis : multilingual information retrieval with character n-grams and mutual information.

    DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

    Bader, Brett William; Chew, Peter A.; Abdelali, Ahmed

    We describe an entirely statistics-based, unsupervised, and language-independent approach to multilingual information retrieval, which we call Latent Morpho-Semantic Analysis (LMSA). LMSA overcomes some of the shortcomings of related previous approaches such as Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA). LMSA has an important theoretical advantage over LSA: it combines well-known techniques in a novel way to break the terms of LSA down into units which correspond more closely to morphemes. Thus, it has a particular appeal for use with morphologically complex languages such as Arabic. We show through empirical results that the theoretical advantages of LMSA can translate into significant gains in precisionmore » in multilingual information retrieval tests. These gains are not matched either when a standard stemmer is used with LSA, or when terms are indiscriminately broken down into n-grams.« less

  18. A Novel Approach to Creating Disambiguated Multilingual Dictionaries

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Boguslavsky, Igor; Cardenosa, Jesus; Gallardo, Carolina

    2009-01-01

    Multilingual lexicons are needed in various applications, such as cross-lingual information retrieval, machine translation, and some others. Often, these applications suffer from the ambiguity of dictionary items, especially when an intermediate natural language is involved in the process of the dictionary construction, since this language adds…

  19. A Bootstrapped Approach to Multilingual Text Stream Parsing

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Londhe, Nikhil

    2017-01-01

    The ubiquitous hashtag has disruptively transformed how news stories are reported and shared across social media networks. Often, such text streams are massively multilingual with 50 different languages on an average and contain a combination of subjective user opinion, objective evolving information about the story and unrelated spam. This is in…

  20. "Lunch Keeps People Apart": The Role of English for Social Interaction in a Multilingual Academic Workplace

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Negretti, Raffaella; Garcia-Yeste, Miguel

    2015-01-01

    Research on the role of language in multilingual workplaces, where English is often adopted as a lingua franca (ELF), shows that language practices influence socialization and interpersonal communication, frequently creating issues such as asymmetrical sharing of information, language clusters, or thin communication. Similarly to other…

  1. Conflicting Language Ideologies and Contradictory Language Practices in Singaporean Multilingual Families

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Curdt-Christiansen, Xiao Lan

    2016-01-01

    Informed by family language policy (FLP) as the theoretical framework, I illustrate in this paper how language ideologies can be incongruous and language policies can be conflicting through three multilingual families in Singapore representing three major ethnic groups--Chinese, Malay and Indian. By studying their family language audits, observing…

  2. Multi-lingual search engine to access PubMed monolingual subsets: a feasibility study.

    PubMed

    Darmoni, Stéfan J; Soualmia, Lina F; Griffon, Nicolas; Grosjean, Julien; Kerdelhué, Gaétan; Kergourlay, Ivan; Dahamna, Badisse

    2013-01-01

    PubMed contains many articles in languages other than English but it is difficult to find them using the English version of the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) Thesaurus. The aim of this work is to propose a tool allowing access to a PubMed subset in one language, and to evaluate its performance. Translations of MeSH were enriched and gathered in the information system. PubMed subsets in main European languages were also added in our database, using a dedicated parser. The CISMeF generic semantic search engine was evaluated on the response time for simple queries. MeSH descriptors are currently available in 11 languages in the information system. All the 654,000 PubMed citations in French were integrated into CISMeF database. None of the response times exceed the threshold defined for usability (2 seconds). It is now possible to freely access biomedical literature in French using a tool in French; health professionals and lay people with a low English language may find it useful. It will be expended to several European languages: German, Spanish, Norwegian and Portuguese.

  3. Fostering Multilinguality in the UMLS: A Computational Approach to Terminology Expansion for Multiple Languages

    PubMed Central

    Hellrich, Johannes; Hahn, Udo

    2014-01-01

    We here report on efforts to computationally support the maintenance and extension of multilingual biomedical terminology resources. Our main idea is to treat term acquisition as a classification problem guided by term alignment in parallel multilingual corpora, using termhood information coming from of a named entity recognition system as a novel feature. We report on experiments for Spanish, French, German and Dutch parts of a multilingual UMLS-derived biomedical terminology. These efforts yielded 19k, 18k, 23k and 12k new terms and synonyms, respectively, from which about half relate to concepts without a previously available term label for these non-English languages. Based on expert assessment of a novel German terminology sample, 80% of the newly acquired terms were judged as reasonable additions to the terminology. PMID:25954371

  4. Language Choice and Identity Construction in Peer Interactions: Insights from a Multilingual University in Hong Kong

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Gu, Mingyue

    2011-01-01

    Informed by linguistic ecological theory and the notion of identity, this study investigates language uses and identity construction in interactions among students with different linguistic and cultural backgrounds in a multilingual university. Individual and focus-group interviews were conducted with two groups of students: Hong Kong (HK) and…

  5. "I Use My Mother Tongue at Home and with Friends--Not in School!" Multilingualism and Identity in Rural Kenya

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Spernes, Kari

    2012-01-01

    The present paper investigates students' experiences of being multilingual. Qualitative data have been collected during observation, focus groups, interviews and text writing in a public primary school in rural Kenya. The informants are students in standards one, three and eight whose mother tongue is the indigenous language called Nandi, which…

  6. Content Management and the Future of Academic Libraries.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Wu, Yuhfen Diana; Liu, Mengxiong

    2001-01-01

    Discusses Internet-based electronic content management in digital libraries and considers the future of academic libraries. Topics include digital technologies; content management systems; standards; bandwidth; security and privacy concerns; legal matters, including copyrights and ownership; lifecycle; and multilingual access and interface. (LRW)

  7. A Platform for Multilingual Research in Spoken Dialogue Systems

    DTIC Science & Technology

    2000-08-01

    UNCLASSIFIED Defense Technical Information Center Compilation Part Notice ADP010384 TITLE: A Platform for Multilingual Research in Spoken Dialogue...Ronald A. Cole*, Ben Serridge§, John-Paul Hosomý, Andrew Cronke, and Ed Kaiser* *Center for Spoken Language Understanding ; University of Colorado...Boulder; Boulder, CO, 80309, USA §Universidad de las Americas; 72820 Santa Catarina Martir; Puebla, Mexico *Center for Spoken Language Understanding (CSLU

  8. Towards a Multilingual Medical Lexicon

    PubMed Central

    Markó, Kornél; Baud, Robert; Zweigenbaum, Pierre; Borin, Lars; Merkel, Magnus; Schulz, Stefan

    2006-01-01

    We present results of the collaboration of a multinational team of researchers from (computational) linguistics, medicine, and medical informatics with the goal of building a multilingual medical lexicon with high coverage and complete morpho-syntactic information. Monolingual lexical resources were collected and subsequently mapped between languages using a morpho-semantic term normalization engine, which captures intra- as well as interlingual synonymy relationships on the level of subwords. PMID:17238398

  9. Divergence of Languages as Resources for Theorizing

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Nguyen, Thi Hong Nhung

    2017-01-01

    This paper investigates the potential of conceptual divergences within and between languages for providing intellectual resources for theorizing. Specifically, it explores the role of multilingual researchers in using the possibilities of the plurality of intellectual cultures and languages they have access to for theorizing International Service…

  10. The multilingual videotape project: community involvement in a unique health education program.

    PubMed Central

    Clabots, R B; Dolphin, D

    1992-01-01

    The large number of Southeast Asian, Hispanic, and Portuguese immigrants in Rhode Island face formidable language and cultural barriers in gaining access to the health care that they need. As the funding for refugee-specific programs diminishes, the focus is on programs that encourage self-sufficiency, assist in gaining access to mainstream health care, and involve a collaboration among service agencies and the communities they serve. On behalf of a coalition of health care and community agencies, Women and Infants Hospital of Rhode Island received a private foundation grant to produce nine multilingual videotapes that would educate immigrants and refugees about health issues specific to them and help them access the health care system. The project was structured to maximize the involvement of the various communities and to "empower" community members in working with mainstream service agencies. Coalition and other community members provided input into topic selection, script content, and presentation methods for the videotapes that would be culturally appropriate. During the 2-year project, nine videotapes were produced with narration in seven languages. Copies of the videotapes were distributed free of charge to coalition members. PMID:1738812

  11. [The QR code in society, economy and medicine--fields of application, options and chances].

    PubMed

    Flaig, Benno; Parzeller, Markus

    2011-01-01

    2D codes like the QR Code ("Quick Response") are becoming more and more common in society and medicine. The application spectrum and benefits in medicine and other fields are described. 2D codes can be created free of charge on any computer with internet access without any previous knowledge. The codes can be easily used in publications, presentations, on business cards and posters. Editors choose between contact details, text or a hyperlink as information behind the code. At expert conferences, linkage by QR Code allows the audience to download presentations and posters quickly. The documents obtained can then be saved, printed, processed etc. Fast access to stored data in the internet makes it possible to integrate additional and explanatory multilingual videos into medical posters. In this context, a combination of different technologies (printed handout, QR Code and screen) may be reasonable.

  12. "La Orquesta": Symbolic Performance in a Multilingual Community of Practice

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Back, Michele

    2013-01-01

    Researchers in second language socialization (SLS) often examine those interactions relating to a learner's integration within a target community. Kramsch and Whiteside (2008) noted the importance of "symbolic competence" in this integration. Symbolic competence, defined as the ability to access contextually relevant social and political…

  13. Technology to Enhance Learning in the Multi-Lingual Classroom

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Hollenbeck, James E.; Hollenbeck, Darina Z.

    2004-01-01

    Research and various studies have showed that using multimedia in the classroom increases creativity, innovation problem solving and improves communication between people. Technology addresses equity and access issues for learners. Technology allows educators to refine teaching strategies and learning processes, and to be more inclusive of all…

  14. Perceptions of Cataloguers and End-Users towards Bilingual Authority Files.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Abdoulaye, Kaba

    2002-01-01

    Analyzes and describes bilingual authority files at the main library of the International Islamic University of Malaysia. Highlights include a review of multilingual research; perceptions of end users and catalogers; problems with bilingual files; and use of the OPAC (online public access catalog) by users. (Author/LRW)

  15. Bottle-Neck Feature Extraction Structures for Multilingual Training and Porting (Pub Version, Open Access)

    DTIC Science & Technology

    2016-05-03

    24 Mel-scaled filters applied on squared FFT magnitudes (critical band energies, CRBE) and 10 F0-related coefficients. The filter- bank spans...Acknowledgements This work was supported by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) via Department of Defense US Army Research Laboratory

  16. Commentary

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Heller, Monica

    2014-01-01

    The subject of multilingualism in institutions has long been a central interest in sociolinguistics, and it is worth asking why. The answer lies in the role of institutions in the modern nation state, a point made over and over again by Michel Foucault. Institutions control access to all the resources a state can distribute; it distributes them…

  17. Structural and Multilingual Approaches to Subject Access on the Web.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Chan, Lois Mai; Lin, Xia; Zeng, Marcia

    This paper presents some of the efforts currently being made to develop mechanisms that can organize World Wide Web resources for efficient and effective retrieval, as well as programs that can accommodate multiple languages. Part 1 discusses structural approaches to organizing Web resources, including the use of hierarchical or…

  18. Multilingual Policies and Multilingual Education in the Nordic Countries

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Björklund, Mikaela; Björklund, Siv; Sjöholm, Kaj

    2013-01-01

    This article presents some aspects of multilingualism and multilingual education in the Nordic countries, drawing upon experiences from the project "Network for Researchers of Multilingualism and Multilingual Education, RoMME" (2011-2013), where Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden are represented. The aim is to briefly present and…

  19. Epistemological Access through Lecture Materials in Multiple Modes and Language Varieties: The Role of Ideologies and Multilingual Literacy Practices in Student Evaluations of Such Materials at a South African University

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Antia, Bassey E.; Dyers, Charlyn

    2016-01-01

    This paper seeks to address the ways in which ideology and literacy practices shape the responses of students to an ongoing initiative at the University of the Western Cape aimed at diversifying options for epistemological access, specifically the language varieties and the modes in which parts of the curriculum for a third year linguistics module…

  20. Multilingual Awareness and Heritage Language Education: Children's Multimodal Representations of Their Multilingualism

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Melo-Pfeifer, Sílvia

    2015-01-01

    In this article, we analyse visual narratives of multilingual children, in order to acknowledge their self-perception as multilingual selves. Through the analysis of drawings produced by children enrolled in Portuguese as heritage language (PHL) classes in Germany, we analyse how bi-/multilingual children perceive their multilingual repertoires…

  1. Localizing OER in Afghanistan: Developing a Multilingual Digital Library for Afghan Teachers

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Oates, Lauryn; Hashimi, Jamshid

    2016-01-01

    The Darakht-e Danesh ("knowledge tree") Online Library is the first open educational resource (OER) initiative in Afghanistan, established to enhance teacher subject-area knowledge, access and use of learning materials, and to foster more diverse teaching methodologies in order to improve learning outcomes in Afghan classrooms. This…

  2. The Sign Language Situation in Mali

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Nyst, Victoria

    2015-01-01

    This article gives a first overview of the sign language situation in Mali and its capital, Bamako, located in the West African Sahel. Mali is a highly multilingual country with a significant incidence of deafness, for which meningitis appears to be the main cause, coupled with limited access to adequate health care. In comparison to neighboring…

  3. Preserved Visual Language Identification Despite Severe Alexia

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Di Pietro, Marie; Ptak, Radek; Schnider, Armin

    2012-01-01

    Patients with letter-by-letter alexia may have residual access to lexical or semantic representations of words despite severely impaired overt word recognition (reading). Here, we report a multilingual patient with severe letter-by-letter alexia who rapidly identified the language of written words and sentences in French and English while he had…

  4. Penn Working Papers in Educational Linguistics. Volume 7, Number 1, Spring 1991.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Hardman, Joel, Ed.; And Others

    Five working papers in linguistics and education are presented. "The Mediators: Providing Access To Texts in English in a Semi-Urban Maharashtrian College Community" (Grace Plamthodathil Jacob) examines the teacher's role in mediating cultural awareness as part of English second language education in a multilingual, non-western society.…

  5. International Multilingual Student Writers' (Re)Negotiation of Their Languages and Literacies Practices in a First-Year Multilingual Composition Class

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Prikhodko, Maria Y.

    2017-01-01

    This qualitative case study explores how five multilingual student writers (re)negotiate their multilingual literacies histories with emergent U.S. academic writing conventions as part of a first-year multilingual composition (FYMC) class. In pursuit of examining this (re)negotiation, first, I define multilingual literacies as nomadic (Ciolfi…

  6. Developing Multilingual Pedagogies and Research through Language Study and Reflection

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Catalano, Theresa; Shende, Madhur; Suh, Emily K.

    2018-01-01

    Globalisation and increased transnational migration underscore the need for educational responses to multilingualism and multilingual discourses. One way to heighten awareness of multilingual pedagogies (while simultaneously providing data for multilingual research) is the use of reflective language study and journaling by language…

  7. The relationship between spoken English proficiency and participation in higher education, employment and income from two Australian censuses.

    PubMed

    Blake, Helen L; Mcleod, Sharynne; Verdon, Sarah; Fuller, Gail

    2018-04-01

    Proficiency in the language of the country of residence has implications for an individual's level of education, employability, income and social integration. This paper explores the relationship between the spoken English proficiency of residents of Australia on census day and their educational level, employment and income to provide insight into multilingual speakers' ability to participate in Australia as an English-dominant society. Data presented are derived from two Australian censuses i.e. 2006 and 2011 of over 19 million people. The proportion of Australians who reported speaking a language other than English at home was 21.5% in the 2006 census and 23.2% in the 2011 census. Multilingual speakers who also spoke English very well were more likely to have post-graduate qualifications, full-time employment and high income than monolingual English-speaking Australians. However, multilingual speakers who reported speaking English not well were much less likely to have post-graduate qualifications or full-time employment than monolingual English-speaking Australians. These findings provide insight into the socioeconomic and educational profiles of multilingual speakers, which will inform the understanding of people such as speech-language pathologists who provide them with support. The results indicate spoken English proficiency may impact participation in Australian society. These findings challenge the "monolingual mindset" by demonstrating that outcomes for multilingual speakers in education, employment and income are higher than for monolingual speakers.

  8. Abstracts of SIG Sessions.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Proceedings of the ASIS Annual Meeting, 1997

    1997-01-01

    Presents abstracts of SIG Sessions. Highlights include digital collections; information retrieval methods; public interest/fair use; classification and indexing; electronic publication; funding; globalization; information technology projects; interface design; networking in developing countries; metadata; multilingual databases; networked…

  9. A Framework for Achieving Situational Awareness during Crisis based on Twitter Analysis

    NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

    Zielinski, Andrea; Tokarchuk, Laurissa; Middleton, Stuart; Chaves, Fernando

    2013-04-01

    Decision Support Systems for Natural Crisis Management increasingly employ Web 2.0 and 3.0 technologies for future collaborative decision making, including the use of social networks like Twitter. However, human sensor data is not readily accessible and interpretable, since the texts are unstructured, noisy and available in various languages. The present work focusses on the detection of crisis events in a multilingual setting as part of the FP7-funded EU project TRIDEC and is motivated by the goal to establish a Tsunami warning system for the Mediterranean. It is integrated into a dynamic spatial-temporal decision making component with a command and control unit's graphical user interface that presents all relevant information to the human operator to support critical decision-support. To this end, a tool for the interactive visualization of geospatial data is implemented: All tweets with an exact timestamp or geo-location are monitored on the map in real-time so that the operator on duty can get an overall picture of the situation. Apart from the human sensor data, the seismic sensor data will appear also on the same screen. Signs of abnormal activity from twitter usage in social networks as well as in sensor networks devices can then be used to trigger official warning alerts according to the CAP message standard. Whenever a certain threshold of relevant tweets in a HASC region (Hierarchical Administrative Subdivision Code) is exceeded, the twitter activity in this administrative region will be shown on a map. We believe that the following functionalities are crucial for monitoring crisis, making use of text mining and network analysis techniques: Focussed crawling, trustworthyness analysis geo-parsing, and multilingual tweet classification. In the first step, the Twitter Streaming API accesses the social data, using an adaptive keyword list (focussed crawling). Then, tweets are filtered and aggregated to form counts for a certain time-span (e.g., an interval of 1-2 minutes). Particularly, we investigate the following novel techniques that help to fulfill this task: trustworthyness analysis (linkage analysis and user network analysis), geo-parsing (locating the event in space), and multilingual tweet classification (filtering out of noisy tweets for various Mediterranean languages). Lastly, an aberration algorithm looks for spikes in the temporal stream of twitter data.

  10. A data dictionary approach to multilingual documentation and decision support for the diagnosis of acute abdominal pain. (COPERNICUS 555, an European concerted action).

    PubMed

    Ohmann, C; Eich, H P; Sippel, H

    1998-01-01

    This paper describes the design and development of a multilingual documentation and decision support system for the diagnosis of acute abdominal pain. The work was performed within a multi-national COPERNICUS European concerted action dealing with information technology for quality assurance in acute abdominal pain in Europe (EURO-AAP, 555). The software engineering was based on object-oriented analysis design and programming. The program cover three modules: a data dictionary, a documentation program and a knowledge based system. National versions of the software were provided and introduced into 16 centers from Central and Eastern Europe. A prospective data collection was performed in which 4020 patients were recruited. The software design has been proven to be very efficient and useful for the development of multilingual software.

  11. Linguistic Ideologies in Multilingual South African Suburban Schools

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Makoe, Pinky; McKinney, Carolyn

    2014-01-01

    Existing research on language in South African schooling frequently draws attention to the problematic hegemony of English and the lack of access to quality education in the home language of the majority of learners, often drawing on the metaphor of a gap or a disjuncture between post-apartheid language in education policy (LiEP) and its…

  12. The Inclusion of Slovak Roma Pupils in Secondary School: Contexts of Language Policy and Planning

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Payne, Mark

    2017-01-01

    The arrival of large numbers of Slovak Roma to Sheffield over a relatively short period has inserted two new languages (Slovak and Romani) into an already diverse, multilingual school environment. Schools face challenges in welcoming the new migrant children, inducting and integrating them and facilitating access to the English school curriculum.…

  13. Language Management: A Snapshot of Governmentality within the Private Schools in Quetta, Pakistan

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Manan, Syed Abdul; David, Maya Khemlani; Dumanig, Francisco Perlas

    2016-01-01

    Pakistan is a multilingual and multiethnic country; however, this diversity stands unrecognized in the formal language-in-education policies. Estimates suggest that about 90% of children who speak over 60 indigenous languages do not have access to education in their mother tongues. Linguists estimate that exclusive teaching of Urdu and English…

  14. Examining the Potential of Fansubbing as a Language Learning Activity

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Lakarnchua, Onuma

    2017-01-01

    The learning of English can help learners to not only understand and enjoy cultural products of the target language community, but also allows them to share what they enjoy in their own language community, or other communities to which English grants them access, with the world. Fansubbing, or the amateur production of multilingual subtitles for…

  15. Multilingual Metalanguage, or the Way Multilinguals Talk about Their Languages

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Jessner, Ulrike

    2005-01-01

    The increase of multilingualism in both natural and formal contexts has provoked a number of studies which have concentrated on providing evidence of multilingual processing and finding out about the differences and similarities between second and third language learning. This paper deals with the use of metalanguage in multilingual students in an…

  16. Preparing FCS Professionals for a Multilingual Society: Building Community through the Experiences of Multilingual Families

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Duncan, Janine; Duncan, Daniel

    2014-01-01

    As demographics in the United States shift, family and consumer sciences (FCS) professionals must be prepared to foster healthy communities that embrace multilingual families. Because hegemonic language ideologies challenge multilingual families, FCS professionals need to know how to inclusively reframe communities to honor multilingual families.…

  17. Problems of Bi- and Multilingualism (Part III of "Language Learning: Individual Needs, Interdisciplinary Co-operation, Bi- and Multilingualism").

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    1978

    The following papers on the issue of multilingualism in second language instruction are included: (1) "Problemes linguistiques dans les societes plurilingues (Linguistic Problems in Multilingual Societies)," by Amadou-Mahtar M'Bow; (2) "Aim: Multilingualism. The Dismantling of Resistance and Prejudice," by Eva Koberski; (3)…

  18. Sounds Affecting the Moments of Stuttering in Multilingualism: A Case Study

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Morrish, Taryn; Nesbitt, Amy; le Roux, Mia; Zsilavecz, Ursula; van der Linde, Jeannie

    2017-01-01

    Research involving stuttering in multilingual individuals is limited. Speech-language therapists face the challenge of treating a diverse client base, which includes multilingual individuals. The aim of this study was to examine the stuttering moments across English, Afrikaans, and German in a multilingual speaker. A single multilingual adult with…

  19. Language Universalization for Improved Information Management: The Necessity for Esperanto.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Jones, R. Kent

    1978-01-01

    Discusses problems for information management in dealing with multilingual documentation. The planned language, Esperanto, is suggested as a universal working language because of its neutrality, rational structure, clarity, and expressive power. (Author/CWM)

  20. HONselect: multilingual assistant search engine operated by a concept-based interface system to decentralized heterogeneous sources.

    PubMed

    Boyer, C; Baujard, V; Scherrer, J R

    2001-01-01

    Any new user to the Internet will think that to retrieve the relevant document is an easy task especially with the wealth of sources available on this medium, but this is not the case. Even experienced users have difficulty formulating the right query for making the most of a search tool in order to efficiently obtain an accurate result. The goal of this work is to reduce the time and the energy necessary in searching and locating medical and health information. To reach this goal we have developed HONselect [1]. The aim of HONselect is not only to improve efficiency in retrieving documents but to respond to an increased need for obtaining a selection of relevant and accurate documents from a breadth of various knowledge databases including scientific bibliographical references, clinical trials, daily news, multimedia illustrations, conferences, forum, Web sites, clinical cases, and others. The authors based their approach on the knowledge representation using the National Library of Medicine's Medical Subject Headings (NLM, MeSH) vocabulary and classification [2,3]. The innovation is to propose a multilingual "one-stop searching" (one Web interface to databases currently in English, French and German) with full navigational and connectivity capabilities. The user may choose from a given selection of related terms the one that best suit his search, navigate in the term's hierarchical tree, and access directly to a selection of documents from high quality knowledge suppliers such as the MEDLINE database, the NLM's ClinicalTrials.gov server, the NewsPage's daily news, the HON's media gallery, conference listings and MedHunt's Web sites [4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]. HONselect, developed by HON, a non-profit organisation [10], is a free online available multilingual tool based on the MeSH thesaurus to index, select, retrieve and display accurate, up to date, high-level and quality documents.

  1. Orthographic and Phonological Neighborhood Databases across Multiple Languages.

    PubMed

    Marian, Viorica

    2017-01-01

    The increased globalization of science and technology and the growing number of bilinguals and multilinguals in the world have made research with multiple languages a mainstay for scholars who study human function and especially those who focus on language, cognition, and the brain. Such research can benefit from large-scale databases and online resources that describe and measure lexical, phonological, orthographic, and semantic information. The present paper discusses currently-available resources and underscores the need for tools that enable measurements both within and across multiple languages. A general review of language databases is followed by a targeted introduction to databases of orthographic and phonological neighborhoods. A specific focus on CLEARPOND illustrates how databases can be used to assess and compare neighborhood information across languages, to develop research materials, and to provide insight into broad questions about language. As an example of how using large-scale databases can answer questions about language, a closer look at neighborhood effects on lexical access reveals that not only orthographic, but also phonological neighborhoods can influence visual lexical access both within and across languages. We conclude that capitalizing upon large-scale linguistic databases can advance, refine, and accelerate scientific discoveries about the human linguistic capacity.

  2. Improving Access to Online Multilingual Resources by Adopting the My Language Portal in the City of Greater Dandenong Libraries

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Bogdanovic, Marijana; Johanson, Graeme

    2007-01-01

    This paper reports on the implementation of "My Language Portal" in the City of Greater Dandenong Libraries (CGDL), Melbourne, Victoria, through the development of a "My Language Portal Project Plan" in 2006. It discusses how the aims of the designers of My Language Portal (MLP) are fulfilled in the exceptional, changing…

  3. Study of Large Data Resources for Multilingual Training and System Porting (Pub Version, Open Access)

    DTIC Science & Technology

    2016-05-03

    extraction trained on a large database corpus – English Fisher. Although the performance of ported monolingual system would be worse in comparison...Language TE LI HA LA ZU LLP hours 8.6 9.6 7.9 8.1 8.4 LM sentences 11935 10743 9861 11577 10644 LM words 68175 83157 93131 93328 60832 dictionary 14505

  4. A Grammar Library for Information Structure

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Song, Sanghoun

    2014-01-01

    This dissertation makes substantial contributions to both the theoretical and computational treatment of information structure, with an eye toward creating natural language processing applications such as multilingual machine translation systems. The aim of the present dissertation is to create a grammar library of information structure for the…

  5. A multilingual and multimodal approach to literacy teaching and learning in urban education: a collaborative inquiry project in an inner city elementary school.

    PubMed

    Ntelioglou, Burcu Yaman; Fannin, Jennifer; Montanera, Mike; Cummins, Jim

    2014-01-01

    This paper presents findings from a collaborative inquiry project that explored teaching approaches that highlight the significance of multilingualism, multimodality, and multiliteracies in classrooms with high numbers of English language learners (ELLs). The research took place in an inner city elementary school with a large population of recently arrived and Canadian-born linguistically and culturally diverse students from Gambian, Indian, Mexican, Sri Lankan, Tibetan and Vietnamese backgrounds, as well as a recent wave of Roma students from Hungary. A high number of these students were from families with low-SES. The collaboration between two Grade 3 teachers and university-based researchers sought to create instructional approaches that would support students' academic engagement and literacy learning. In this paper, we described one of the projects that took place in this class, exploring how a descriptive writing unit could be implemented in a way that connected with students' lives and enabled them to use their home languages, through the creation of multiple texts, using creative writing, digital technologies, and drama pedagogy. This kind of multilingual and multimodal classroom practice changed the classroom dynamics and allowed the students access to identity positions of expertise, increasing their literacy investment, literacy engagement and learning.

  6. A multilingual and multimodal approach to literacy teaching and learning in urban education: a collaborative inquiry project in an inner city elementary school

    PubMed Central

    Ntelioglou, Burcu Yaman; Fannin, Jennifer; Montanera, Mike; Cummins, Jim

    2014-01-01

    This paper presents findings from a collaborative inquiry project that explored teaching approaches that highlight the significance of multilingualism, multimodality, and multiliteracies in classrooms with high numbers of English language learners (ELLs). The research took place in an inner city elementary school with a large population of recently arrived and Canadian-born linguistically and culturally diverse students from Gambian, Indian, Mexican, Sri Lankan, Tibetan and Vietnamese backgrounds, as well as a recent wave of Roma students from Hungary. A high number of these students were from families with low-SES. The collaboration between two Grade 3 teachers and university-based researchers sought to create instructional approaches that would support students’ academic engagement and literacy learning. In this paper, we described one of the projects that took place in this class, exploring how a descriptive writing unit could be implemented in a way that connected with students’ lives and enabled them to use their home languages, through the creation of multiple texts, using creative writing, digital technologies, and drama pedagogy. This kind of multilingual and multimodal classroom practice changed the classroom dynamics and allowed the students access to identity positions of expertise, increasing their literacy investment, literacy engagement and learning. PMID:24994986

  7. Understanding Editing Behaviors in Multilingual Wikipedia.

    PubMed

    Kim, Suin; Park, Sungjoon; Hale, Scott A; Kim, Sooyoung; Byun, Jeongmin; Oh, Alice H

    2016-01-01

    Multilingualism is common offline, but we have a more limited understanding of the ways multilingualism is displayed online and the roles that multilinguals play in the spread of content between speakers of different languages. We take a computational approach to studying multilingualism using one of the largest user-generated content platforms, Wikipedia. We study multilingualism by collecting and analyzing a large dataset of the content written by multilingual editors of the English, German, and Spanish editions of Wikipedia. This dataset contains over two million paragraphs edited by over 15,000 multilingual users from July 8 to August 9, 2013. We analyze these multilingual editors in terms of their engagement, interests, and language proficiency in their primary and non-primary (secondary) languages and find that the English edition of Wikipedia displays different dynamics from the Spanish and German editions. Users primarily editing the Spanish and German editions make more complex edits than users who edit these editions as a second language. In contrast, users editing the English edition as a second language make edits that are just as complex as the edits by users who primarily edit the English edition. In this way, English serves a special role bringing together content written by multilinguals from many language editions. Nonetheless, language remains a formidable hurdle to the spread of content: we find evidence for a complexity barrier whereby editors are less likely to edit complex content in a second language. In addition, we find that multilinguals are less engaged and show lower levels of language proficiency in their second languages. We also examine the topical interests of multilingual editors and find that there is no significant difference between primary and non-primary editors in each language.

  8. Understanding Editing Behaviors in Multilingual Wikipedia

    PubMed Central

    Hale, Scott A.; Kim, Sooyoung; Byun, Jeongmin; Oh, Alice H.

    2016-01-01

    Multilingualism is common offline, but we have a more limited understanding of the ways multilingualism is displayed online and the roles that multilinguals play in the spread of content between speakers of different languages. We take a computational approach to studying multilingualism using one of the largest user-generated content platforms, Wikipedia. We study multilingualism by collecting and analyzing a large dataset of the content written by multilingual editors of the English, German, and Spanish editions of Wikipedia. This dataset contains over two million paragraphs edited by over 15,000 multilingual users from July 8 to August 9, 2013. We analyze these multilingual editors in terms of their engagement, interests, and language proficiency in their primary and non-primary (secondary) languages and find that the English edition of Wikipedia displays different dynamics from the Spanish and German editions. Users primarily editing the Spanish and German editions make more complex edits than users who edit these editions as a second language. In contrast, users editing the English edition as a second language make edits that are just as complex as the edits by users who primarily edit the English edition. In this way, English serves a special role bringing together content written by multilinguals from many language editions. Nonetheless, language remains a formidable hurdle to the spread of content: we find evidence for a complexity barrier whereby editors are less likely to edit complex content in a second language. In addition, we find that multilinguals are less engaged and show lower levels of language proficiency in their second languages. We also examine the topical interests of multilingual editors and find that there is no significant difference between primary and non-primary editors in each language. PMID:27171158

  9. Towards cross-lingual alerting for bursty epidemic events.

    PubMed

    Collier, Nigel

    2011-10-06

    Online news reports are increasingly becoming a source for event-based early warning systems that detect natural disasters. Harnessing the massive volume of information available from multilingual newswire presents as many challanges as opportunities due to the patterns of reporting complex spatio-temporal events. In this article we study the problem of utilising correlated event reports across languages. We track the evolution of 16 disease outbreaks using 5 temporal aberration detection algorithms on text-mined events classified according to disease and outbreak country. Using ProMED reports as a silver standard, comparative analysis of news data for 13 languages over a 129 day trial period showed improved sensitivity, F1 and timeliness across most models using cross-lingual events. We report a detailed case study analysis for Cholera in Angola 2010 which highlights the challenges faced in correlating news events with the silver standard. The results show that automated health surveillance using multilingual text mining has the potential to turn low value news into high value alerts if informed choices are used to govern the selection of models and data sources. An implementation of the C2 alerting algorithm using multilingual news is available at the BioCaster portal http://born.nii.ac.jp/?page=globalroundup.

  10. Benefits of Multilingualism in Education

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Okal, Benard Odoyo

    2014-01-01

    The article gives a brief analytical survey of multilingualism practices, its consequences, its benefits in education and discussions on the appropriate ways towards its achievement in education. Multilingualism refers to speaking more than one language competently. Generally there are both the official and unofficial multilingualism practices. A…

  11. Case Studies of Multilingual/Multicultural Asian Deaf Adults: Strategies for Success.

    PubMed

    Wang, Qiuying; Andrews, Jean; Liu, Hsiu Tan; Liu, Chun Jung

    2016-01-01

    Case studies of adult d/Deaf or Hard of Hearing Multilingual Learners (DMLs) are few, especially studies of DMLs who learn more than one sign language and read logographic and alphabetic scripts. To reduce this paucity, two descriptive case studies are presented. Written questionnaires, face-to-face interviews, and self-appraisals of language-use rubrics were used to explore (a) the language and literacy histories of two adult Asian DMLs who had learned multiple languages: Chinese (spoken/written), English (written), Chinese Sign Language, and American Sign Language; and (b) how each language was used in different cultural communities with diverse conversational partners. Home literacy environment, family support, visual access to languages, peer and sibling support, role models, encouragement, perseverance, and Deaf identity all played vital roles in the participants' academic success. The findings provide insights into the acquisition of multiple languages and bi-literacy through social communication and academic content.

  12. Underlying Paradox in the European Union's Multilingualism Policies

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Johnson, Fern L.

    2013-01-01

    The European Union (EU) has developed comprehensive policies in recent years to promote multilingualism. In this article, major EU policy statements on multilingualism are analyzed to demonstrate how their underlying language ideology produces paradox by both encouraging multilingualism and regulating its definition within the EU. The first…

  13. A Bright Future for Interdisciplinary Multilingualism Research

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Comanaru, Ruxandra-S.; Dewaele, Jean-Marc

    2015-01-01

    Multilingualism is a prevalent reality in today's world. From an individual level to a societal one, multilingualism incorporates many aspects that have been studied extensively by diverse social research disciplines. The present article will explore the potential directions which multilingualism research can take, concentrating mainly on the…

  14. Attitudes towards Foreign Accents among Adult Multilingual Language Users

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Dewaele, Jean-Marc; McCloskey, James

    2015-01-01

    The present study investigates inter-individual variation (linked to personality traits, multilingualism and sociobiographical variables) in the attitudes that 2035 multilinguals have of their own and others' foreign accent (FA). Data were collected through an online questionnaire. We found that multilinguals who were extraverted, emotionally…

  15. Multilingualism(s) and System-Wide Assessment: A Southern Perspective

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Heugh, Kathleen; Prinsloo, Cas; Makgamatha, Matthews; Diedericks, Gerda; Winnaar, Lolita

    2017-01-01

    Rapidly changing demographics challenge education systems everywhere. Multilingualism, in particular, brings challenges in curriculum, pedagogy and assessment. Here we draw attention to contexts and practices of multilingual education in southern settings that differ from those in northern ones. Whereas much of the literature indicates that…

  16. Best practices for online Canadian prenatal health promotion: A public health approach.

    PubMed

    Chedid, Rebecca A; Terrell, Rowan M; Phillips, Karen P

    2017-11-04

    Prenatal health promotion provides information regarding pregnancy risks, protective behaviours and clinical and community resources. Typically, women obtain prenatal health information from health care providers, prenatal classes, peers/family, media and increasingly, Internet sites and mobile apps. Barriers to prenatal health promotion and related services include language, rural/remote location, citizenship and disability. Online public health platforms represent the capacity to reach underserved women and can be customised to address the needs of a heterogeneous population of pregnant women. Canadian government-hosted websites and online prenatal e-classes were evaluated to determine if accessible, inclusive, comprehensive and evidence-based prenatal health promotion was provided. Using a multijurisdictional approach, federal, provincial/territorial, municipal and public health region-hosted websites, along with affiliated prenatal e-classes, were evaluated based on four criteria: comprehensiveness, evidence-based information, accessibility and inclusivity. Online prenatal e-classes, federal, provincial/territorial and public health-hosted websites generally provided comprehensive and evidence-based promotion of essential prenatal topics, in contrast to municipal-hosted websites which provided very limited prenatal health information. Gaps in online prenatal health promotion were identified as lack of French and multilingual content, targeted information and representations of Indigenous peoples, immigrants and women with disabilities. Canadian online prenatal health promotion is broadly comprehensive and evidence-based, but fails to address the needs of non-Anglophones and represent the diverse population of Canadian pregnant women. It is recommended that agencies enhance the organisation of website pregnancy portals/pages and collaborate with other jurisdictions and community groups to ensure linguistically accessible, culturally-competent and inclusive prenatal online resources. Copyright © 2017 Australian College of Midwives. All rights reserved.

  17. Negotiating the "Multi" in Multilingualism and Multiliteracies: Undergraduate Students in Vancouver, Canada

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Marshall, Steve; Hayashi, Hisako; Yeung, Paul

    2012-01-01

    This article poses the following research question: How do multilingual students in higher education negotiate the "multi" in their multilingualism and multiliteracies? The article presents data from a qualitative study conducted with eight multilingual undergraduate university students in which the participants describe their complex…

  18. Multilingualism and Psychotherapy: Exploring Multilingual Clients' Experiences of Language Practices in Psychotherapy

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Rolland, Louise; Dewaele, Jean-Marc; Costa, Beverley

    2017-01-01

    This study investigates bi- and multilingual clients' self-reported language practices in counselling and psychotherapy. Quantitative and qualitative data were collected through an international web survey inviting adults who had experienced one-to-one therapy to describe their experiences. Analysis of responses by 109 multilingual clients…

  19. A Framework to Support Mobile Learning in Multilingual Environments

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Jantjies, Mmaki E.; Joy, Mike

    2014-01-01

    This paper presents a multilingual mobile learning framework that can be used to support the pedagogical development of mobile learning systems which can support learning in under-resourced multilingual schools. The framework has been developed following two empirical mobile learning studies. Both studies were conducted in multilingual South…

  20. Multilingual School Population: Ensuring School Belonging by Tolerating Multilingualism

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Van Der Wildt, Anouk; Van Avermaet, Piet; Van Houtte, Mieke

    2017-01-01

    Societies have become super-diverse due to migration and globalization. Many mainstream classroom teachers feel managing the linguistic variety children bring to school is challenging. This often leads to restrictive language policies. Research on multilingualism has given us insight into the multilingual realities of pupils, which allows us to…

  1. German Schools Abroad: Hotspots of Elite Multilingualism?

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Sander, Anne E; Admiraal, Wilfried

    2016-01-01

    While multilingualism itself is a widely analyzed topic, a study about multilingualism at German schools abroad is so far unique. This quantitative study investigates the differences in the size of German expressive and receptive vocabulary between monolingual and multilingual students, aged between 5 and 11 years. A cohort of 65 multilingual…

  2. Evaluating the Use of Machine Translation Post-Editing in the Foreign Language Class

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Nino, Ana

    2008-01-01

    Generalised access to the Internet and globalisation has led to increased demand for translation services and a resurgence in the use of machine translation (MT) systems. MT post-editing or the correction of MT output to an acceptable standard is known to be one of the ways to face the huge demand on multilingual communication. Given that the use…

  3. Early Intervention: A Multicultural Perspective on d/Deaf and Hard of Hearing Multilingual Learners.

    PubMed

    Sandy, K Bowen

    2016-01-01

    Today's pluralistic society is characterized by families from many linguistic and cultural backgrounds, including families with infants and toddlers who are deaf or hard of hearing (d/Dhh). Taking a multicultural perspective, the author examines family-centered early intervention (FCEI) and the transition to school services for children who are d/Dhh. Working with d/Dhh Multilingual Learners (DMLs) and their families presents a unique challenge to early intervention professionals: ensuring that families have adequate information and resources to make informed choices, particularly regarding communication. The author presents information and research related to (a) family and professional partnerships, (b) cultural contexts for early intervention, (c) family communication decisions and linguistic diversity, (d) emerging research on DMLs, (e) considerations for early intervention providers and interpreters who work with culturally and linguistically diverse d/Dhh infants and toddlers, and (f) cultural reflections on ensuring smooth transitions from early intervention into preschool programs.

  4. New CALL-SLA Research Interfaces for the 21st Century: Towards Equitable Multilingualism

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Ortega, Lourdes

    2017-01-01

    The majority of the world is multilingual, but inequitably multilingual, and much of the world is also technologized, but inequitably so. Thus, researchers in the fields of computer-assisted language learning (CALL) and second language acquisition (SLA) would profit from considering multilingualism and social justice when envisioning new CALL-SLA…

  5. Piecing Together the "Workplace Multilingualism" Jigsaw Puzzle

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Hua, Zhu

    2014-01-01

    Multilingualism in the workplace is different from multilingualism at home or in other domains of social life. It has more direct, yet entangled, economic and social implications and serves interactional purposes which can be at any point on the continuum of goal-orientation and relationship-building. Multilingualism in the workplace is both a…

  6. Constructing Glocal Identities through Multilingual Writing Practices on Flickr.com[R

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Lee, Carmen K. M.; Barton, David

    2011-01-01

    This article reports on a study of user-generated multilingual writing activities on the photo sharing site, Flickr.com[R]. It discusses how Flickr users deploy their multilingual resources when interacting with international audiences, the factors affecting their language choice, and how new multilingual identities are constructed. An exploratory…

  7. A DST Model of Multilingualism and the Role of Metalinguistic Awareness

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Jessner, Ulrike

    2008-01-01

    This paper suggests that a dynamic systems theory (DST) provides an adequate conceptual metaphor for discussing multilingual development. Multilingual acquisition is a nonlinear and complex dynamic process depending on a number of interacting factors. Variability plays a crucial role in the multilingual system as it changes over time (Herdina &…

  8. Stylistic Performance through Affective Marking: A Case of Multilingual Literary Discourse

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Chakravarty, Urjani

    2016-01-01

    This paper provides an overall analysis of how multi-lingual writer like Amitav Ghosh write about emotion in his literary text, and emphasize on how multilingual authors display emotion/affect through use of literary multilingualism (affective markers) combined with writer style. Through use of multiple strategies, they reduces the limitations of…

  9. Sustainable Multilingual Communication: Managing Multilingual Content Using Free and Open Source Content Management Systems

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Kelsey, Todd

    2011-01-01

    It is often too complicated or expensive for most educators, non-profits and individuals to create and maintain a multilingual Web site, because of the technological hurdles, and the logistics of working with content in different languages. But multilingual content management systems, combined with streamlined processes and inexpensive…

  10. Multilingual Practices of University Students and Changing Forms of Multilingualism in Luxembourg

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    de Bres, Julia; Franziskus, Anne

    2014-01-01

    With its own national language, Luxembourgish, and three languages of administration, French, German and Luxembourgish, Luxembourg has long been a very multilingual country. The nature of this multilingualism is now changing, due to the rising proportion of migrants in the country, who now make up 43% of the resident population. The changing…

  11. Honoring and Building on the Rich Literacy Practices of Young Bilingual and Multilingual Learners

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Souto-Manning, Mariana

    2016-01-01

    In this article, the author invites teachers of children who are bilingual, multilingual, and at promise for bi-/multilingualism to honor and build on their rich literacy practices. To do so, she challenges ideas and labels that continuously disempower bilingual and multilingual learners. Souto-Manning establishes the understanding that education…

  12. Modelling vocabulary development among multilingual children prior to and following the transition to school entry.

    PubMed

    MacLeod, Andrea A N; Castellanos-Ryan, Natalie; Parent, Sophie; Jacques, Sophie; Séguin, Jean R

    2018-01-01

    Differences between monolingual and multilingual vocabulary development have been observed but few studies provide a longitudinal perspective on vocabulary development before and following school entry. This study compares vocabulary growth profiles of 106 multilingual children to 211 monolingual peers before and after school entry to examine whether: (1) school entry coincides with different rates of vocabulary growth compared to prior to school entry, (2) compared to monolingual peers, multilingual children show different vocabulary sizes or rates of vocabulary growth, (3) the age of onset of second-language acquisition for multilingual children is associated with vocabulary size or rate of vocabulary growth, and (4) the sociolinguistic context of the languages spoken by multilingual children is associated with vocabulary size or rate of vocabulary growth. Results showed increases in vocabulary size across time for all children, with a steeper increase prior to school entry. A significant difference between monolingual and multilingual children who speak a minority language was observed with regards to vocabulary size at school entry and vocabulary growth prior to school entry, but growth rate differences were no longer present following school entry. Taken together, results suggest that which languages children speak may matter more than being multilingual per se.

  13. Bootstrapping a Multilingual Part-of-speech Tagger in One Person-day

    DTIC Science & Technology

    2002-01-01

    dictionary , (2) a basic library reference grammar, and (3) access to an existing monolingual text corpus in the language. The al- gorithm begins by...inducing initial lexical POS dis- tributions from English translations in a bilingual dictionary without POS tags. It handles irregular, regular and semi...many booksellers and websites offer a foundation of linguistic wisdom in reference grammars and dictionaries . Thus starting from this baseline, what

  14. Knowledge management systems for oral health in developing and developed countries.

    PubMed

    Nattestad, Anders

    2012-10-01

    Knowledge management systems utilize information technology to manage knowledge in organizations with the purpose of creating, supporting, storing and disseminating information. These systems have been around for decades, but have significantly changed over time in complexity and features with the evolution of information technology and the Internet. With the development of these new technologies, the concept of knowledge management has thrived and has had significant impact on the way in which knowledge is accumulated, stored and accessed. This article will describe the historical development of knowledge management systems in oral health, illustrate the technology using examples and explore the future use of these systems with emerging technologies such as Google Wave®. One example of how knowledge management systems may affect the quality of dental education is the DentEd project, where a collaborative website was developed to coordinate dental school visitations and collection of reports from working groups, leading to several important publications. MEDLINE is another example of an effective knowledge management system in health care, providing access to health care-related scientific literature, which is highly organized under the auspices of the United States National Library of Medicine. Another and very differently organized example of an effective knowledge management system is Wikipedia, which is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by a nonprofit foundation. The final example of an effective knowledge management system is all of the social media, including Facebook and Twitter. These tools have proven very powerful in organizing and collaborating. In conclusion, the development of new technologies and the Internet have changed the way in which information is developed and accessed. This development is still ongoing and only the future will reveal how this will continue to change. © 2012 John Wiley & Sons A/S.

  15. Use of a web portal for support and research after a disaster: opportunities and lessons learned.

    PubMed

    Marres, Geertruid Mh; Leenen, Luke Ph; van der Slikke, Johannes W; Vermetten, Eric

    2012-11-21

    In this report we describe the development and use of a web portal in the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami. This large scale disaster confronted many displaced people with death, despair and need for information and support. Awareness and insight in the emotional impact of disasters can provide opportunities for surveillance and early treatment. Moreover, online support systems can contribute to community building, empowerment of victims and resilience. We evaluate the development and use of a multilingual web portal that combined a platform for information, emotional support, self assessment and referral with research opportunities. The rapid development, use, advantages, difficulties and learning points are discussed. A multidisciplinary working group from the University Medical Centre Utrecht, the Major Incident Hospital and the Central Military Hospital developed a web portal for tsunami victims. The webportal combined: (1) a forum aimed at community building, (2) self assessment tools that in the same time function as a reseach survey, (3) e-consultation, and (4) an information portal. Within 3 weeks after the tsunami, the working group launched an open, online service (www.TISEI.org. Tsunami Intrenational Survey on Emotional Impact) to foster community) support in the aftermath of the disaster. It combined four functionalities that were earlier previously only used separately. The portal had over 36.800 unique visitors in the first two years. At least 31% (144/464) percent of the Dutch surviving victims could be reached for a survey through the site. The TISEI-environment was available in 15 languages and visitors came from all over the world. Ninety-five percent of all visitors came from Europe or the United States. Subsequent to immediate disaster support, the web portal also served as a memorial archive for anniversary meetings and follow-up incentives. Difficulties we experienced were lack of funding, time pressure, victim-anonymisation, international collaboration and long term maintenance. A multilingual website with combined modalities for emotional care and research after a natural disaster proved feasible. Web based services like www.TISEI.org in the aftermath of mass disasters can help community building and deliver low level, patient centred and easily accessible information and care. A multilingual website with combined modalities for emotional care and research after a natural disaster proved feasible. Growing Internet penetration world wide and especially the rapid expansion and influence of online communities enables delivery of care and perform research with the internetInternet as a platform. The unpredictable nature of disaster does put time pressure on the development of online solutions and influenced the yield of our site. This highlights the necessity of developing methods and (inter) national collaborations in advance, secure funding, and learn from earlier initiatives.

  16. Use of a Web Portal for Support and Research After a Disaster: Opportunities and Lessons Learned

    PubMed Central

    Leenen, Luke PH; van der Slikke, Johannes W; Vermetten, Eric

    2012-01-01

    Background In this report we describe the development and use of a web portal in the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami. This large scale disaster confronted many displaced people with death, despair and need for information and support. Awareness and insight in the emotional impact of disasters can provide opportunities for surveillance and early treatment. Moreover, online support systems can contribute to community building, empowerment of victims and resilience. Objective We evaluate the development and use of a multilingual web portal that combined a platform for information, emotional support, self assessment and referral with research opportunities. The rapid development, use, advantages, difficulties and learning points are discussed. Methods A multidisciplinary working group from the University Medical Centre Utrecht, the Major Incident Hospital and the Central Military Hospital developed a web portal for tsunami victims. The webportal combined: (1) a forum aimed at community building, (2) self assessment tools that in the same time function as a reseach survey, (3) e-consultation, and (4) an information portal. Results Within 3 weeks after the tsunami, the working group launched an open, online service (www.TISEI.org. Tsunami Intrenational Survey on Emotional Impact) to foster community) support in the aftermath of the disaster. It combined four functionalities that were earlier previously only used separately. The portal had over 36.800 unique visitors in the first two years. At least 31% (144/464) percent of the Dutch surviving victims could be reached for a survey through the site. The TISEI-environment was available in 15 languages and visitors came from all over the world. Ninety-five percent of all visitors came from Europe or the United States. Subsequent to immediate disaster support, the web portal also served as a memorial archive for anniversary meetings and follow-up incentives. Difficulties we experienced were lack of funding, time pressure, victim-anonymisation, international collaboration and long term maintenance. Conclusions A multilingual website with combined modalities for emotional care and research after a natural disaster proved feasible. Web based services like www.TISEI.org in the aftermath of mass disasters can help community building and deliver low level, patient centred and easily accessible information and care. A multilingual website with combined modalities for emotional care and research after a natural disaster proved feasible. Growing Internet penetration world wide and especially the rapid expansion and influence of online communities enables delivery of care and perform research with the internetInternet as a platform. The unpredictable nature of disaster does put time pressure on the development of online solutions and influenced the yield of our site. This highlights the necessity of developing methods and (inter) national collaborations in advance, secure funding, and learn from earlier initiatives. PMID:23612349

  17. The CEC Action Plan for Libraries and IMPACT 2.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    de Bruine, R. Frans

    1992-01-01

    Discusses the role of the Commission of the European Communities (CEC) in the development of the electronic information industry in Europe. Activities aimed at libraries are described; the IMPACT program for developing the market for information services is explained; and problems of multilingualism are addressed. (LRW)

  18. Is Mommy Talking to Daddy or to Me? Exploring Parental Estimates of Child Language Exposure Using the Multilingual Infant Language Questionnaire

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Liu, Liquan; Kager, René

    2017-01-01

    Language input is a key factor in bi-/multilingual research. It roots in the definition of bi-/multilingualism and influences infant cognitive development since and even before birth. The methods used to assess language exposure among bi-/multilingual infants vary across studies. This paper discusses the parental report patterns of the…

  19. Practitioner Review: Multilingualism and neurodevelopmental disorders - an overview of recent research and discussion of clinical implications.

    PubMed

    Uljarević, Mirko; Katsos, Napoleon; Hudry, Kristelle; Gibson, Jenny L

    2016-11-01

    Language and communication skills are essential aspects of child development, which are often disrupted in children with neurodevelopmental disorders. Cutting edge research in psycholinguistics suggests that multilingualism has potential to influence social, linguistic and cognitive development. Thus, multilingualism has implications for clinical assessment, diagnostic formulation, intervention and support offered to families. We present a systematic review and synthesis of the effects of multilingualism for children with neurodevelopmental disorders and discuss clinical implications. We conducted systematic searches for studies on multilingualism in neurodevelopmental disorders. Keywords for neurodevelopmental disorders were based on Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition categories as follows; Intellectual Disabilities, Communication Disorders, Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, Specific Learning Disorder, Motor Disorders, Other Neurodevelopmental Disorders. We included only studies based on empirical research and published in peer-reviewed journals. Fifty studies met inclusion criteria. Thirty-eight studies explored multilingualism in Communication Disorders, 10 in ASD and two in Intellectual Disability. No studies on multilingualism in Specific Learning Disorder or Motor Disorders were identified. Studies which found a disadvantage for multilingual children with neurodevelopmental disorders were rare, and there appears little reason to assume that multilingualism has negative effects on various aspects of functioning across a range of conditions. In fact, when considering only those studies which have compared a multilingual group with developmental disorders to a monolingual group with similar disorders, the findings consistently show no adverse effects on language development or other aspects of functioning. In the case of ASD, a positive effect on communication and social functioning has been observed. There is little evidence to support the widely held view that multilingual exposure is detrimental to the linguistic or social development of individuals with neurodevelopmental disorders. However, we also note that the available pool of studies is small and the number of methodologically high quality studies is relatively low. We discuss implications of multilingualism for clinical management of neurodevelopmental disorders, and discuss possible directions for future research. © 2016 Association for Child and Adolescent Mental Health.

  20. Cross-Language Information Retrieval: An Analysis of Errors.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Ruiz, Miguel E.; Srinivasan, Padmini

    1998-01-01

    Investigates an automatic method for Cross Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) that utilizes the multilingual Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) Metathesaurus to translate Spanish natural-language queries into English. Results indicate that for Spanish, the UMLS Metathesaurus-based CLIR method is at least equivalent to if not better than…

  1. Experiments in Multi-Lingual Information Retrieval.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Salton, Gerard

    A comparison was made of the performance in an automatic information retrieval environment of user queries and document abstracts available in natural language form in both English and French. The results obtained indicate that the automatic indexing and retrieval techniques actually used appear equally effective in handling the query and document…

  2. A Multilingual Approach to Analysing Standardized Test Results: Immigrant Primary School Children and the Role of Languages Spoken in a Bi-/Multilingual Community

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    De Angelis, Gessica

    2014-01-01

    The present study adopts a multilingual approach to analysing the standardized test results of primary school immigrant children living in the bi-/multilingual context of South Tyrol, Italy. The standardized test results are from the Invalsi test administered across Italy in 2009/2010. In South Tyrol, several languages are spoken on a daily basis…

  3. Modelling vocabulary development among multilingual children prior to and following the transition to school entry

    PubMed Central

    MacLeod, Andrea A. N.; Castellanos-Ryan, Natalie; Parent, Sophie; Jacques, Sophie; Séguin, Jean R.

    2017-01-01

    Differences between monolingual and multilingual vocabulary development have been observed but few studies provide a longitudinal perspective on vocabulary development before and following school entry. This study compares vocabulary growth profiles of 106 multilingual children to 211 monolingual peers before and after school entry to examine whether: (1) school entry coincides with different rates of vocabulary growth compared to prior to school entry, (2) compared to monolingual peers, multilingual children show different vocabulary sizes or rates of vocabulary growth, (3) the age of onset of second-language acquisition for multilingual children is associated with vocabulary size or rate of vocabulary growth, and (4) the sociolinguistic context of the languages spoken by multilingual children is associated with vocabulary size or rate of vocabulary growth. Results showed increases in vocabulary size across time for all children, with a steeper increase prior to school entry. A significant difference between monolingual and multilingual children who speak a minority language was observed with regards to vocabulary size at school entry and vocabulary growth prior to school entry, but growth rate differences were no longer present following school entry. Taken together, results suggest that which languages children speak may matter more than being multilingual per se. PMID:29354017

  4. Innovation in learning and development in multilingual and multicultural contexts: Principles learned from a higher educational study programme in Luxembourg

    NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

    Ziegler, Gudrun

    2011-12-01

    Multilingualism in education is a conceptual as well as a pedagogical challenge of the 21st century. Luxembourg, with its three statutory official languages (Luxembourgish, French and German), is an especially complex setting. The gap between traditional principles of language education on the one hand and the challenging impacts of today's multilingualisms on the other led the University of Luxembourg (founded in 2003) to set up a developmentally-driven Master's programme in 2007, entitled "Learning and Development in Multilingual and Multicultural Contexts". After a presentation of the general multilingual settings in Luxembourg, this paper discusses the constellation of the multilingual University's staff and students and provides an analysis of the concept of the course by outlining its innovative approach, its principles and lessons learned with regard to running a trilingual higher education programme.

  5. Multilingual Education.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Rado, Marta, Ed.

    This is a summary of proceedings, organized on a thematic basis, of workshop sessions conducted for teachers involved in multilingual education. The collection consists of the following: (1) "Bilingual Education: A Focus on the Student," by Marta Rado; (2) "Introduction to Multilingual Project Units," which includes…

  6. Exploring Local Public Health Workflow in the Context of Automated Translation Technologies

    PubMed Central

    Mandel, Hannah; Turner, Anne M.

    2013-01-01

    Despite the growing limited English proficiency (LEP) population in the US, and federal regulations requiring multilingual health information be available for LEP individuals, there is a lack of available high quality multilingual health promotion materials. The costs and personnel time associated with creating high quality translations serve as barriers to their creation, especially in resource limited public health settings. To explore the potential adoption of novel machine translation and document dissemination technologies for improving the creation and sharing of translated public health materials, we interviewed key health department personnel in Washington State. We analyzed translation workflow, elucidated key themes regarding public health translation work, and assessed attitudes towards electronic document exchange and machine translation. Public health personnel expressed the need for human quality assurance and oversight, but appreciated the potential of novel information technologies to assist in the production and dissemination of translated materials for public health practice. PMID:24551385

  7. Grammatical category dissociation in multilingual aphasia.

    PubMed

    Faroqi-Shah, Yasmeen; Waked, Arifi N

    2010-03-01

    Word retrieval deficits for specific grammatical categories, such as verbs versus nouns, occur as a consequence of brain damage. Such deficits are informative about the nature of lexical organization in the human brain. This study examined retrieval of grammatical categories across three languages in a trilingual person with aphasia who spoke Arabic, French, and English. In order to delineate the nature of word production difficulty, comprehension was tested, and a variety of concomitant lexical-semantic variables were analysed. The patient demonstrated a consistent noun-verb dissociation in picture naming and narrative speech, with severely impaired production of verbs across all three languages. The cross-linguistically similar noun-verb dissociation, coupled with little evidence of semantic impairment, suggests that (a) the patient has a true "nonsemantic" grammatical category specific deficit, and (b) lexical organization in multilingual speakers shares grammatical class information between languages. The findings of this study contribute to our understanding of the architecture of lexical organization in bilinguals.

  8. TESE--Thesaurus for Education Systems in Europe. English Version

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Eurydice, 2009

    2009-01-01

    The Thesaurus for Education Systems in Europe (TESE-2009 edition) is a multilingual thesaurus and a robust information retrieval tool focusing on European education systems and policies. It is specifically designed to cover the indexation needs of the Eurydice network and to facilitate information retrieval on Eurydice's central website. It can…

  9. The Literacies of Things: Reconfiguring the Material-Discursive Production of Race and Class in an Informal Learning Centre

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Thiel, Jaye Johnson; Jones, Stephanie

    2017-01-01

    Drawing on our documentation of transforming an informal learning centre (the Playhouse) in a multilingual, working-class neighbourhood, this paper presents significant and deliberate material-discursive changes at the Playhouse that produced unpredictable shifts in belongings among young children. More specifically, this paper entwines our…

  10. Many Mansions: Conceptualizing Translingual Curriculum

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Gilmetdinova, Alsu; Burdick, Jake

    2016-01-01

    This article presents a vision for fostering multilingualism in schools that extends the notion of translanguaging to include the realm of multilingual curriculum theorizing. We locate our analysis at the intersection of multicultural education, multilingual education, and curriculum studies in order to conceptualize language, culture, and…

  11. Multilingual Proficiency in Fiji Primary Schools.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Shameem, Nikhat

    2002-01-01

    Determined language proficiency among multilingual Indo-Fijian primary school children who have the languages, Fiji-Hindi, Standard Hindi, Urdu, English, Fijian, and Fijian English in their speech repertoire. Identifies the variables that affect multilingual proficiency in this group and determines whether classroom practice reflects educational…

  12. Editorial Introduction: Multilingualism and Education around the Mediterranean.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Bahous, Rima; Thonhauser, Ingo

    2001-01-01

    Introduces a special issue on the complex relationship between multilingualism and education in the Mediterranean region. Articles examine Maltese bilingual education; teaching English in Algeria; shifts in environmental literacy in Lebanon; multilingual education in Lebanon; cognitive-academic language proficiency and language acquisition in…

  13. Opening up towards Children's Languages: Enhancing Teachers' Tolerant Practices towards Multilingualism

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Van Der Wildt, Anouk; Van Avermaet, Piet; Van Houtte, Mieke

    2017-01-01

    Mainstream teachers struggle with linguistic diversity, often leading to restricting multilingualism. Scientific research, however, recommends including pupils' home languages in school. Various qualitative studies have evaluated implementations in schools and indicated possibilities for improving teachers' attitudes towards multilingualism. This…

  14. Speaking one more language in early life has only minor effects on cognition in Taiwanese with low education level: the Taishan Project.

    PubMed

    Liu, Yi-Chien; Liu, Yen-Ying; Yip, Ping-Keung; Meguro, Mitsue; Meguro, Kenichi

    2017-07-01

    Increasing evidence shows that bilingualism or multilingualism may have beneficial effects on preventing dementia. We performed a cross-sectional, community-based study in Taiwan. Some elders (older than 70 years) in Taiwan can speak Japanese because of the formal Japanese education they received before World War II, when Taiwan was under Japanese rule. After the war, Mandarin Chinese was adopted as the official language of Taiwan. We assessed whether constantly using three languages had an effect on dementia prevalence and cognitive function. We defined multilingualism as the ability to fluently speak Taiwanese (T), Japanese (J), and Mandarin Chinese (C) in daily life. We evaluated the Mini-Mental State Examination and AD8 questionnaire results of 514 community-dwelling people older than 70 years in Taishan, Taiwan. Seventy-three of the subjects (14.2%) were multilingual (T, J, C) and 441 (85.8%) were bilingual (T, C). No difference was noted in dementia prevalence between multilingual (6.8%) and bilingual (7.4%) populations, but multilinguals were older than bilinguals (mean age: 79.9 vs 77.3 years). Multilinguals had higher Mini-Mental State Examination scores than bilinguals (mean: 24.6 vs. 22.7). However, after the subjects were stratified into low and high education level groups, the Mini-Mental State Examination difference was found to be significant in only the low education level group. Dementia prevalence did not significantly differ between the multilingual (T, J, C) and bilingual (T, C) groups. However, given that the average age of the multilingual group was approximately 2 years older than that of the bilingual group, there may have been minor effects in the multilingual group. © 2017 Japanese Psychogeriatric Society.

  15. Cross-language information retrieval using PARAFAC2.

    DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

    Bader, Brett William; Chew, Peter; Abdelali, Ahmed

    A standard approach to cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) uses Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) in conjunction with a multilingual parallel aligned corpus. This approach has been shown to be successful in identifying similar documents across languages - or more precisely, retrieving the most similar document in one language to a query in another language. However, the approach has severe drawbacks when applied to a related task, that of clustering documents 'language-independently', so that documents about similar topics end up closest to one another in the semantic space regardless of their language. The problem is that documents are generally more similar tomore » other documents in the same language than they are to documents in a different language, but on the same topic. As a result, when using multilingual LSA, documents will in practice cluster by language, not by topic. We propose a novel application of PARAFAC2 (which is a variant of PARAFAC, a multi-way generalization of the singular value decomposition [SVD]) to overcome this problem. Instead of forming a single multilingual term-by-document matrix which, under LSA, is subjected to SVD, we form an irregular three-way array, each slice of which is a separate term-by-document matrix for a single language in the parallel corpus. The goal is to compute an SVD for each language such that V (the matrix of right singular vectors) is the same across all languages. Effectively, PARAFAC2 imposes the constraint, not present in standard LSA, that the 'concepts' in all documents in the parallel corpus are the same regardless of language. Intuitively, this constraint makes sense, since the whole purpose of using a parallel corpus is that exactly the same concepts are expressed in the translations. We tested this approach by comparing the performance of PARAFAC2 with standard LSA in solving a particular CLIR problem. From our results, we conclude that PARAFAC2 offers a very promising alternative to LSA not only for multilingual document clustering, but also for solving other problems in cross-language information retrieval.« less

  16. Evaluation of language concordant, patient-centered drug label instructions.

    PubMed

    Bailey, Stacy Cooper; Sarkar, Urmimala; Chen, Alice Hm; Schillinger, Dean; Wolf, Michael S

    2012-12-01

    Despite federal laws requiring language access in healthcare settings, most US pharmacies are unable to provide prescription (Rx) medication instructions to limited English proficient (LEP) patients in their native language. To evaluate the efficacy of health literacy-informed, multilingual Rx instructions (the ConcordantRx instructions) to improve Rx understanding, regimen dosing and regimen consolidation in comparison to standard, language-concordant Rx instructions. Randomized, experimental evaluation. Two hundred and two LEP adults speaking five non-English languages (Chinese, Korean, Russian, Spanish, Vietnamese), recruited from nine clinics and community organizations in San Francisco and Chicago. Subjects were randomized to review Rx bottles with either ConcordantRx or standard instructions. Proper demonstration of common prescription label instructions for single and multi-drug medication regimens. Regimen consolidation was assessed by determining how many times per day subjects would take medicine for a multi-drug regimen. Subjects receiving the ConcordantRx instructions demonstrated significantly greater Rx understanding, regimen dosing and regimen consolidation in comparison to those receiving standard instructions (incidence rate ratio [IRR]: 1.25, 95 % confidence interval [CI]: 1.06-1.48; P= 0.007 for Rx understanding, IRR: 1.19, 95 % CI: 1.03-1.39; P= 0.02 for regimen dosing and IRR: 0.76, 95 % CI: 0.64-0.90; P= 0.001 for regimen consolidation). In most cases, instruction type was the sole, independent predictor of outcomes in multivariate models controlling for relevant covariates. There is a need for standardized, multilingual Rx instructions that can be implemented in pharmacy practices to promote safe medication use among LEP patients. The ConcordantRx instructions represent an important step towards achieving this goal.

  17. Multilingualism, Empathy and Multicompetence

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Dewaele, Jean-Marc; Wei, Li

    2012-01-01

    The present study investigates the link between multilingualism and the personality trait of cognitive empathy among 2158 mono- and multilinguals. Data were collected through an online questionnaire. Statistical analyses revealed that the knowledge of more languages was not linked to cognitive empathy. Bilingual upbringing and the experience of…

  18. Multilingual Faculty across Academic Disciplines: Language Difference in Scholarship

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Cavazos, Alyssa G.

    2015-01-01

    Due to the dominance of the English language in scholarship, multilingual academics often encounter challenges in achieving academic biliteracy and identifying successful language negotiation practices in academia. Through personal interviews with self-identified multilingual academics across academic disciplines, this paper explores how they…

  19. Une approche plurilingue pour faciliter l'inclusion scolaire : engagement et dynamique pédagogique

    NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

    Ribierre-Dubile, Nathalie

    2017-08-01

    A multilingual approach to facilitating inclusion: Educational commitment and dynamics - In the school context, the first steps in the process of learning a foreign language require commitment and motivation on the part of the learner, as well as a commitment from the teacher to include all students. This raises questions about the inclusiveness of education and the educational achievement of multilingual and/or immigrant students in predominantly monolingual classes. The author draws on a corpus of research to explore a number of parameters involved in the implementation of a multilingual and inclusive approach. She links the foundations of a multilingual approach to the institutional framework and the positions of the actors in the didactic relationship, as well as in their relationship to languages. The article then gives an overview of the characteristics of the metacognitive strategies employed by multilingual learners and, in conclusion, proposes some innovative methods to go beyond the monolingual principles in learning and foster exchanges that are both multicultural and multilingual.

  20. Multilingualism and Creativity: A Multivariate Approach

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Fürst, Guillaume; Grin, François

    2018-01-01

    This paper proposes a contribution to the investigation of the relation between multilingualism and creativity. Past evidence of a correlation between multilingualism and creativity is reviewed in a generalist perspective, that is, without focusing on a specific population such as migrants or highly proficient bilinguals. This review is also…

  1. Global Perspectives on Multilingualism: Unity in Diversity

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Torres-Guzman, Maria E., Ed.; Gomez, Joel, Ed.

    2009-01-01

    In this timely volume, international scholars examine how multilingual schooling is handled in schools across the world with a series of case studies from South Africa, Nigeria, Germany, Colombia, Slovakia, New Zealand, and Taiwan. Presenting new contributions arising from the varied contexts of multilingualism today, this collection urges…

  2. Beyond Identity: The Desirability and Possibility of Policies of Multilingualism

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Rubin, Aviad

    2017-01-01

    Many contributors to the normative literature on language policy argue that inclusive multilingual regimes are beneficial on several grounds. However, despite the professed advantages of multilingualism, most nation-states have been reluctant to equally recognise minority languages alongside the majority language. This reality raises three…

  3. Theorizing Translanguaging and Multilingual Literacies through Human Capital Theory

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Smith, Patrick H.; Murillo, Luz A.

    2015-01-01

    In this conceptual article we invite multilingual researchers to consider the concept of translanguaging through the lens of human capital theory. Our thinking about the interconnections among human capital, multilingualism, and translanguaging is motivated by our research in border "colonias" and other minoritized communities in South…

  4. Foreign Language Analysis and Recognition (FLARE) Progress

    DTIC Science & Technology

    2015-02-01

    Copies may be obtained from the Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC) (http://www.dtic.mil). AFRL- RH -WP-TR-2015-0007 HAS BEEN REVIEWED AND IS... retrieval (IR). 15. SUBJECT TERMS Automatic speech recognition (ASR), information retrieval (IR). 16. SECURITY CLASSIFICATION OF: 17. LIMITATION OF...to the Haystack Multilingual Multimedia Information Extraction and Retrieval (MMIER) system that was initially developed under a prior work unit

  5. Working Memory and Short-Term Memory Abilities in Accomplished Multilinguals

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Biedron, Adriana; Szczepaniak, Anna

    2012-01-01

    The role of short-term memory and working memory in accomplished multilinguals was investigated. Twenty-eight accomplished multilinguals were compared to 36 mainstream philology students. The following instruments were used in the study: three memory subtests of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale (Digit Span, Digit-Symbol Coding, and Arithmetic,…

  6. The Literacy Practices of "Transfronterizos" in a Multilingual World

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    de la Piedra, Maria Teresa; Guerra, Juan C.

    2012-01-01

    This introduction provides the background for this special issue by first describing the US-Mexico border, a fascinating context in which to research issues related to Spanish-English biliteracy and multilingualism. We present main points in the prevailing discussion within the field of literacy studies about issues of multilingualism and…

  7. Language Choice in Multilingual Encounters in Transnational Workplaces

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Kingsley, Leilarna

    2013-01-01

    This paper is based on research conducted in banks in the international banking centre of Luxembourg. Operating in the globalised context of international banking and multilingual Luxembourg, financial institutions are an ideal focal point for investigating policy and practices in complex multilingual and transnational work spaces. Two theoretical…

  8. Multilingual Communication and Language Acquisition: New Research Directions

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Canagarajah, A. Suresh; Wurr, Adrian J.

    2011-01-01

    In this article, we outline the differences between a monolingual and multilingual orientation to language and language acquisition. The increasing contact between languages in the context of globalization motivates such a shift of paradigms. Multilingual communicative practices have remained vibrant in non-western communities for a long time. We…

  9. Antinomies of Ideologies and Situationality of Education Language Politics in Multilingual Contexts

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Odugu, Desmond Ikenna

    2015-01-01

    Widespread scholarly and political attention to language-related inequities in the 20th century precipitated a spate of orientations to language planning in multilingual societies. While various orientations indicate a shift from earlier deficit to affirmative views of multilingualism, vigorous debates persist about the logical and pragmatic…

  10. Identity Practices of Multilingual Writers in Social Networking Spaces

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Chen, Hsin-I

    2013-01-01

    This study examines the literacy practices of two multilingual writers in social networking communities. The findings show that the multilingual writers explored and reappropriated symbolic resources afforded by the social networking site as they aligned themselves with particular collective and personal identities at local and global levels.…

  11. Multilingualism and Nation Building. Multilingual Matters 91.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Mansour, Gerda

    This book examines the phenomenon of multilingualism in West Africa from a historical, social, and environmental perspective. Chapter 1 explains why the catalogue of African languages established by linguists is not reliable for assessing the linguistic diversity of the region. It also discusses studies that show that the linguistic behavior in…

  12. Bridging Language Barriers in Multilingual Care Encounters

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Jansson, Gunilla

    2014-01-01

    The present case study demonstrates how the multilingual practices of a linguistically diverse workforce contribute to the functioning of a modern workplace. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and recordings in a residential home for elderly people with dementia in Sweden, the article explores how multilingual immigrant care workers creatively use…

  13. Linguistic Minorities and the Multilingual Turn: Constructing Language Ownership through Affect in Cultural Production

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    McLaughlin, Mireille

    2016-01-01

    The "multilingual turn" brings questions of language ownership to the forefront of debates about linguistic minority governance. Acadian minority cultural producers construct language ownership using multiple languages and targeting multilingual publics, but use ideologies of monolingualism to situate Acadian authenticity in place and…

  14. Multilinguals' Perceptions of Feeling Different When Switching Languages

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Dewaele, Jean-Marc; Nakano, Seiji

    2013-01-01

    Research into multilingualism and personality has shown that a majority of multilinguals report feeling different when they switch from one language to another. The present study looks at perceived shifts on five scales of feelings (feeling logical, serious, emotional, fake and different) in pair-wise comparisons between languages following the…

  15. Multilingual Stroop Performance: Effects of Trilingualism and Proficiency on Inhibitory Control

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Marian, Viorica; Blumenfeld, Henrike K.; Mizrahi, Elena; Kania, Ursula; Cordes, Anne-Kristin

    2013-01-01

    Previous research suggests that multilinguals' languages are constantly co-activated and that experience managing this co-activation changes inhibitory control function. The present study examined language interaction and inhibitory control using a colour-word Stroop task. Multilingual participants were tested in their three most proficient…

  16. Adolescent Multilinguals' Engagement with Religion in a Book Club

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Choi, Jayoung; Tinker Sachs, Gertrude

    2017-01-01

    The study examines four adolescent multilinguals' engagement with religion, as well as outcomes of that engagement, in an out-of-school book club. The qualitative analysis of participants' talk in book club meetings, writing responses, and individual interviews revealed that multilinguals tap into their religious knowledge and identities in making…

  17. Literacy Learning in Limpopo--A Multilingual Environment

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Cherian, Lily; Du Toit, Cecilia

    2008-01-01

    This article is a report on research conducted to support the development of a multilingual literacy learning software programme for adult learners in rural Limpopo Province, South Africa. The topic of inquiry for the research was literacy learning in a multilingual environment, with special attention paid to attitudinal and metacognitive aspects.…

  18. Multilingual Institutional Discourses of Negotiation and Intertextuality in Writing Center Interactions in Macao

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Lee, Alice Shu-Ju

    2017-01-01

    This dissertation explores the identity enactments (Bucholtz & Hall, 2005) of 14 multilingual university writing center tutors and multilingual student writers who use English and Putonghua to negotiate their interactions. The study is situated within sociocultural theory (Vygotsky, 1978) and uses ethnographic methods such as observation,…

  19. Turbulence and Dilemma: Implications of Diversity and Multilingualism in Australian Education

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Heugh, Kathleen

    2014-01-01

    An international interest in multilingualism and multilingual education has burgeoned since the turn of the twenty-first century, accompanying apparently significant changes in the physical and virtual mobilities of people, international frameworks, and commitments and goals for socially just education. It has also accompanied major political…

  20. Multilingual Cultural Resources in Child-Headed Families in Uganda

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Namazzi, Elizabeth; Kendrick, Maureen E.

    2014-01-01

    This article reports on a study focusing on the use of multilingual cultural resources in child-headed households (CHHs) in Uganda's Rakai District. Using funds of knowledge and sociocultural perspectives on children's learning, we documented through ethnographic observations and interviews how children in four CHHs used multilingual cultural…

  1. Social Inclusion through Multilingual Ideologies, Policies and Practices: A Case Study of a Minority Church

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Han, Huamei

    2011-01-01

    Adopting a materialist and processual approach to language and specifically multilingualism, this paper explores what language ideologies a minority, non-educational institution embraced and how this facilitated social inclusion through constructing institutional multilingualism within societal monolingualism. Specifically, I document how a…

  2. Translanguaging in the Writing of Emergent Multilinguals

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Kiramba, Lydiah Kananu

    2017-01-01

    This article discusses the findings of an empirical study that investigated the writing practices in a multilingual, rural, fourth-grade classroom in Kenya. The study was undergirded by Bakhtin's heteroglossia. Analysis of texts indicated that these emergent multilinguals used multiple semiotic resources to maximize the chances of meeting the…

  3. Multilingual Children's Interaction with Metafiction in a Postmodern Picture Book

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Daugaard, Line Møller; Johansen, Martin Blok

    2014-01-01

    When teachers and school librarians choose picture books for multilingual children, they often base their choice on an evaluation of linguistic comprehensibility, content familiarity and cultural appropriateness. This means that postmodern picture books may be excluded. This paper presents a case study of multilingual children's encounter with a…

  4. Language Ecology in Multilingual Settings. Towards a Theory of Symbolic Competence

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Kramsch, Claire; Whiteside, Anne

    2008-01-01

    This paper draws on complexity theory and post-modern sociolinguistics to explore how an ecological approach to language data can illuminate aspects of language use in multilingual environments. We first examine transcripts of exchanges taking place among multilingual individuals in multicultural settings. We briefly review what conversation and…

  5. The Gradience of Multilingualism in Typical and Impaired Language Development: Positioning Bilectalism within Comparative Bilingualism

    PubMed Central

    Grohmann, Kleanthes K.; Kambanaros, Maria

    2016-01-01

    A multitude of factors characterizes bi- and multilingual compared to monolingual language acquisition. Two of the most prominent viewpoints have recently been put in perspective and enriched by a third (Tsimpli, 2014): age of onset of children's exposure to their native languages, the role of the input they receive, and the timing in monolingual first language development of the phenomena examined in bi- and multilingual children's performance. This article picks up a fourth potential factor (Grohmann, 2014b): language proximity, that is, the closeness between the two or more grammars a multilingual child acquires. It is a first attempt to flesh out the proposed gradient scale of multilingualism within the approach dubbed “comparative bilingualism.” The empirical part of this project comes from three types of research: (i) the acquisition and subsequent development of pronominal object clitic placement in two closely related varieties of Greek by bilectal, binational, bilingual, and multilingual children; (ii) the performance on executive control tasks by monolingual, bilectal, and bi- or multilingual children; and (iii) the role of comparative bilingualism in children with a developmental language impairment for both the diagnosis and subsequent treatment as well as the possible avoidance or weakening of how language impairment presents. PMID:26903890

  6. Survivorship Care Plan Information Needs: Perspectives of Safety-Net Breast Cancer Patients.

    PubMed

    Burke, Nancy J; Napoles, Tessa M; Banks, Priscilla J; Orenstein, Fern S; Luce, Judith A; Joseph, Galen

    2016-01-01

    Despite the Institute of Medicine's (IOM) 2005 recommendation, few care organizations have instituted standard survivorship care plans (SCPs). Low health literacy and low English proficiency are important factors to consider in SCP development. Our study aimed to identify information needs and survivorship care plan preferences of low literacy, multi-lingual patients to support the transition from oncology to primary care and ongoing learning in survivorship. We conducted focus groups in five languages with African American, Latina, Russian, Filipina, White, and Chinese medically underserved breast cancer patients. Topics explored included the transition to primary care, access to information, knowledge of treatment history, and perspectives on SCPs. Analysis of focus group data identified three themes: 1) the need for information and education on the transition between "active treatment" and "survivorship"; 2) information needed (and often not obtained) from providers; and 3) perspectives on SCP content and delivery. Our data point to the need to develop a process as well as written information for medically underserved breast cancer patients. An SCP document will not replace direct communication with providers about treatment, symptom management and transition, a communication that is missing in participating safety-net patients' experiences of cancer care. Women turned to peer support and community-based organizations in the absence of information from providers. "Clear and effective" communication of survivorship care for safety-net patients requires dedicated staff trained to address wide-ranging information needs and uncertainties.

  7. Politics and Policies of Promoting Multilingualism in the European Union

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Romaine, Suzanne

    2013-01-01

    This article examines the politics of policies promoting multilingualism in the European Union (EU), specifically in light of the recently released European Union Civil Society Platform on Multilingualism. As the most far-reaching and ambitious policy document issued by the European Commission, the Platform warrants close scrutiny at a significant…

  8. The Multilingual Apple: Languages in New York City. Second Edition.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Garcia, Ofelia, Ed.; Fishman, Joshua A., Ed.

    This collection of papers tells the story of how languages other than English have contributed to making New York City a culturally vibrant and linguistically diverse city. Part 1, "Introduction to the Multilingual Apple," features "New York's Multilingualism: World Languages and Their Role in a U.S. City" (Ofelia Garcia). Part…

  9. Language Practices in Multilingual Communities: Insights from a Suburban High School

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Willoughby, Louisa

    2013-01-01

    As a result of globalisation and mass migration, suburbs and schools around the world are becoming increasingly multiethnic, multilingual places. Yet there is still relatively little linguistic research on how language is used in everyday interaction in these multilingual communities. In this paper, I explore the strengths and limitations of…

  10. Multilingual Education: The Role of Language Ideologies and Attitudes

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Liddicoat, Anthony J.; Taylor-Leech, Kerry

    2015-01-01

    This paper overviews issues relating to the role of ideologies and attitudes in multilingual education (MLE). It argues that ideologies and attitudes are constituent parts of the language planning process and shape the possibilities for multilingualism in educational programmes in complex ways, but most frequently work to constrain the ways that…

  11. Multilingual Practices in Contemporary and Historical Contexts: Interfaces between Code-Switching and Translation

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Kolehmainen, Leena; Skaffari, Janne

    2016-01-01

    This article serves as an introduction to a collection of four articles on multilingual practices in speech and writing, exploring both contemporary and historical sources. It not only introduces the articles but also discusses the scope and definitions of code-switching, attitudes towards multilingual interaction and, most pertinently, the…

  12. To Win the Game, Know the Rules and Legitimize the Players: Disciplinary Literacy and Multilingual Learners

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Hickey, Pamela J.; Lewis, Tarie

    2015-01-01

    Effective disciplinary literacy instruction is an essential element in the education of multilingual learners. In this article, we provide an overview of disciplinary literacy as well as instructional approaches that support meaningful pedagogy for these students. We recognize that multilingual learners are already skilled at negotiating language…

  13. Variation in Discourse Strategies in a Multilingual Context

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Bai, B. Lakshmi

    2010-01-01

    This paper is an attempt to study empirically a sample of spoken narratives of Hindi, Telugu and Dakkhini speakers in the multilingual setting of Hyderabad. After a brief account of multilingualism and variation within a language as commonly occurring phenomena, the paper examines the spoken narratives of the three languages mentioned above with a…

  14. Re-Becoming ESL: Multilingual University Students and a Deficit Identity

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Marshall, Steve

    2010-01-01

    In this article, I analyze how a group of multilingual students at a university in British Columbia, Canada, go through the process of "re-becoming ESL" during their first year of university. I highlight a central contradiction. Despite bringing a diverse and rich range of languages and cultures to the university, multilingual students…

  15. Educational Trajectories at the Crossroads: The Making and Unmaking of Multilingual Communities of Learners

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Budach, Gabriele

    2014-01-01

    This article investigates the educational trajectories of young multilingual learners in Germany. Drawing on previous ethnographic research in a primary bilingual German-Italian Two-Way-Immersion classroom, this study examines the continuity and fragmentation of multilingual learning as they occur in the transition from primary to secondary…

  16. Multilingual Children Increase Language Differentiation by Indexing Communities of Practice

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    O'Shannessy, Carmel

    2015-01-01

    An area in need of study in child language acquisition is that of complex multilingual contexts in which there is little language separation by interlocutor or domain. Little is known about how multilingual children use language to construct their identities in each language or in both languages. Identity construction in monolingual contexts has…

  17. Multilingual, like Franz Kafka

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Kramsch, Claire

    2008-01-01

    This paper explores the social and cultural dimensions of individual multilingualism by focusing on a semi-autobiographical essay written in 1917 by an author who is usually read as a monolingual German writer but who was, in fact, multilingual and multicultural: Franz Kafka. The story is about an ape who, in order to survive his capture by the…

  18. English as a Lingua Franca in Europe: Bilingualism and Multicompetence

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    MacKenzie, Ian

    2012-01-01

    Many multilinguals in Europe habitually use the linguistic strategies often attributed to users of English as a lingua franca (ELF). ELF, in which native speaker norms are not invoked, may be the perfect arena for multilinguals to exploit what Vivian Cook calls "multicompetence", a dynamic multilingual system in which more than one…

  19. Affordance Theory and Multiple Language Learning and Teaching

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Kordt, Birgit

    2018-01-01

    This article argues that the concept of affordances as put forward by James J. Gibson can make a major contribution to our understanding of multilingualism. It can throw some light on multilingualism in general as well as on specific aspects like successful and unsuccessful transfer, the challenges involved in teaching for multilingualism,…

  20. From Opposition to Transcendence: The Language Practices and Ideologies of Students in a Multilingual University

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Gu, Mingyue

    2014-01-01

    This article explores language ideologies and language uses in a multilingual university in Hong Kong by exploring the voices and experiences of both mainland Chinese and Hong Kong students. Drawing on the notions of language ideologies, separate multilingualism, and translanguaging, the research illustrates how students' linguistic ideologies are…

  1. Marketing, Management and Performance: Multilingualism as Commodity in a Tourism Call Centre

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Duchene, Alexandre

    2009-01-01

    This paper focuses on the ways an institution of the new economy--a tourism call centre in Switzerland--markets, manages and performs multilingual services. In particular, it explores the ways multilingualism operates as a strategic and managerial tool within tourism call centres and how the institutional regulation of language practices…

  2. Emerging Multilingual Awareness in Educational Contexts: From Theory to Practice

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Jessner, Ulrike; Allgäuer-Hackl, Elisabeth; Hofer, Barbara

    2016-01-01

    The aim of this article is to stress the importance of a dynamic systems or complexity theory approach as a necessary prerequisite to understanding the development of multi-competence in multilingual learners. Selected results from a study on emergent multilingual awareness in children, carried out in South Tyrol, are outlined and discussed. The…

  3. Do Interlocutors or Conversation Topics Affect Migrants' Sense of Feeling Different When Switching Languages?

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Panicacci, Alessandra; Dewaele, Jean-Marc

    2018-01-01

    A majority of multilinguals report feeling different when switching languages [Dewaele, J.-M. (2016). "Why do So Many Bi- and Multilinguals Feel Different When Switching Languages?" "International Journal of Multilingualism" 13 (1): 92-105; Panicacci, A., and J.-M. Dewaele. (2017). "'A Voice from Elsewhere': Acculturation,…

  4. Micro Language Planning for Multilingual Education: Agency in Local Contexts

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Liddicoat, Anthony J.; Taylor-Leech, Kerry

    2014-01-01

    This paper overviews some of the domains of application of micro-level language planning approaches to foster multilingual education. It examines the language planning of local agents and the contexts in which their work contributes to multilingual education, either to expand or limit educational possibilities. It identifies four broad contexts of…

  5. Multilingualism in European Workplaces

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Gunnarsson, Britt-Louise

    2014-01-01

    This state-of-the-art article includes a review of past and recent studies on multilingualism at work in European environments. One aim is to provide the reader with a cross-cultural picture of workplace studies on various languages in Europe, another to discuss both positive and problem-based accounts of multilingualism at work. The overview…

  6. Language Use and Social Change. Problems of Multilingualism with Special Reference to Eastern Africa.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Whiteley, W. H., Ed.

    This book contains 22 studies relating to the social implications of multilingualism in Eastern Africa. The first section, "General and Theoretical Studies," contains papers on national languages and languages of wider communication in developing nations; the communication roles of languages in multilingual societies; the social and…

  7. Intra- and Inter-Individual Variation in Self-Reported Code-Switching Patterns of Adult Multilinguals

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Dewaele, Jean-Marc; Li, Wei

    2014-01-01

    The present study is a large-scale quantitative analysis of intra-individual variation (linked to type of interlocutor) and inter-individual variation (linked to multilingualism, sociobiographical variables and three personality traits) in self-reported frequency of code-switching (CS) among 2116 multilinguals. We found a significant effect of…

  8. Theoretical-and-Methodological Substantiation of Multilingual Model Activity in Kazakhstan Higher School Education System

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Ospanova, Bikesh Revovna; Azimbayeva, Zhanat Amantayevna; Timokhina, Tatyana Vladimirovna; Seydakhmetova, Zergul Koblandiyevna

    2016-01-01

    The need of implementing the model of professional development in training an expert in the conditions of multilingualism is considered. The possibility of using the multilingual approach in the context of present day education with the use of innovative technologies of training is substantiated, the definition of "multilingual…

  9. Are Multilingualism, Tolerance of Ambiguity, and Attitudes toward Linguistic Variation Related?

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    van Compernolle, Rémi A.

    2016-01-01

    This article explores the links between multilingualism, the personality trait Tolerance of Ambiguity (TA), and attitudes toward linguistic variation among 379 mono-, bi-, and multilingual adults who completed an online questionnaire. A self-reported high level of proficiency in multiple languages, short- and long-term residence abroad, and high…

  10. Multilingual Language and Literacy Practices and Social Identities in Sunni Madrassahs in Mauritius: A Case Study

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Owodally, Ambarin Mooznah Auleear

    2011-01-01

    This study analyzes the connections among multilingual language practices, multilingual literacy practices, and social identities in two Sunni madrassahs in Mauritius. The study is framed by sociolinguistic and poststructuralist perspectives on language and identity, and social practice views of literacy. Data collection and analysis involved…

  11. Minority Voices in Literary Fiction: A Case Study of Translating Multilingual Practices

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Nurmi, Arja

    2016-01-01

    Translating multilingual texts is still a new field of inquiry. Transplanting a text where the function of embraced multilingual practices is strongly related to local ethnic identities can provide challenges for translators and readers alike. This study discusses the translation strategies adopted by second-year translation students on an…

  12. Public Library Services to Ethno-Cultural Minorities.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Schulte-Albert, Hans G.

    1984-01-01

    Report on development of multicultural and multilingual public library services in Federal Republic of Germany highlights influx of migratory workers, education, occupational training, efforts of public libraries to address information needs of foreign workers, illiteracy, and an international seminar titled "Books for Children from…

  13. Multicultural Issues and Concerns in Library Education.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Freiband, Susan J.

    1992-01-01

    Identifies multilingual and multicultural issues relevant to library and information science curricula today and outlines the skills, knowledge, and attitudes needed by graduates to address these issues. Aspects of the curriculum, specific programs, and activities on which to focus are discussed. (13 references) (EA)

  14. Beyond bilingualism: multilingual experience correlates with caudate volume.

    PubMed

    Hervais-Adelman, Alexis; Egorova, Natalia; Golestani, Narly

    2018-06-14

    The multilingual brain implements mechanisms that serve to select the appropriate language as a function of the communicative environment. Engaging these mechanisms on a regular basis appears to have consequences for brain structure and function. Studies have implicated the caudate nuclei as important nodes in polyglot language control processes, and have also shown structural differences in the caudate nuclei in bilingual compared to monolingual populations. However, the majority of published work has focused on the categorical differences between monolingual and bilingual individuals, and little is known about whether these findings extend to multilingual individuals, who have even greater language control demands. In the present paper, we present an analysis of the volume and morphology of the caudate nuclei, putamen, pallidum and thalami in 75 multilingual individuals who speak three or more languages. Volumetric analyses revealed a significant relationship between multilingual experience and right caudate volume, as well as a marginally significant relationship with left caudate volume. Vertex-wise analyses revealed a significant enlargement of dorsal and anterior portions of the left caudate nucleus, known to have connectivity with executive brain regions, as a function of multilingual expertise. These results suggest that multilingual expertise might exercise a continuous impact on brain structure, and that as additional languages beyond a second are acquired, the additional demands for linguistic and cognitive control result in modifications to brain structures associated with language management processes.

  15. Crowd-Sourcing (Semantically) Structured Multilingual Educational Content (CoSMEC)

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Tarasowa, Darya; Auer, Sören; Khalili, Ali; Unbehauen, Jörg

    2014-01-01

    The support of multilingual content becomes crucial for educational platforms due to the benefits it offers. In this paper we propose a concept that allows content authors to use the power of the crowd to create (semantically) structured multilingual educational content out of their material. To enable the collaboration of the crowd, we expand our…

  16. Linguistically Based Inequality, Multilingual Education and a Genre-Based Literacy Development Pedagogy: Insights from the Australian Experience

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    White, Peter R. R.; Mammone, Giuseppe; Caldwell, David

    2015-01-01

    This chapter addresses the issue of pedagogy and bilingual/multilingual education: how best to match teaching-and-learning approaches to the literacy development needs of students in multilingual educational settings. More specifically, it makes the case for what is known as the "Sydney school" genre-based literacy development approach.…

  17. Use Your Languages! From Monolingual to Multilingual Interaction in a Language Class

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Kyppö, Anna; Natri, Teija; Pietarinen, Margarita; Saaristo, Pekka

    2015-01-01

    This reflective paper presents a new course concept for multilingual interaction, which was piloted at the University of Jyväskylä Language Centre in the spring of 2014. The course, implemented as part of the centre's action research, is the result of a development process aimed at enhancing students' multilingual and multicultural academic…

  18. Multilingualism in the Workplace: Language Practices in Multilingual Contexts

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Angouri, Jo

    2014-01-01

    The modern workplace is international and multilingual. Both white and blue collar employees are expected to be mobile, work increasingly in (virtual) teams (Gee et al. 1996) and to address complex organisational issues in a language that, often, is not their first language (L1). This results in a number of languages forming the ecosystem of…

  19. The Multilingual Lexicon: Modelling Selection and Control

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    de Bot, Kees

    2004-01-01

    In this paper an overview of research on the multilingual lexicon is presented as the basis for a model for processing multiple languages. With respect to specific issues relating to the processing of more than two languages, it is suggested that there is no need to develop a specific model for such multilingual processing, but at the same time we…

  20. Review Article: The Imaging of What in the Multilingual Mind?

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    de Bot, Kees

    2008-01-01

    In this review article it is argued that while the number of neuro-imaging (NI) studies on multilingual processing has exploded over the last few years, the contribution of such studies to enhance our understanding of the process of multilingual processing has not been very substantial. There are problems on various levels, which include the…

  1. The Multilingual Education (MLE) Network Phenomenon: Advocacy and Action for Minoritized Language Communities

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Trudell, Barbara

    2014-01-01

    This article examines a new phenomenon in language activism variously called the multilingual education working group or the multilingual education network, and abbreviated as MLEN. After an analysis of the conceptual and organizational contexts for these activist groups, the six MLENs in existence as of 2013 are described. The groups are then…

  2. The Concordance of Multilingual Legal Texts at the WTO

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Condon, Bradly J.

    2012-01-01

    Multilingualism is a sensitive and complex subject in a global organisation such as the World Trade Organization (WTO). In the WTO legal texts, there is a need for full concordance, not simply translation. This article begins with an overview of the issues raised by multilingual processes at the WTO in the negotiation, drafting, translation,…

  3. From Bilingualism to Multilingualism in the Workplace: The Case of the Basque Autonomous Community

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    van der Worp, Karin; Cenoz, Jasone; Gorter, Durk

    2017-01-01

    In this article we discuss the outcomes of a study into the languages of the workplace of internationally operating companies. Our aim is to contribute to studies of multilingualism in the workplace by adopting a holistic approach that focuses on several languages and relates the competences and attitudes of multilingual professionals to the…

  4. Development of a Tablet Application for the Screening of Receptive Vocabulary Skills in Multilingual Children: A Pilot Study

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Schaefer, Blanca; Bowyer-Crane, Claudine; Herrmann, Frank; Fricke, Silke

    2016-01-01

    For professionals working with multilingual children, detecting language deficits in a child's home language can present a challenge. This is largely due to the scarcity of standardized assessments in many children's home languages and missing normative data on multilingual language acquisition. A common approach is to translate existing English…

  5. Multilingual Aspects of Speech Sound Disorders in Children. Communication Disorders across Languages

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    McLeod, Sharynne; Goldstein, Brian

    2012-01-01

    Multilingual Aspects of Speech Sound Disorders in Children explores both multilingual and multicultural aspects of children with speech sound disorders. The 30 chapters have been written by 44 authors from 16 different countries about 112 languages and dialects. The book is designed to translate research into clinical practice. It is divided into…

  6. Reconceptualizing Practice with Multilingual Children with Speech Sound Disorders: People, Practicalities and Policy

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Verdon, Sarah; McLeod, Sharynne; Wong, Sandie

    2015-01-01

    Background: The speech and language therapy profession is required to provide services to increasingly multilingual caseloads. Much international research has focused on the challenges of speech and language therapists' (SLTs) practice with multilingual children. Aims: To draw on the experience and knowledge of experts in the field to: (1)…

  7. Language Attitudes in Multilingual Primary Schools in Fiji

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Shameem, Nikhat

    2004-01-01

    Fiji is a multilingual country in the South Pacific with English, Fijian and Hindi being the official languages. As is inevitable in multilingual societies, language use is functional with Fiji Hindi and Fijian being the mother tongues of the two main ethnic groups in the country, the Indo-Fijians and the Fijians. English, because of Fiji's…

  8. Multilingual natural language generation as part of a medical terminology server.

    PubMed

    Wagner, J C; Solomon, W D; Michel, P A; Juge, C; Baud, R H; Rector, A L; Scherrer, J R

    1995-01-01

    Re-usable and sharable, and therefore language-independent concept models are of increasing importance in the medical domain. The GALEN project (Generalized Architecture for Languages Encyclopedias and Nomenclatures in Medicine) aims at developing language-independent concept representation systems as the foundations for the next generation of multilingual coding systems. For use within clinical applications, the content of the model has to be mapped to natural language. A so-called Multilingual Information Module (MM) establishes the link between the language-independent concept model and different natural languages. This text generation software must be versatile enough to cope at the same time with different languages and with different parts of a compositional model. It has to meet, on the one hand, the properties of the language as used in the medical domain and, on the other hand, the specific characteristics of the underlying model and its representation formalism. We propose a semantic-oriented approach to natural language generation that is based on linguistic annotations to a concept model. This approach is realized as an integral part of a Terminology Server, built around the concept model and offering different terminological services for clinical applications.

  9. RTO Technical Publications: A Quarterly Listing

    NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

    2004-01-01

    This is a listing of recent unclassified RTO technical publications processed by the NASA Center for AeroSpace Information. Contents include the following: RTO Technical Publications: A Quarterly Listing. Implications of Multilingual Interoperability of Speech Technology for Military Use. Non-Lethal Weapons and Future Peace Enforcement Operations.

  10. Political Strategies and Language Policies: The European Union Lisbon Strategy and Its Implications for the EU's Language and Multilingualism Policy

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Krzyzanowski, Michal; Wodak, Ruth

    2011-01-01

    This paper explores the interplay between the politics and policies of multilingualism by looking at the role of political macro-strategies in shaping language and multilingualism policies within the European Union. The paper focuses on the relationship between the European Union's 2000-2010 Lisbon Strategy on the European Knowledge-Based Economy…

  11. How Does Linguistic Competence Enhance Cognitive Functions in Children? A Study in Multilingual Children with Different Linguistic Competences

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Videsott, Gerda; Della Rosa, Pasquale Anthony; Wiater, Werner; Franceschini, Rita; Abutalebi, Jubin

    2012-01-01

    The aim of the present study was to investigate the attentional mechanisms of multilingual children with differential degrees of language competence. For this purpose, 118 children (61 female/57 male; mean age 10.9 years (SD = 0.29); early acquisition multilinguals) from the Ladin valleys in South Tyrol, Italy, performed the Attentional Network…

  12. Comparative Intergroup Relations and Social Incorporation in Two Multilingual Societies: Canada and Switzerland. Occasional Paper No. 95-03.1.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Schmid, Carol

    A study of national identity and social integration in two multilingual societies, Canada and Switzerland, examines the relations between Quebec and anglophone Canada and between French and German Switzerland. First, the historical setting for the emergence of multilingualism is outlined for both countries, and the demography of the major language…

  13. Why Do so Many Bi- and Multilinguals Feel Different When Switching Languages?

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Dewaele, Jean-Marc

    2016-01-01

    Is the feeling of difference experienced by many bi- and multilinguals linked to a later age of onset (AoA) and a lower level of proficiency in the foreign language (LX)? This empirical study, based on the qualitative and quantitative data from 1005 bi- and multilinguals, suggests AoA is unrelated to feelings of difference. While several…

  14. "The Soccer Field, It Has Dirt": A Critical Analysis of Teacher Learners in Contact with Emergent Multilingual Students

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Catalano, Theresa; Reeves, Jenelle R.; Wessels, Stephanie

    2018-01-01

    In today's globalized world, superdiversity and global migration have led to an increased focus on emergent multilingual students and how schools can best serve them. The authors explore how teacher learners in an undergraduate course on emergent multilinguals in a mid-sized university in the Midwest critically reflect on their learning in a…

  15. Elite Bilingualism? Language Use among Multilingual Teenagers of Swedish Background in European Schools and International Schools in Europe

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Rydenvald, Marie

    2015-01-01

    This article explores the language use and language attitudes as reported by a number of multilingual teenagers with a Swedish background in European Schools and international schools in Europe. Special attention is given to the concepts of Third Culture Kids and elite bilingualism in relation to teenagers' multilingualism. This study is based on…

  16. A Critical Overview of Research on Third Language Acquisition and Multilingualism Published in the German Language

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    International Journal of Multilingualism, 2004

    2004-01-01

    For the purposes of this article, the authors define "multilingualism" as a state of general communicative proficiency in more than two languages; that is, a person is multilingual when he or she can fulfill his or her communicative goals in at least three languages. Bilingualism and trilingualism are thus seen as specific subtypes of a…

  17. Intercomprehension between Romance Languages and the Role of English: A Study of Multilingual Chat Rooms

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Melo-Pfeifer, Sílvia

    2014-01-01

    In this article, we focus on the role English plays in multilingual chat rooms in Romance Languages. We intend to demonstrate how English, even as forbidden language in this particular setting, is a mediation and a remediation tool. Our conclusions point out that: (1) English is an constructive resource in multilingual communication; (2) it has a…

  18. Multilingual Phoneme Models for Rapid Speech Processing System Development

    DTIC Science & Technology

    2006-09-01

    processes are used to develop an Arabic speech recognition system starting from monolingual English models, In- ternational Phonetic Association (IPA...clusters. It was found that multilingual bootstrapping methods out- perform monolingual English bootstrapping methods on the Arabic evaluation data initially...International Phonetic Alphabet . . . . . . . . . 7 2.3.2 Multilingual vs. Monolingual Speech Recognition 7 2.3.3 Data-Driven Approaches

  19. A Study of a Multiple Component Feedback Approach to Substantive Revision for Secondary ELL and Multilingual Writers

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Early, Jessica Singer; Saidy, Christina

    2014-01-01

    This mixed method investigation included a quasi-experiment examining if revision instruction enhanced the substantive revising behavior of 15 English language learner (ELL) and multilingual 10th grade students enrolled in an English class for underperforming students in comparison to 14 non-ELL and multilingual students from the same class who…

  20. Comparing behavioral discrimination and learning abilities in monolinguals, bilinguals and multilinguals.

    PubMed

    Tremblay, Marie-Claude; Sabourin, Laura

    2012-11-01

    The aim of the experiment was to determine whether language learning experience contributes to the development of enhanced speech perception abilities. Monolinguals, bilinguals and multilinguals were compared in their ability to discriminate a non-native contrast behaviorally using an AX task. The experiment was based on a "pre-test-training-post-test" design and performance was tested before and after receiving training on the voiceless aspirated dental/retroflex stop contrast. At post-test, participants were also tested on their ability to transfer training to a similar contrast (i.e., voiceless unaspirated dental/retroflex stop contrast). While no group differences were found at pre-test, analyses of the trained-on contrast at post-test revealed that multilinguals were more accurate than monolinguals and that both the multilingual and bilingual groups were more accurate than a control group that received no training. The results of the experiment not only suggest that multilinguals and bilinguals have enhanced speech perception abilities compared to monolinguals, but they also indicate that bi-/multilingualism helps develop superior learning abilities. This provides support for the idea that learning more than one language has positive effects on the cognitive development of an individual (e.g., Bialystok et al., 2004).

  1. International aspirations for speech-language pathologists' practice with multilingual children with speech sound disorders: development of a position paper.

    PubMed

    McLeod, Sharynne; Verdon, Sarah; Bowen, Caroline

    2013-01-01

    A major challenge for the speech-language pathology profession in many cultures is to address the mismatch between the "linguistic homogeneity of the speech-language pathology profession and the linguistic diversity of its clientele" (Caesar & Kohler, 2007, p. 198). This paper outlines the development of the Multilingual Children with Speech Sound Disorders: Position Paper created to guide speech-language pathologists' (SLPs') facilitation of multilingual children's speech. An international expert panel was assembled comprising 57 researchers (SLPs, linguists, phoneticians, and speech scientists) with knowledge about multilingual children's speech, or children with speech sound disorders. Combined, they had worked in 33 countries and used 26 languages in professional practice. Fourteen panel members met for a one-day workshop to identify key points for inclusion in the position paper. Subsequently, 42 additional panel members participated online to contribute to drafts of the position paper. A thematic analysis was undertaken of the major areas of discussion using two data sources: (a) face-to-face workshop transcript (133 pages) and (b) online discussion artifacts (104 pages). Finally, a moderator with international expertise in working with children with speech sound disorders facilitated the incorporation of the panel's recommendations. The following themes were identified: definitions, scope, framework, evidence, challenges, practices, and consideration of a multilingual audience. The resulting position paper contains guidelines for providing services to multilingual children with speech sound disorders (http://www.csu.edu.au/research/multilingual-speech/position-paper). The paper is structured using the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health: Children and Youth Version (World Health Organization, 2007) and incorporates recommendations for (a) children and families, (b) SLPs' assessment and intervention, (c) SLPs' professional practice, and (d) SLPs' collaboration with other professionals. Readers will 1. recognize that multilingual children with speech sound disorders have both similar and different needs to monolingual children when working with speech-language pathologists. 2. Describe the challenges for speech-language pathologists who work with multilingual children. 3. Recall the importance of cultural competence for speech-language pathologists. 4. Identify methods for international collaboration and consultation. 5. Recognize the importance of engaging with families and people within their local communities for supporting multilingual children in context. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

  2. Designing of Intelligent Multilingual Patient Reported Outcome System (IMPROS)

    PubMed Central

    Pourasghar, Faramarz; Partovi, Yeganeh

    2015-01-01

    Background: By self-reporting outcome procedure the patients themselves record disease symptoms outside medical centers and then report them to medical staff in specific periods of time. One of the self-reporting methods is the application of interactive voice response (IVR), in which some pre-designed questions in the form of voice tracks would be played and then the caller responses the questions by pressing phone’s keypad bottoms. Aim: The present research explains the main framework of such system designing according to IVR technology that is for the first time designed and administered in Iran. Methods: Interactive Voice Response system was composed by two main parts of hardware and software. Hardware section includes one or several digital phone lines, a modem card with voice playing capability and a PC. IVR software on the other hand, acts as an intelligent control center, records call information and controls incoming data. Results: One of the main features of the system is its capability to be administered in common PCs, utilizing simple and cheap modems, high speed to take responses and it’s appropriateness to low literate patients. The system is applicable for monitoring chronic diseases, cancer and also in psychological diseases and can be suitable for taking care of elders and Children who require long term cares. Other features include user-friendly, decrease in direct and indirect costs of disease treatment and enjoying from high level of security to access patients’ profiles. Conclusions: Intelligent multilingual patient reported outcome system (IMPROS) by controlling diseases gives the opportunity to patients to have more participation during treatment and it improves mutual interaction between patient and medical staff. Moreover it increases the quality of medical services, Additional to empowering patients and their followers. PMID:26635441

  3. Multilingual Analysis of Twitter News in Support of Mass Emergency Events

    NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

    Zielinski, A.; Bügel, U.; Middleton, L.; Middleton, S. E.; Tokarchuk, L.; Watson, K.; Chaves, F.

    2012-04-01

    Social media are increasingly becoming an additional source of information for event-based early warning systems in the sense that they can help to detect natural crises and support crisis management during or after disasters. Within the European FP7 TRIDEC project we study the problem of analyzing multilingual twitter feeds for emergency events. Specifically, we consider tsunami and earthquakes, as one possible originating cause of tsunami, and propose to analyze twitter messages for capturing testified information at affected points of interest in order to obtain a better picture of the actual situation. For tsunami, these could be the so called Forecast Points, i.e. agreed-upon points chosen by the Regional Tsunami Warning Centers (RTWC) and the potentially affected countries, which must be considered when calculating expected tsunami arrival times. Generally, local civil protection authorities and the population are likely to respond in their native languages. Therefore, the present work focuses on English as "lingua franca" and on under-resourced Mediterranean languages in endangered zones, particularly in Turkey, Greece, and Romania. We investigated ten earthquake events and defined four language-specific classifiers that can be used to detect natural crisis events by filtering out irrelevant messages that do not relate to the event. Preliminary results indicate that such a filter has the potential to support earthquake detection and could be integrated into seismographic sensor networks. One hindrance in our study is the lack of geo-located data for asserting the geographical origin of the tweets and thus to be able to observe correlations of events across languages. One way to overcome this deficit consists in identifying geographic names contained in tweets that correspond to or which are located in the vicinity of specific points-of-interest such as the forecast points of the tsunami scenario. We also intend to use twitter analysis for situation picture assessment, e.g. for planning relief actions. At present, a multilingual corpus of Twitter messages related to crises is being assembled, and domain-specific language resources such as multilingual terminology lists and language-specific Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools are being built up to help cross the language barrier. The final goal is to extend this work to the main languages spoken around the Mediterranean and to classify and extract relevant information from tweets, translating the main keywords into English.

  4. Intercultural Contact and Multilingualism in an Intimate Relationship in the Austro-Hungarian Littoral.

    PubMed

    Martinis, Anja Iveković

    2016-09-01

    The paper presents a case study of multilingualism in private correspondence in turn-of-the-century Austro-Hungarian Istria. Language attitudes and use of German, Italian and Slovenian are analyzed, with results indicating the compatibility of national feelings with an appreciation of multilingualism, as well as the important role that intimate intercultural relationships play in this regard in a culturally mixed region.

  5. Multilingual Acquisition of Vowels in L1 Polish, L2 Danish and L3 English

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Sypianska, Jolanta

    2016-01-01

    The aim of this paper is to determine whether all languages in the linguistic repertoire of a multilingual speaker manifest cross-linguistic influence (CLI) and establish the directions of CLI on the basis of chosen vowels from the linguistic repertoire of two groups: the Bilingual group (L1 Polish/L2 Danish) and the Multilingual group (L1…

  6. Interaction for Transfer: Flexible Approaches to Multilingualism and Their Pedagogical Implications for Classroom Interaction in Linguistically Diverse Mainstream Classrooms

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Rosiers, Kirsten; Willaert, Evita; Van Avermaet, Piet; Slembrouck, Stef

    2016-01-01

    This study focuses on how teachers construe and give meaning to a pedagogical experiment in which the use of the home language in a primary school in Flanders was permitted in order to acknowledge the urban multilingual realities and resources of the pupils and to turn them into didactic capital (functional multilingual learning, FML). Using…

  7. Bilingual/Multilingual Learners' Willingness to Communicate in and Anxiety on Speaking Chinese and Their Associations with Self-Rated Proficiency in Chinese

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Liu, Meihua

    2018-01-01

    The present research explored bilingual/multilingual students' willingness to communicate in Chinese (WTCC) and foreign language anxiety (FLA) when speaking Chinese and their associations with self-rated proficiency in Chinese in a university in Beijing. The study recruited 167 bilingual and multilingual learners of Chinese to fill in a battery of…

  8. English-lus Multilingualism as the New Linguistic Capital? Implications of University Students' Attitudes towards Languages of Instruction in a Multilingual Environment

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Klapwijk, Nanda; Van der Walt, Christa

    2016-01-01

    This article investigates university students' attitudes and perceptions about language in a multilingual country where most instruction is in English and annual national literacy results have been declining for at least 15 years. Despite this decline, English seems to be entrenched as the language of instruction, and at university it seems a…

  9. The Role of Previously Learned Languages in the Thought Processes of Multilingual Writers at the Deutsche Schule Barcelona

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Tullock, Brandon D.; Fernandez-Villanueva, Marta

    2013-01-01

    In recent years, scholars have voiced the need for research which focuses on the ability of multilinguals to write across multiple languages rather than on the limitations that they face when composing in a non-native language. In order to better understand multilingual writers as resourceful and creative problem-solvers, the current study aims to…

  10. Managing Multilinguality: Israel's Retraining Course for New Immigrant Librarians.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Lazinger, Susan S.; Peritz, Bluma C.

    1993-01-01

    Describes a six-month retraining program developed for Israel's Russian-speaking immigrant librarians and information specialists that includes Hebrew language, Jewish and Israeli history, English, and library automation. Differences from the Soviet library system are discussed, including censorship and public libraries, and characteristics of the…

  11. Language (Policy) Matters!

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Kozleski, E. B.; Mulligan, E.; Hernandez-Saca, D.

    2011-01-01

    Public education has a vital role in ensuring that this and subsequent generations are successful in a global, multilingual economy. In this What Matters brief, we examine how teachers, students, parents, and communities in our nation's schools can create rich opportunities for students to learn. Language (Policy) Matters! includes information and…

  12. Multilingual Medical Data Models in ODM Format

    PubMed Central

    Breil, B.; Kenneweg, J.; Fritz, F.; Bruland, P.; Doods, D.; Trinczek, B.; Dugas, M.

    2012-01-01

    Background Semantic interoperability between routine healthcare and clinical research is an unsolved issue, as information systems in the healthcare domain still use proprietary and site-specific data models. However, information exchange and data harmonization are essential for physicians and scientists if they want to collect and analyze data from different hospitals in order to build up registries and perform multicenter clinical trials. Consequently, there is a need for a standardized metadata exchange based on common data models. Currently this is mainly done by informatics experts instead of medical experts. Objectives We propose to enable physicians to exchange, rate, comment and discuss their own medical data models in a collaborative web-based repository of medical forms in a standardized format. Methods Based on a comprehensive requirement analysis, a web-based portal for medical data models was specified. In this context, a data model is the technical specification (attributes, data types, value lists) of a medical form without any layout information. The CDISC Operational Data Model (ODM) was chosen as the appropriate format for the standardized representation of data models. The system was implemented with Ruby on Rails and applies web 2.0 technologies to provide a community based solution. Forms from different source systems – both routine care and clinical research – were converted into ODM format and uploaded into the portal. Results A portal for medical data models based on ODM-files was implemented (http://www.medical-data-models.org). Physicians are able to upload, comment, rate and download medical data models. More than 250 forms with approximately 8000 items are provided in different views (overview and detailed presentation) and in multiple languages. For instance, the portal contains forms from clinical and research information systems. Conclusion The portal provides a system-independent repository for multilingual data models in ODM format which can be used by physicians. It serves as a platform for discussion and enables the exchange of multilingual medical data models in a standardized way. PMID:23620720

  13. Multilingual educational trends and practices in Lebanon: A case study

    NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

    Bahous, Rima; Bacha, Nahla Nola; Nabhani, Mona

    2011-12-01

    This paper reports on the multilingual background, language education policies and practices in Lebanon. Specifically, it shows how the multilingual make-up in the country is translated into language policies in schools. A survey of 30 private school principals, middle managers and teachers was administered online to obtain their views on school policies, problems, successes, concerns and quality ranking. Results showed that a great deal of work has been done to introduce a language of instruction and a third language as decreed by the Ministry of Education and at the same time keep the national language, Arabic, alive. The main concerns of the participants were the need for teacher training programmes and resources. Although the research implies that the school systems, in keeping up with this multilingual milieu, could be contributing to the death of the national language as well as producing students who are not fluent in any of the languages, there continues to be an attempt to keep alive a quality multilingual educational context which contributes to a cohesive society.

  14. Is There a Place for Heritage Languages in the Promotion of an Intercultural and Multilingual Education in the Portuguese Schools?

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Faneca, Rosa Maria; Araújo e Sá, Maria Helena; Melo-Pfeifer, Sílvia

    2016-01-01

    This paper is part of a case study aimed at researching the multilingual repertoires of young people from a linguistic and cultural minority. Further, it analyzes the role of and the place given to heritage languages (HL) in the development of a multilingual and intercultural competence in schools. In the scope of the study mentioned above, a…

  15. Carving out Institutional Space for Multilingualism in the World's Most Multilingual Region: The Role of Linguistics at the University of the South Pacific

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Willans, Fiona

    2016-01-01

    The University of the South Pacific is a regional university catering for 12 countries. Its location situates it within unparalleled linguistic diversity, and its regional structure creates a highly multilingual body of staff and students interacting either face-to-face on the major campuses or remotely via e-learning and satellite communications.…

  16. Beyond the Ancestral Code: Towards a Model for Sociolinguistic Language Documentation

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Childs, Tucker; Good, Jeff; Mitchell, Alice

    2014-01-01

    Most language documentation efforts focus on capturing lexico-grammatical information on individual languages. Comparatively little effort has been devoted to considering a language's sociolinguistic contexts. In parts of the world characterized by high degrees of multilingualism, questions surrounding the factors involved in language choice and…

  17. Contextualised Language Choice in the Church in Kenya

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Luchivia, John Ommani

    2013-01-01

    This dissertation explores the missiological opportunities, challenges and implications of growing multilingualism among people who are fluent in two or more languages. I look at the cognitive value of language and how languages shape people's world views. World views influence peoples' perceptions and way of processing and understand information.…

  18. Machine Translation for Academic Purposes

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Lin, Grace Hui-chin; Chien, Paul Shih Chieh

    2009-01-01

    Due to the globalization trend and knowledge boost in the second millennium, multi-lingual translation has become a noteworthy issue. For the purposes of learning knowledge in academic fields, Machine Translation (MT) should be noticed not only academically but also practically. MT should be informed to the translating learners because it is a…

  19. Digital, Hybrid, and Multilingual Literacies in Early Childhood

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Razfar, Aria; Yang, Eunah

    2010-01-01

    This article examines sociocultural research on early literacy development in the digital age. The last decade has witnessed a proliferation of informational technology that has fundamentally shifted how we think about language and literacy in the early childhood years. Despite these trends, narrow and reductive views of literacy continue to…

  20. Automatic Construction of English/Chinese Parallel Corpora.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Yang, Christopher C.; Li, Kar Wing

    2003-01-01

    Discussion of multilingual corpora and cross-lingual information retrieval focuses on research that constructed English/Chinese parallel corpus automatically from the World Wide Web. Presents an alignment method which is based on dynamic programming to identify one-to-one Chinese and English title pairs and discusses results of experiments…

  1. Mapping the Linguistic Landscape of a Commercial Neighbourhood in Central Phnom Penh

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Kasanga, Luanga Adrien

    2012-01-01

    This article examines the distributional pattern of signs in the linguistic landscape of a neighbourhood in the commercial district of Phonm Penh, Cambodia. Informed by the frameworks of ethnolinguistic vitality and ethnocultural stereotypes, it discusses the developing multilingualism from socio-economic and historical perspectives. An analysis…

  2. One Classroom, Many Learners: Best Literacy Practices for Today's Multilingual Classrooms

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Coppola, Julie, Ed.; Primas, Elizabeth V., Ed.

    2009-01-01

    This comprehensive volume provides important and timely information about how best to teach literacy to ELLs. Contributors have come together to share their ideas on important topics such as increasing engagement and motivation, improving content area instruction, addressing writing instruction, strengthening home-school connections, and providing…

  3. Multi-Lingual Deep Neural Networks for Language Recognition

    DTIC Science & Technology

    2016-08-08

    training configurations for the NIST 2011 and 2015 lan- guage recognition evaluations (LRE11 and LRE15). The best per- forming multi-lingual BN-DNN...very ef- fective approach in the NIST 2015 language recognition evaluation (LRE15) open training condition [4, 5]. In this work we evaluate the impact...language are summarized in Table 2. Two language recognition tasks are used for evaluating the multi-lingual bottleneck systems. The first is the NIST

  4. Implementation of a near-real time cross-border web-mapping platform on airborne particulate matter (PM) concentration with open-source software

    NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

    Knörchen, Achim; Ketzler, Gunnar; Schneider, Christoph

    2015-01-01

    Although Europe has been growing together for the past decades, cross-border information platforms on environmental issues are still scarce. With regard to the establishment of a web-mapping tool on airborne particulate matter (PM) concentration for the Euregio Meuse-Rhine located in the border region of Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands, this article describes the research on methodical and technical backgrounds implementing such a platform. An open-source solution was selected for presenting the data in a Web GIS (OpenLayers/GeoExt; both JavaScript-based), applying other free tools for data handling (Python), data management (PostgreSQL), geo-statistical modelling (Octave), geoprocessing (GRASS GIS/GDAL) and web mapping (MapServer). The multilingual, made-to-order online platform provides access to near-real time data on PM concentration as well as additional background information. In an open data section, commented configuration files for the Web GIS client are being made available for download. Furthermore, all geodata generated by the project is being published under public domain and can be retrieved in various formats or integrated into Desktop GIS as Web Map Services (WMS).

  5. More Delusions May Be Observed in Low-Proficient Multilingual Alzheimer's Disease Patients.

    PubMed

    Liu, Yi-Chien; Liu, Yen-Ying; Yip, Ping-Keung; Akanuma, Kyoko; Meguro, Kenichi

    2015-01-01

    Language impairment and behavioral symptoms are both common phenomena in dementia patients. In this study, we investigated the behavioral symptoms in dementia patients with different language backgrounds. Through this, we aimed to propose a possible connection between language and delusion. We recruited 21 patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD), according to the DSM-IV and NINCDS-ADRDA criteria, from the memory clinic of the Cardinal Tien Hospital in Taipei, Taiwan. They were classified into two groups: 11 multilinguals who could speak Japanese, Taiwanese and Mandarin Chinese, and 10 bilinguals who only spoke Taiwanese and Mandarin Chinese. There were no differences between age, education, disease duration, disease severity, environment and medical care between these two groups. Comprehensive neuropsychological examinations, including Clinical Dementia Rating (CDR), Mini-Mental Status Examination (MMSE), Cognitive Abilities Screening Instrument (CASI), Verbal fluency, Chinese version of the Boston naming test (BNT) and the Behavioral Pathology in Alzheimer's Disease Rating Scale (BEHAVE-AD), were administered. The multilingual group showed worse results on the Boston naming test. Other neuropsychological tests, including the MMSE, CASI and Verbal fluency, were not significantly different. More delusions were noted in the multilingual group. Three pairs of subjects were identified for further examination of their differences. These three cases presented the typical scenario of how language misunderstanding may cause delusions in multilingual dementia patients. Consequently, more emotion and distorted ideas may be induced in the multilinguals compared with the MMSE-matched controls. Inappropriate mixing of language or conflict between cognition and emotion may cause more delusions in these multilingual patients. This reminds us that delusion is not a pure biological outcome of brain degeneration. Although the cognitive performance was not significantly different between our groups, language may still affect their delusion.

  6. More Delusions May Be Observed in Low-Proficient Multilingual Alzheimer’s Disease Patients

    PubMed Central

    Liu, Yi-Chien; Liu, Yen-Ying; Yip, Ping-Keung; Akanuma, Kyoko; Meguro, Kenichi

    2015-01-01

    Background Language impairment and behavioral symptoms are both common phenomena in dementia patients. In this study, we investigated the behavioral symptoms in dementia patients with different language backgrounds. Through this, we aimed to propose a possible connection between language and delusion. Methods We recruited 21 patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD), according to the DSM-IV and NINCDS-ADRDA criteria, from the memory clinic of the Cardinal Tien Hospital in Taipei, Taiwan. They were classified into two groups: 11 multilinguals who could speak Japanese, Taiwanese and Mandarin Chinese, and 10 bilinguals who only spoke Taiwanese and Mandarin Chinese. There were no differences between age, education, disease duration, disease severity, environment and medical care between these two groups. Comprehensive neuropsychological examinations, including Clinical Dementia Rating (CDR), Mini-Mental Status Examination (MMSE), Cognitive Abilities Screening Instrument (CASI), Verbal fluency, Chinese version of the Boston naming test (BNT) and the Behavioral Pathology in Alzheimer’s Disease Rating Scale (BEHAVE-AD), were administered. Results The multilingual group showed worse results on the Boston naming test. Other neuropsychological tests, including the MMSE, CASI and Verbal fluency, were not significantly different. More delusions were noted in the multilingual group. Three pairs of subjects were identified for further examination of their differences. These three cases presented the typical scenario of how language misunderstanding may cause delusions in multilingual dementia patients. Consequently, more emotion and distorted ideas may be induced in the multilinguals compared with the MMSE-matched controls. Conclusion Inappropriate mixing of language or conflict between cognition and emotion may cause more delusions in these multilingual patients. This reminds us that delusion is not a pure biological outcome of brain degeneration. Although the cognitive performance was not significantly different between our groups, language may still affect their delusion. PMID:26554588

  7. The ESRC: A Web-based Environmental Satellite Resource Center

    NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

    Abshire, W. E.; Guarente, B.; Dills, P. N.

    2009-12-01

    The COMET® Program has developed an Environmental Satellite Resource Center (known as the ESRC), a searchable, database-driven Website that provides easy access to a wide range of useful information training materials on polar-orbiting and geostationary satellites. Primarily sponsored by the NPOESS Program and NOAA, the ESRC is a tool for users seeking reliable sources of satellite information, training, and data. First published in September 2008, and upgraded in April 2009, the site is freely available at: http://www.meted.ucar.edu/esrc. Additional contributions to the ESRC are sought and made on an ongoing basis. The ESRC was created in response to a broad community request first made in May 2006. The COMET Program was asked to develop the site to consolidate and simplify access to reliable, current, and diverse information, training materials, and data associated with environmental satellites. The ESRC currently includes over 400 significant resources from NRL, CIMSS, CIRA, NASA, VISIT, NESDIS, and EUMETSAT, and improves access to the numerous satellite resources available from COMET’s MetEd Website. The ESRC is designed as a community site where organizations and individuals around the globe can easily submit their resources via online forms by providing a small set of metadata. The ESRC supports languages other than English and multi-lingual character sets have been tested. COMET’s role is threefold: 1) maintain the site, 2) populate it with our own materials, including smaller, focused learning objects derived from our larger training modules, and 3) provide the necessary quality assurance and monitoring to ensure that all resources are appropriate and well described before being made available. Our presentation will demonstrate many of the features and functionality of searching for resources using the ESRC, and will outline the steps for users to make their own submissions. For the site to reach its full potential, submissions representing diverse interests and intended for diverse audiences are strongly encouraged.

  8. Language Maintenance in a Multilingual Family: Informal Heritage Language Lessons in Parent-Child Interactions

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Kheirkhah, Mina; Cekaite, Asta

    2015-01-01

    The present study explores language socialization patterns in a Persian-Kurdish family in Sweden and examines how "one-parent, one-language" family language policies are instantiated and negotiated in parent-child interactions. The data consist of video-recordings and ethnographic observations of family interactions, as well as…

  9. Young Children Learning Languages in a Multilingual Context

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Kirsch, Claudine

    2006-01-01

    Luxembourg is a trilingual country where residents communicate in Luxembourgish, French and German concurrently. Children therefore study these languages at primary school. In this paper I explore how six eight-year-old Luxembourgish children use and learn German, French and English in formal and informal settings over a period of one year. Their…

  10. Policy and Practice in Madrid Multilingual Schools

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Pastor, Ana Maria Relano

    2009-01-01

    This article focuses on Spain's most recent implementing of education policies designed to address the needs of immigrant students. It overviews how the latest education policies do not meet the needs of a diverse body of students, drawing on information provided in focus group interviews from several Madrid schools, as well as from other official…

  11. Exploring English Language Teaching in an Ecuadorian Urban Secondary Institution

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Burgin, Ximena; Daniel, Mayra

    2017-01-01

    This article presents a case study focused on the pedagogy of nine English language teachers' pedagogy in Ecuador. The significance of this study is its potential to inform practitioners, teacher educators, and policymakers in countries where teachers need to be prepared to teach in multilingual settings, such as Ecuador. Data analyses of nine…

  12. Health search engine with e-document analysis for reliable search results.

    PubMed

    Gaudinat, Arnaud; Ruch, Patrick; Joubert, Michel; Uziel, Philippe; Strauss, Anne; Thonnet, Michèle; Baud, Robert; Spahni, Stéphane; Weber, Patrick; Bonal, Juan; Boyer, Celia; Fieschi, Marius; Geissbuhler, Antoine

    2006-01-01

    After a review of the existing practical solution available to the citizen to retrieve eHealth document, the paper describes an original specialized search engine WRAPIN. WRAPIN uses advanced cross lingual information retrieval technologies to check information quality by synthesizing medical concepts, conclusions and references contained in the health literature, to identify accurate, relevant sources. Thanks to MeSH terminology [1] (Medical Subject Headings from the U.S. National Library of Medicine) and advanced approaches such as conclusion extraction from structured document, reformulation of the query, WRAPIN offers to the user a privileged access to navigate through multilingual documents without language or medical prerequisites. The results of an evaluation conducted on the WRAPIN prototype show that results of the WRAPIN search engine are perceived as informative 65% (59% for a general-purpose search engine), reliable and trustworthy 72% (41% for the other engine) by users. But it leaves room for improvement such as the increase of database coverage, the explanation of the original functionalities and an audience adaptability. Thanks to evaluation outcomes, WRAPIN is now in exploitation on the HON web site (http://www.healthonnet.org), free of charge. Intended to the citizen it is a good alternative to general-purpose search engines when the user looks up trustworthy health and medical information or wants to check automatically a doubtful content of a Web page.

  13. Speech-language pathologists' assessment and intervention practices with multilingual children.

    PubMed

    Williams, Corinne J; McLeod, Sharynne

    2012-06-01

    Within predominantly English-speaking countries such as the US, UK, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, there are a significant number of people who speak languages other than English. This study aimed to examine Australian speech-language pathologists' (SLPs) perspectives and experiences of multilingualism, including their assessment and intervention practices, and service delivery methods when working with children who speak languages other than English. A questionnaire was completed by 128 SLPs who attended an SLP seminar about cultural and linguistic diversity. Approximately one half of the SLPs (48.4%) reported that they had at least minimal competence in a language(s) other than English; but only 12 (9.4%) reported that they were proficient in another language. The SLPs spoke a total of 28 languages other than English, the most common being French, Italian, German, Spanish, Mandarin, and Auslan (Australian sign language). Participants reported that they had, in the past 12 months, worked with a mean of 59.2 (range 1-100) children from multilingual backgrounds. These children were reported to speak between two and five languages each; the most common being: Vietnamese, Arabic, Cantonese, Mandarin, Australian Indigenous languages, Tagalog, Greek, and other Chinese languages. There was limited overlap between the languages spoken by the SLPs and the children on the SLPs' caseloads. Many of the SLPs assessed children's speech (50.5%) and/or language (34.2%) without assistance from others (including interpreters). English was the primary language used during assessments and intervention. The majority of SLPs always used informal speech (76.7%) and language (78.2%) assessments and, if standardized tests were used, typically they were in English. The SLPs sought additional information about the children's languages and cultural backgrounds, but indicated that they had limited resources to discriminate between speech and language difference vs disorder.

  14. Diglossia and Its Practice in Multilingual Fiji.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Kumar, Margaret Kamla

    2001-01-01

    Explores the notion of diglossia in the three main languages of Fiji--Bauab Fijian, Shudh Hindi, and English. Discussion focuses on situating the languages both historically and socially in a multilingual context. (Author/VWL)

  15. Heritage language and linguistic theory

    PubMed Central

    Scontras, Gregory; Fuchs, Zuzanna; Polinsky, Maria

    2015-01-01

    This paper discusses a common reality in many cases of multilingualism: heritage speakers, or unbalanced bilinguals, simultaneous or sequential, who shifted early in childhood from one language (their heritage language) to their dominant language (the language of their speech community). To demonstrate the relevance of heritage linguistics to the study of linguistic competence more broadly defined, we present a series of case studies on heritage linguistics, documenting some of the deficits and abilities typical of heritage speakers, together with the broader theoretical questions they inform. We consider the reorganization of morphosyntactic feature systems, the reanalysis of atypical argument structure, the attrition of the syntax of relativization, and the simplification of scope interpretations; these phenomena implicate diverging trajectories and outcomes in the development of heritage speakers. The case studies also have practical and methodological implications for the study of multilingualism. We conclude by discussing more general concepts central to linguistic inquiry, in particular, complexity and native speaker competence. PMID:26500595

  16. Multilingual Sentiment Analysis: State of the Art and Independent Comparison of Techniques.

    PubMed

    Dashtipour, Kia; Poria, Soujanya; Hussain, Amir; Cambria, Erik; Hawalah, Ahmad Y A; Gelbukh, Alexander; Zhou, Qiang

    With the advent of Internet, people actively express their opinions about products, services, events, political parties, etc., in social media, blogs, and website comments. The amount of research work on sentiment analysis is growing explosively. However, the majority of research efforts are devoted to English-language data, while a great share of information is available in other languages. We present a state-of-the-art review on multilingual sentiment analysis. More importantly, we compare our own implementation of existing approaches on common data. Precision observed in our experiments is typically lower than the one reported by the original authors, which we attribute to the lack of detail in the original presentation of those approaches. Thus, we compare the existing works by what they really offer to the reader, including whether they allow for accurate implementation and for reliable reproduction of the reported results.

  17. "The Tongue of Pangcah and of Savages Are the Same": Language Ideology in a Multilingual Aboriginal Village in Taiwan

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Chang, Ya-ling

    2011-01-01

    This study examines incongruent languages ideologies as they exist among parents, grandparents and community members of Taiwan's aboriginal Pangcah people. The language ideologies of the villagers function as language policy that informs their decisions in favor of transmitting or abandoning their linguistic heritage. Taking a critical perspective…

  18. Using Multilingual Analytics to Explore the Usage of a Learning Portal in Developing Countries

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Protonotarios, Vassilis; Stoitsis, Giannis; Kastrantas, Kostas; Sanchez-Alonso, Salvador

    2013-01-01

    Learning analytics is a domain that has been constantly evolving throughout recent years due to the acknowledgement of its importance by those using intelligent data, learner-produced data, and analysis models to discover information and social connections for predicting and advising people's learning [1]. Learning analytics may be applied in a…

  19. Between Arabic and French in the Israeli Education System: Acquisition of Cosmopolitan Capital in a Conflict-Ridden Society

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Yemini, Miri; Bar-Netz, Natali

    2015-01-01

    In the era of globalization, educational systems are forced to react and globalize through schools' content and context. Among other 21st-century capabilities such as information technology use, team work, and entrepreneurship, multilingual competence has been placed among the objectives of education systems in many developed and developing…

  20. Towards a Well-Being Focussed Language Pedagogy: Enabling Arts-Based, Multilingual Learning Spaces for Young People with Refugee Backgrounds

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Frimberger, Katja

    2016-01-01

    The following article explores the conceptual background and pedagogical realities of establishing a well-being focussed language pedagogy in the context of an informal educational event called "Language Fest". The event was organised as part of the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded large grant project "Researching…

  1. Multilingual Literacies in Transnational Digitally Mediated Contexts: An Exploratory Study of Immigrant Teens in the United States

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Lam, Wan Shun Eva; Rosario-Ramos, Enid

    2009-01-01

    This study explores the literacy practices that are involved in transnational social and information networking among youths of immigrant backgrounds in the United States. In particular, it investigates the ways in which young migrants of diverse national origins in the United States are utilising digital media to organise social relationships…

  2. A Multilingual Mobile University Information Portal Designed to Cater for Visiting Overseas Students

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Curran, Kevin; Huang, Winston

    2008-01-01

    Purpose: Student dropout rates have been a source of contention throughout many Universities worldwide. Universities recognize this fact and many have acted to improve their induction process for students joining the University in the first year. However, student dropout rates continue to be higher than acceptable and it is in this context that…

  3. Emergent Understandings: Multilingual Fourth Grade Students Generating Close Readings and Multimodal Responses to Global and Informational Texts

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Hasty, Michelle Medlin; Fain, Jeanne Gilliam

    2014-01-01

    In this paper, the authors present findings from a yearlong ethnographic research study that examines the development of critical literacy within two urban fourth grade classrooms in Tennessee. This study examines how young second language learners in English-dominant classrooms learn to read critically, write, and construct multimodal…

  4. [Impact of the inclusion of articles written in English in multilingual Spanish biomedical journals].

    PubMed

    Cremades Pallas, R; Burbano, P; Valcárcel de la Iglesia, M A; Burillo-Putze, G; Martín-Sánchez, F J; Miró, Ò

    2013-01-01

    To analyze the impact of articles published in English compared to those published in Spanish in multilingual Spanish biomedical journals. We analyzed the language of publication, the number of original articles, the nationality of the authors, the citations received, the citing article and the nationality of the citing authors among the articles published from 2008-2012 in 5 multilingual Spanish biomedical journals. The study included 4,296 documents, 85 of which were published in English (2%). The percentage of original articles and of non-Spanish authorship was significantly higher among these latter articles and they also achieved more citations and more citing articles per article published. The proportion of articles published in English by multilingual Spanish biomedical journals is low and they are more often originals signed exclusively by foreign authors and receive more citations than those published in Spanish, which are also more frequently made by foreign authors.

  5. Predicting Foreign Language Usage from English-Only Social Media Posts

    DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

    Volkova, Svitlana; Ranshous, Stephen M.; Phillips, Lawrence A.

    Social media is known for its multicultural and multilingual interactions, a natural product of which is code-mixing. Multilingual speakers mix languages they tweet to address a different audience, express certain feelings, or attract attention. This paper presents a large-scale analysis of 6 million tweets produced by 23 thousand multilingual users speaking 11 other languages besides English. We rely on this multilingual corpus to build predictive models for a novel task – inferring non- English languages that users speak exclusively from their English tweets. We contrast the predictive power of different linguistic signals and report that lexical content and syntactic structuremore » of English tweets are the most predictive of non-English languages that users speak on Twitter. By analyzing cross-lingual transfer – the influence of non-English languages on various levels of linguistic performance in English, we present novel findings on stylistic and syntactic variations across speakers of 11 languages.« less

  6. The decriminalization of prostitution is associated with better coverage of health promotion programs for sex workers.

    PubMed

    Harcourt, Christine; O'Connor, Jody; Egger, Sandra; Fairley, Christopher K; Wand, Handan; Chen, Marcus Y; Marshall, Lewis; Kaldor, John M; Donovan, Basil

    2010-10-01

    In order to assess whether the law has an impact on the delivery of health promotion services to sex workers, we compared health promotion programs in three Australian cities with different prostitution laws. The cities were Melbourne (brothels legalized if licensed, unlicensed brothels criminalized), Perth (criminalization of all forms of sex work) and Sydney (sex work largely decriminalized, without licensing). We interviewed key informants and gave questionnaires to representative samples of female sex workers in urban brothels. Despite the different laws, each city had a thriving and diverse sex industry and a government-funded sex worker health promotion program with shopfront, phone, online and outreach facilities. The Sydney program was the only one run by a community-based organisation and the only program employing multi-lingual staff with evening outreach to all brothels. The Melbourne program did not service the unlicensed sector, while the Perth program accessed the minority of brothels by invitation only. More Sydney workers reported a sexual health centre as a source of safer sex training and information (Sydney 52% v Melbourne 33% and Perth 35%; p<0.001). Sex workers in Melbourne's licensed brothels were the most likely to have access to free condoms (Melbourne 88%, Sydney 39%, Perth 12%; p<0.001). The legal context appeared to affect the conduct of health promotion programs targeting the sex industry. Brothel licensing and police-controlled illegal brothels can result in the unlicensed sector being isolated from peer-education and support. © 2010 The Authors. Journal Compilation © 2010 Public Health Association of Australia.

  7. Cross-linguistic transfer effects after phonologically based cognate therapy in a case of multilingual specific language impairment (SLI).

    PubMed

    Kambanaros, Maria; Michaelides, Michalis; Grohmann, Kleanthes K

    2017-05-01

    Clinicians globally recognize as exceptionally challenging the development of effective intervention practices for bi- or multilingual children with specific language impairment (SLI). Therapy in both or all of an impaired child's languages is rarely possible. An alternative is to develop treatment protocols that facilitate the transfer of therapy effects from a treated language to an untreated language. To explore whether cognates, words that share meaning and phonological features across languages, could be used to boost lexical retrieval in the context of multilingual SLI. This is dependent on exploiting the phonological information in the one, trained language as a mechanism for (phonological) language transfer to the other, untrained languages. The participant is an 8.5-year-old girl diagnosed with SLI who showed a severe naming deficit in her three spoken languages (Bulgarian, English and Greek). She received training on cognates (n = 20) using a picture-based naming task in English only, three times a week, over a 4-week period for 20 min each time. Phonological-based naming therapy was carried out using form-based strategies. There was a significant improvement during therapy and immediately after intervention on cognate performance in English which was maintained 1 month after intervention. Cognate production in Bulgarian and Greek also improved during all stages of the intervention. Improvement in the non-treated languages was slightly more than half of the improvement recorded in English. The findings reflected some degree of cross-linguistic transfer effects. Cross-linguistic transfer effects were evident during therapy and after therapy had finished and the effects were maintained 1 month post-treatment. Both the native language (Bulgarian) and the dominant language (Greek) benefitted equally from the treatment of cognates in English. Generalization to non-treatment words was evident, predominantly for English. The results suggest that cognates can indeed be used successfully as a WFD intervention strategy for multilingual children with SLI with lasting effects. © 2016 Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists.

  8. OneGeology-Europe: architecture, portal and web services to provide a European geological map

    NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

    Tellez-Arenas, Agnès.; Serrano, Jean-Jacques; Tertre, François; Laxton, John

    2010-05-01

    OneGeology-Europe is a large ambitious project to make geological spatial data further known and accessible. The OneGeology-Europe project develops an integrated system of data to create and make accessible for the first time through the internet the geological map of the whole of Europe. The architecture implemented by the project is web services oriented, based on the OGC standards: the geological map is not a centralized database but is composed by several web services, each of them hosted by a European country involved in the project. Since geological data are elaborated differently from country to country, they are difficult to share. OneGeology-Europe, while providing more detailed and complete information, will foster even beyond the geological community an easier exchange of data within Europe and globally. This implies an important work regarding the harmonization of the data, both model and the content. OneGeology-Europe is characterised by the high technological capacity of the EU Member States, and has the final goal to achieve the harmonisation of European geological survey data according to common standards. As a direct consequence Europe will make a further step in terms of innovation and information dissemination, continuing to play a world leading role in the development of geosciences information. The scope of the common harmonized data model was defined primarily by the requirements of the geological map of Europe, but in addition users were consulted and the requirements of both INSPIRE and ‘high-resolution' geological maps were considered. The data model is based on GeoSciML, developed since 2006 by a group of Geological Surveys. The data providers involved in the project implemented a new component that allows the web services to deliver the geological map expressed into GeoSciML. In order to capture the information describing the geological units of the map of Europe the scope of the data model needs to include lithology; age; genesis and metamorphic character. For high resolution maps physical properties, bedding characteristics and weathering also need to be added. Furthermore, Geological data held by national geological surveys is generally described in national language of the country. The project has to deal with the multilingual issue, an important requirement of the INSPIRE directive. The project provides a list of harmonized vocabularies, a set of web services to deal with them, and a web site for helping the geoscientists while mapping the terms used into the national datasets into these vocabularies. The web services provided by each data provider, with the particular component that allows them to deliver the harmonised data model and to handle the multilingualism, are the first part of the architecture. The project also implements a web portal that provides several functionalities. Thanks to the common data model implemented by each web service delivering a part of the geological map, and using OGC SLD standards, the client offers the following option. A user can request for a sub-selection of the map, for instance searching on a particular attribute such as "age is quaternary", and display only the parts of the map according to the filter. Using the web services on the common vocabularies, the data displayed are translated. The project started September 2008 for two years, with 29 partners from 20 countries (20 partners are Geological Surveys). The budget is 3.25 M€, with a European Commission contribution of 2.6 M€. The paper will describe the technical solutions to implement OneGeology-Europe components: the profile of the common data model to exchange geological data, the web services to view and access geological data; and a geoportal to provide the user with a user-friendly way to discover, view and access geological data.

  9. Language Ideologies and Epistemic Exclusion

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Kiramba, Lydiah Kananu

    2018-01-01

    Research in educational linguistics is now challenging the efficacy of monolingual approaches that often dominate educational practices in multilingual settings. In most African nations where multilingualism is the norm, there remains a persistent reluctance by educational stakeholders (principals, teachers, parents, and students) to embrace…

  10. Cognitive Approaches to L3 Acquisition

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Garcia-Mayo, Maria del Pilar

    2012-01-01

    Multilingualism has established itself as an area of systematic research in linguistic studies over the last two decades. The multilingual phenomenon can be approached from different perspectives: educational, formal linguistic, neurolinguistic, psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic, among others. This article presents an overview of cognitive…

  11. Talk-in-Interaction: Multilingual Perspectives

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Nguyen, Hanh thi, Ed.; Kasper, Gabriele, Ed.

    2009-01-01

    "Talk-in-interaction: Multilingual perspectives" offers original studies of interaction in a range of languages and language varieties, including Chinese, English, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Swahili, Thai, and Vietnamese; monolingual and bilingual interactions; and activities designed for second or foreign language learning. Conducted from the…

  12. Intensity of Multilingual Language Use Predicts Cognitive Performance in Some Multilingual Older Adults

    PubMed Central

    Keijzer, Merel; de Bot, Kees

    2018-01-01

    Cognitive advantages for bilinguals have inconsistently been observed in different populations, with different operationalisations of bilingualism, cognitive performance, and the process by which language control transfers to cognitive control. This calls for studies investigating which aspects of multilingualism drive a cognitive advantage, in which populations and under which conditions. This study reports on two cognitive tasks coupled with an extensive background questionnaire on health, wellbeing, personality, language knowledge and language use, administered to 387 older adults in the northern Netherlands, a small but highly multilingual area. Using linear mixed effects regression modeling, we find that when different languages are used frequently in different contexts, enhanced attentional control is observed. Subsequently, a PLS regression model targeting also other influential factors yielded a two-component solution whereby only more sensitive measures of language proficiency and language usage in different social contexts were predictive of cognitive performance above and beyond the contribution of age, gender, income and education. We discuss these findings in light of previous studies that try to uncover more about the nature of bilingualism and the cognitive processes that may drive an advantage. With an unusually large sample size our study advocates for a move away from dichotomous, knowledge-based operationalisations of multilingualism and offers new insights for future studies at the individual level. PMID:29783764

  13. Monoglossic Echoes in Multilingual Spaces: Language Narratives from a Vietnamese Community Language School in Australia

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Reath Warren, Anne

    2018-01-01

    This article reports on language narratives in the ecology of a Vietnamese community language school (VCLS) in Australia. The study takes a dialogical perspective, where the stories about language that informants in the research setting tell are understood to shape and be shaped by the contexts in which they are told. Systematic analysis of…

  14. The Place of Social Science in Medical Education: A Case Study of Language and Culture in Experiential Learning in a Multilingual Society

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Marcus, Tessa S.

    2011-01-01

    The ?"biopsychosocial model"? is the education paradigm of knowledge that is expected to inform medical practice. Yet in medical education, medical science is the gold standard. Social science barely features in the formal curriculum, and when it does, it is considered best done through experiential learning. This paper analyses…

  15. Terms used in invertebrate pathology in five languages: English, French, German, Italian, Spanish.

    Treesearch

    Mauro E. Martignoni; Aloysius Krieg; Harold W. Rossmoore; Constantin Vago

    1984-01-01

    The exchange of information among invertebrate pathologists of the major linguistic areas of Western Europe and North America has created a demand for a multilingual glossary. This list of specialized terms used in invertebrate pathology and related fields, such as microbial control, comprises over 2200 entries gathered by the four authors with the help of several...

  16. An Approach for Automatic Generation of Adaptive Hypermedia in Education with Multilingual Knowledge Discovery Techniques

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Alfonseca, Enrique; Rodriguez, Pilar; Perez, Diana

    2007-01-01

    This work describes a framework that combines techniques from Adaptive Hypermedia and Natural Language processing in order to create, in a fully automated way, on-line information systems from linear texts in electronic format, such as textbooks. The process is divided into two steps: an "off-line" processing step, which analyses the source text,…

  17. Socialising Multilingualism: Determinants of Codeswitching in Kenyan Primary Classrooms.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Merritt, Marilyn; And Others

    1992-01-01

    Using ethnographic observations of classroom interaction in three primary schools, determinants of teachers' language choice and codeswitching among English, Swahili, and mother-tongue were explored: official school policy, cognitive concerns, classroom management concerns, values and attitudes about societal multilingualism. (36 references)…

  18. Multilingualism in Southern Africa.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Peirce, Bonny Norton; Ridge, Stanley G. M.

    1997-01-01

    Reviews recent research in multilingualism in Southern Africa, focusing on the role of languages in education, sociolinguistics, and language policy. Much of the research is on South Africa. Topics discussed include language of instruction in schools, teacher education, higher education, adult literacy, language contact, gender and linguistic…

  19. Processing demands upon cognitive, linguistic, and articulatory functions promote grey matter plasticity in the adult multilingual brain: Insights from simultaneous interpreters.

    PubMed

    Elmer, Stefan; Hänggi, Jürgen; Jäncke, Lutz

    2014-05-01

    Until now, considerable effort has been made to determine structural brain characteristics related to exceptional multilingual skills. However, at least one important question has not yet been satisfactorily addressed in the previous literature, namely whether and to which extent the processing demands upon cognitive, linguistic, and articulatory functions may promote grey matter plasticity in the adult multilingual brain. Based on the premise that simultaneous interpretation is a highly demanding linguistic task that places strong demands on executive and articulatory functions, here we compared grey matter volumes between professional simultaneous interpreters (SI) and multilingual control subjects. Thereby, we focused on a specific set of a-priori defined bilateral brain regions that have previously been shown to support neurocognitional aspects of language control and linguistic functions in the multilingual brain. These regions are the cingulate gyrus, caudate nucleus, frontal operculum (pars triangularis and opercularis), inferior parietal lobe (IPL) (supramarginal and angular gyrus), and the insula. As a main result, we found reduced grey matter volumes in professional SI, compared to multilingual controls, in the left middle-anterior cingulate gyrus, bilateral pars triangularis, left pars opercularis, bilateral middle part of the insula, and in the left supramarginal gyrus (SMG). Interestingly, grey matter volume in left pars triangularis, right pars opercularis, middle-anterior cingulate gyrus, and in the bilateral caudate nucleus was negatively correlated with the cumulative number of interpreting hours. Hence, we provide first evidence for an expertise-related grey matter architecture that may reflect a composite of brain characteristics that were still present before interpreting training and training-related changes. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

  20. Internationalization of healthcare applications: a generic approach for PACS workstations.

    PubMed

    Hussein, R; Engelmann, U; Schroeter, A; Meinzer, H P

    2004-01-01

    Along with the revolution of information technology and the increasing use of computers world-wide, software providers recognize the emerging need for internationalized, or global, software applications. The importance of internationalization comes from its benefits such as addressing a broader audience, making the software applications more accessible, easier to use, more flexible to support and providing users with more consistent information. In addition, some governmental agencies, e.g., in Spain, accept only fully localized software. Although the healthcare communication standards, namely, Digital Imaging and Communication in Medicine (DICOM) and Health Level Seven (HL7) support wide areas of internationalization, most of the implementers are still protective about supporting the complex languages. This paper describes a generic internationalization approach for Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS) workstations. The Unicode standard is used to internationalize the application user interface. An encoding converter was developed to encode and decode the data between the rendering module (in Unicode encoding) and the DICOM data (in ISO 8859 encoding). An integration gateway was required to integrate the internationalized PACS components with the different PACS installations. To introduce a pragmatic example, the described approach was applied to the CHILI PACS workstation. The approach has enabled the application to handle the different internationalization aspects transparently, such as supporting complex languages, switching between different languages at runtime, and supporting multilingual clinical reports. In the healthcare enterprises, internationalized applications play an essential role in supporting a seamless flow of information between the heterogeneous multivendor information systems.

  1. "Thanks, Shokran, Gracias": Translingual Practices in a Facebook Group

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Kulavuz-Onal, Derya; Vásquez, Camilla

    2018-01-01

    The affordances associated with networked multilingualism (Androutsopoulos, 2015) have led social media scholars to replace traditional notions of code-switching with broader concepts such as translingual practices. In an attempt to further our understanding of online multilingual linguistic practices in the context of educational…

  2. Translanguaging Practices and Perspectives of Four Multilingual Teens

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Daniel, Shannon M.; Pacheco, Mark B.

    2016-01-01

    Increasingly, educational research suggests that translanguaging pedagogies can provide meaningful supports for English language learners. Yet, few studies examine how multilingual teens in English-dominant settings independently translanguage to make sense of school and achieve their goals. In this study, we review definitions of translanguaging…

  3. Multilingualism and Education for Democracy

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Biseth, Heidi

    2009-01-01

    This essay attempts to show the importance of linguistic issues in education for democracy and the close relationship between democracy and multilingualism. Increasingly nation-states are having to adapt to linguistic diversity within their borders and to recognize that democracy requires the participation of all citizens, including those…

  4. The Exposure Advantage: Early Exposure to a Multilingual Environment Promotes Effective Communication.

    PubMed

    Fan, Samantha P; Liberman, Zoe; Keysar, Boaz; Kinzler, Katherine D

    2015-07-01

    Early language exposure is essential to developing a formal language system, but may not be sufficient for communicating effectively. To understand a speaker's intention, one must take the speaker's perspective. Multilingual exposure may promote effective communication by enhancing perspective taking. We tested children on a task that required perspective taking to interpret a speaker's intended meaning. Monolingual children failed to interpret the speaker's meaning dramatically more often than both bilingual children and children who were exposed to a multilingual environment but were not bilingual themselves. Children who were merely exposed to a second language performed as well as bilingual children, despite having lower executive-function scores. Thus, the communicative advantages demonstrated by the bilinguals may be social in origin, and not due to enhanced executive control. For millennia, multilingual exposure has been the norm. Our study shows that such an environment may facilitate the development of perspective-taking tools that are critical for effective communication. © The Author(s) 2015.

  5. Lifelong Exposure to Multilingualism: New Evidence to Support Cognitive Reserve Hypothesis

    PubMed Central

    Perquin, Magali; Vaillant, Michel; Schuller, Anne-Marie; Pastore, Jessica; Dartigues, Jean-François; Lair, Marie-Lise; Diederich, Nico

    2013-01-01

    Objective Investigate the protective effect of multilingualism on cognition in seniors. Methods As part of the MemoVie study conducted on 232 non-demented volunteers aged 65 and more, neurogeriatric and neuropsychological evaluations were performed. Participants were classified as presenting either cognitive impairment without dementia (CIND) or being free of any cognitive impairment (CIND-free). Language practices, socio-demographic data and lifestyle habits were recorded. In this retrospective nested case-control design, we used as proxies of multilingualism: number of languages practiced, age of acquisition and duration of practice, emphasizing the temporal pattern of acquisition, and the resulting practice of several languages sequentially or concomitantly during various periods of life. This special angle on the matter offered to our work a dimension particularly original and innovative. Results 44 subjects (19%) had CIND, the others were cognitively normal. All practiced from 2 to 7 languages. When compared with bilinguals, participants who practiced more than 2 languages presented a lower risk of CIND, after adjustment for education and age (odds ratio (OR) = 0.30, 95% confidence limits (95%CL) = [0.10–0.92]). Progressing from 2 to 3 languages, instead of staying bilingual, was associated with a 7-fold protection against CIND (OR = 0.14, 95%CL = [0.04–0.45], p = 0.0010). A one year delay to reach multilingualism (3 languages practiced being the threshold) multiplied the risk of CIND by 1.022 (OR = 1.022, 95%CL = [1.01–1.04], p = 0.0044). Also noteworthy, just as for multilingualism, an impact of cognitively stimulating activities on the occurrence of CIND was found as well (OR = 0.979, 95%CL = [0.961–0.998], p = 0.033). Conclusion The study did not show independence of multilingualism and CIND. Rather it seems to show a strong association toward a protection against CIND. Practicing multilingualism from early life on, and/or learning it at a fast pace is even more efficient. This protection might be related to the enhancement of cognitive reserve and brain plasticity, thereby preserving brain functions from alterations during aging. PMID:23646113

  6. Lifelong exposure to multilingualism: new evidence to support cognitive reserve hypothesis.

    PubMed

    Perquin, Magali; Vaillant, Michel; Schuller, Anne-Marie; Pastore, Jessica; Dartigues, Jean-François; Lair, Marie-Lise; Diederich, Nico

    2013-01-01

    Investigate the protective effect of multilingualism on cognition in seniors. As part of the MemoVie study conducted on 232 non-demented volunteers aged 65 and more, neurogeriatric and neuropsychological evaluations were performed. Participants were classified as presenting either cognitive impairment without dementia (CIND) or being free of any cognitive impairment (CIND-free). Language practices, socio-demographic data and lifestyle habits were recorded. In this retrospective nested case-control design, we used as proxies of multilingualism: number of languages practiced, age of acquisition and duration of practice, emphasizing the temporal pattern of acquisition, and the resulting practice of several languages sequentially or concomitantly during various periods of life. This special angle on the matter offered to our work a dimension particularly original and innovative. 44 subjects (19%) had CIND, the others were cognitively normal. All practiced from 2 to 7 languages. When compared with bilinguals, participants who practiced more than 2 languages presented a lower risk of CIND, after adjustment for education and age (odds ratio (OR) = 0.30, 95% confidence limits (95%CL) = [0.10-0.92]). Progressing from 2 to 3 languages, instead of staying bilingual, was associated with a 7-fold protection against CIND (OR = 0.14, 95%CL = [0.04-0.45], p = 0.0010). A one year delay to reach multilingualism (3 languages practiced being the threshold) multiplied the risk of CIND by 1.022 (OR = 1.022, 95%CL = [1.01-1.04], p = 0.0044). Also noteworthy, just as for multilingualism, an impact of cognitively stimulating activities on the occurrence of CIND was found as well (OR = 0.979, 95%CL = [0.961-0.998], p = 0.033). The study did not show independence of multilingualism and CIND. Rather it seems to show a strong association toward a protection against CIND. Practicing multilingualism from early life on, and/or learning it at a fast pace is even more efficient. This protection might be related to the enhancement of cognitive reserve and brain plasticity, thereby preserving brain functions from alterations during aging.

  7. Lingua Franca English, Multilingual Communities, and Language Acquisition

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Canagarajah, Suresh

    2007-01-01

    Firth and Wagner (1997) questioned the dichotomies nonnative versus native speaker, learner versus user, and interlanguage versus target language, which reflect a bias toward innateness, cognition, and form in language acquisition. Research on lingua franca English (LFE) not only affirms this questioning, but reveals what multilingual communities…

  8. Transnational Experience, Aspiration and Family Language Policy

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Hua, Zhu; Wei, Li

    2016-01-01

    Transnational and multilingual families have become commonplace in the twenty-first century. Yet relatively few attempts have been made from applied and socio-linguistic perspectives to understand what is going on "within" such families; how their transnational and multilingual experiences impact on the family dynamics and their everyday…

  9. Multilingualism in Education: A Poststructuralist Critique

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    McNamara, Tim

    2011-01-01

    Discussions of multilingualism in education, as exemplified by the articles in this issue, can be critically reevaluated using perspectives available from poststructuralism. These perspectives focus on the potential ambiguity of language and language practices. This, in turn, encourages us to question simple notions of the relationship of learners…

  10. Multilingual Crews: Communication and the Operations of Ships.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Sampson, Helen; Zhao, Minghua

    2003-01-01

    Focuses on efforts to improve standards of English among seafarers, including a top-down approach to language learning utilized by industry regulators and training establishments. Considers the effectiveness of top-down approaches to language development, drawing on ethnographic research conducted aboard vessels with multilingual crews.…

  11. Methodology in Bi- and Multilingual Studies: From Simplification to Complexity

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Aronin, Larissa; Jessner, Ulrike

    2014-01-01

    Research methodology is determined by theoretical approaches. This article discusses methods of multilingualism research in connection with theoretical developments in linguistics, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, and education. Taking a brief glance at the past, the article starts with a discussion of an issue underlying the choice of…

  12. Identity Texts and Academic Achievement: Connecting the Dots in Multilingual School Contexts

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Cummins, Jim; Hu, Shirley; Markus, Paula; Kristiina Montero, M.

    2015-01-01

    The construct of "identity text" conjoins notions of identity affirmation and literacy engagement as equally relevant to addressing causes of underachievement among low socioeconomic status, multilingual, and marginalized group students. Despite extensive empirical evidence supporting the impact on academic achievement of both identity…

  13. Bodies as Objects of Pedagogic Power Relations

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Perumal, Juliet Christine

    2012-01-01

    This paper is based on a study titled "Enacting Feminisms in Academia", which engaged five feminist lecturers teaching English at five different multilingual universities in Southern Africa. The study explored: (1) the complexity of sociolinguistic and feminist identity construction in multilingual seascapes, and by extension (2) how…

  14. Contextualizing Multilingualism in Morocco

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Daniel, Mayra C.; Ball, Alexis

    2009-01-01

    This article discusses the educational system of Morocco and the ways the country's multilingual history has influenced and continues to direct the choice of the languages used in schools. Suggestions that will eliminate cultural mismatch and thus facilitate interactions with Moroccan students and their families are included. The research focuses…

  15. Linking Multilingual Advertising to Foreign Language Teaching.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Martin, Elizabeth

    It is suggested that print advertising is particularly well suited to classroom second language teaching because it is attractive, entertaining, contains powerful emotional or factual messages, and is concise. Research indicates that multilingual or code-mixed advertising is common and reveals interesting linguistic phenomena, including semantic,…

  16. Promoting Literacy in Multilingual Settings

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Kosonen, Kimmo; Young, Catherine; Malone, Susan

    2006-01-01

    This compilation of resource papers and findings is from a regional workshop on mother-tongue/bilingual literacy programmes for ethnic and linguistic minorities in multilingual settings. It was organized by Asia-Pacific Programme of Education for All (APPEAL), United Nations Educational and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Bangkok, 6-10 December…

  17. Portuguese "to Go": Language Representations in Tourist Guides

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Cordeiro, Maria Joao

    2011-01-01

    Language difference is an intrinsic aspect of any kind of mobility and especially of tourism, the world's allegedly largest industry which develops around a myriad of multilingual and multicultural places. However, multilingualism and the intense intermingling of languages characterizing tourist sites are considered a potentially chaos-creating…

  18. A Multilingual Perspective on Translanguaging

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    MacSwan, Jeff

    2017-01-01

    Translanguaging is a new term in bilingual education; it supports a heteroglossic language ideology, which views bilingualism as valuable in its own right. Some translanguaging scholars have questioned the existence of discrete languages, further concluding that multilingualism does not exist. I argue that the political use of language names can…

  19. Application of statistical machine translation to public health information: a feasibility study.

    PubMed

    Kirchhoff, Katrin; Turner, Anne M; Axelrod, Amittai; Saavedra, Francisco

    2011-01-01

    Accurate, understandable public health information is important for ensuring the health of the nation. The large portion of the US population with Limited English Proficiency is best served by translations of public-health information into other languages. However, a large number of health departments and primary care clinics face significant barriers to fulfilling federal mandates to provide multilingual materials to Limited English Proficiency individuals. This article presents a pilot study on the feasibility of using freely available statistical machine translation technology to translate health promotion materials. The authors gathered health-promotion materials in English from local and national public-health websites. Spanish versions were created by translating the documents using a freely available machine-translation website. Translations were rated for adequacy and fluency, analyzed for errors, manually corrected by a human posteditor, and compared with exclusively manual translations. Machine translation plus postediting took 15-53 min per document, compared to the reported days or even weeks for the standard translation process. A blind comparison of machine-assisted and human translations of six documents revealed overall equivalency between machine-translated and manually translated materials. The analysis of translation errors indicated that the most important errors were word-sense errors. The results indicate that machine translation plus postediting may be an effective method of producing multilingual health materials with equivalent quality but lower cost compared to manual translations.

  20. Application of statistical machine translation to public health information: a feasibility study

    PubMed Central

    Turner, Anne M; Axelrod, Amittai; Saavedra, Francisco

    2011-01-01

    Objective Accurate, understandable public health information is important for ensuring the health of the nation. The large portion of the US population with Limited English Proficiency is best served by translations of public-health information into other languages. However, a large number of health departments and primary care clinics face significant barriers to fulfilling federal mandates to provide multilingual materials to Limited English Proficiency individuals. This article presents a pilot study on the feasibility of using freely available statistical machine translation technology to translate health promotion materials. Design The authors gathered health-promotion materials in English from local and national public-health websites. Spanish versions were created by translating the documents using a freely available machine-translation website. Translations were rated for adequacy and fluency, analyzed for errors, manually corrected by a human posteditor, and compared with exclusively manual translations. Results Machine translation plus postediting took 15–53 min per document, compared to the reported days or even weeks for the standard translation process. A blind comparison of machine-assisted and human translations of six documents revealed overall equivalency between machine-translated and manually translated materials. The analysis of translation errors indicated that the most important errors were word-sense errors. Conclusion The results indicate that machine translation plus postediting may be an effective method of producing multilingual health materials with equivalent quality but lower cost compared to manual translations. PMID:21498805

  1. An NLP Framework for Non-Topical Text Analysis in Urdu--A Resource Poor Language

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Mukund, Smruthi

    2012-01-01

    Language plays a very important role in understanding the culture and mindset of people. Given the abundance of electronic multilingual data, it is interesting to see what insight can be gained by automatic analysis of text. This in turn calls for text analysis which is focused on non-topical information such as emotions being expressed that is in…

  2. Contradictory Information in the Input as the Cause of Multiple Grammars: Predictions for Bilingual Acquisition

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Unsworth, Sharon

    2014-01-01

    The central claim in Amaral and Roeper's (this issue; henceforth A&R) keynote article is that everyone is multilingual, whether they speak one or more languages. In a nutshell, the idea is that each speaker has multiple grammars or "sub-sets of rules (or sub-grammars) that co-exist". Thus, rather than positing complex rules to…

  3. The Dynamics of Multilingualism: The Case of Senegal.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Mansour, Gerda

    1980-01-01

    Describes a study which attempts to link micro and macro approaches in the study of societal multilingualism while introducing a diachronic perspective. The sociolinguistic profile of Senegal is used as a point of departure followed by an outline of sociohistorical factors which contributed to language use. Discusses the social implications of…

  4. Post-Monolingual Research Methodology: Multilingual Researchers Democratizing Theorizing and Doctoral Education

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Singh, Michael

    2017-01-01

    This paper reports on the ground-breaking research in the study of languages in doctoral education. It argues for democratizing the production and dissemination of original contributions to knowledge through activating and mobilizing multilingual Higher Degree Researchers' (HDRs) capabilities for theorizing through them using their full linguistic…

  5. Speech Recognition Thresholds for Multilingual Populations.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Ramkissoon, Ishara

    2001-01-01

    This article traces the development of speech audiometry in the United States and reports on the current status, focusing on the needs of a multilingual population in terms of measuring speech recognition threshold (SRT). It also discusses sociolinguistic considerations, alternative SRT stimuli for second language learners, and research on using…

  6. Noticing the Way: Translingual Possibility and Basic Writers

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Stanley, Sarah

    2013-01-01

    This article presents a pedagogical practice for noticing and negotiating error in a multilingual classroom. Two examples from a classroom are compared to demonstrate the importance of "noticing" in the context of translingual pedagogy. The author's first example offers an attempt to negotiate an error with a multilingual writer without…

  7. Mosaic: Re-Imagining the Monolingual Classroom through Theatre-in-Education

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Pakkar-Hulla, D.

    2014-01-01

    This article is a study of "Mosaic"--a piece of multilingual theatre-in-education designed to promote linguistically diverse practices in primary schools in Birmingham, United Kingdom. Focusing on the relatively uncharted territory of applied theatre as a means of promoting multilingualism, and challenging a culture of monolingual…

  8. L2 Motivation and Multilingual Identities

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Henry, Alastair

    2017-01-01

    By tradition, L2 motivation research has a monolingual bias--the motivational systems of a learner's different languages conceptualized as separate entities rather than as cognitively interconnected. At a time when multilingualism has become a new world order (Douglas Fir Group, 2016) and where there is evidence of powerful identity experiences…

  9. Multilingual Language Policies and the Continua of Biliteracy: An Ecological Approach.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Hornberger, Nancy H.

    2002-01-01

    Uses the metaphor of ecology of language to explore ideologies underlying multilingual language policies, and the continua of biliteracy framework as ecological heuristic for situating the challenges faced in implementing them. Considers community and classroom challenges inherent in implementing these new ideologies, as evident in Bolivia and…

  10. Exploring Teacher Knowledge in Multilingual First-Year Composition

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Racelis, Juval V.

    2017-01-01

    This project examines how writing teachers of multilingual students conceptualize their pedagogical practices. Specifically, it draws on work in teacher cognition research to examine the nature of teacher knowledge and the unique characteristics of this knowledge specific to the teaching of second language writing. Seeing teacher knowledge as…

  11. Figurative Language and Multicultural Education: Metaphors of Language Acquisition and Retention

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Erdmann, Susan

    2016-01-01

    Linguistics has long recognised that figurative language in the form of metaphorical expressions structures and communicates attitudes towards the ideas and concepts being expressed and that multilingual students also employ linguistic figures frequently in their writing. In this study, multilingual students use figurative language to both…

  12. On Children as Syncretic Natives: Disrupting and Moving beyond Normative Binaries

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Souto-Manning, Mariana

    2013-01-01

    Historically, US schools have failed multicultural and multilingual children of colour and marginalized expansive conceptualizations of home and community literacy practices. Given the importance of fully inclusive education, this article seeks to understand the ways in which young multilingual and multicultural children take up issues of…

  13. Academic Biliteracies: Multilingual Repertoires in Higher Education

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Palfreyman, David M., Ed.; van der Walt, Christa, Ed.

    2017-01-01

    Research on academic literacy within higher education has focused almost exclusively on the development of academic literacy in English. This book is unique in showing how students use other languages when they engage with written academic content--whether in reading, discussing, or writing--and how increasingly multilingual higher education…

  14. Toward a Multilingual, Experiential Environment for Learning Decision Technology.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Yeo, Gee Kin; Tan, Seng Teen

    1999-01-01

    Describes work at the National University of Singapore on the Internet in expanding a simulation game used in supporting a course in decision technology. Topics include decision support systems, multilingual support for cross-cultural decision studies, process support in a World Wide Web-enhanced multiuser domain (MUD) learning environment, and…

  15. The Contribution of Lexical Diversity to College-Level Writing

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    González, Melanie C.

    2017-01-01

    This article reports on a study that investigated the extent to which lexical frequency and lexical diversity contribute to writing proficiency scores on monolingual English-speaking writers' and advanced multilingual writers' academic compositions. The data consist of essays composed by 104 multilingual English learners enrolled in advanced…

  16. Im Gesprach: An Interview with Claire Kramsch on the "Multilingual Subject"

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Kramsch, Claire; Gerhards, Sascha

    2012-01-01

    In her recently published book "The Multilingual Subject: What foreign language learners say about their experience and why it matters", UC Berkeley applied-linguist Claire Kramsch approaches language learning from a new, visionary perspective. Foregrounding the interplay of cultural aspects in language learning, Kramsch understands…

  17. Writing Learning Outcomes for English Language Lessons in Multilingual Schools

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Jones, Sally Ann

    2016-01-01

    This article proposes a pedagogic innovation in teacher education by articulating a method for writing learning outcomes for English language lessons in multilingual school contexts. The argument for this approach is founded on curriculum studies; however, the practice also draws specifically on applied psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic…

  18. Exploring Linguistic Identity in Young Multilingual Learners

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Dressler, Roswita

    2014-01-01

    This article explores the linguistic identity of young multilingual learners through the use of a Language Portrait Silhouette. Examples from a research study of children aged 6-8 years in a German bilingual program in Canada provide teachers with an understanding that linguistic identity comprises expertise, affiliation, and inheritance. This…

  19. Exploring Uyghur University Students' Identities Constructed through Multilingual Practices in China

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Guo, Xiaoyan; Gu, Mingyue

    2018-01-01

    This article explores how a cohort of tertiary-level Uyghur students contested and negotiated their identities through multilingual practices in the receiving community. Drawing upon interview data from fieldwork, this study indicates that these students experienced essentialist understandings and negative views in the host society. Participants…

  20. Internationalisation, Multilingualism and English-Medium Instruction

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Doiz, Aintzane; Lasagabaster, David; Sierra, Juan Manuel

    2011-01-01

    In the new European higher education space, Universities in Europe are exhorted to cultivate and develop multilingualism. The European Commission's 2004-2006 action plan for promoting language learning and diversity speaks of the need to build an environment which is favourable to languages. Yet reality indicates that it is English which reigns…

  1. Origin and Development of Multilingual Education in Eritrea

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Asfaha, Yonas Mesfun

    2015-01-01

    In an attempt to describe the historical origins of multilingual education in Eritrea, Horn of Africa, this paper looks at how missionaries, European colonisers, successive Ethiopian rules in Eritrea and the independence movements that fought Ethiopia defined ethnic, religious and linguistic differences of communities in the country. These…

  2. "Multilingualizing" Composition: A Diary Self-Study of Learning Spanish and Chinese

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Severino, Carol

    2017-01-01

    Using her own experiences of keeping a journal while learning advanced Spanish creative writing and beginning Chinese during the same semester, the author illustrates that composition teachers' second language learning experiences--intimate and challenging encounters with a second language that multilingual composition students experience every…

  3. Comment Dire: a Neurolinguistic Approach to Beckett's Bilingual Writings

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Kager, Maria

    2015-01-01

    Recent studies from the field of neurolinguistics and psycholinguistics suggest that bilinguals and multilinguals are in many ways fundamentally different from monolinguals, a difference that starts with a different cerebral structure for language. This difference will constitute the point of departure for my paper: If multilingual people are…

  4. Legitimating Multilingual Teacher Identities in the Mainstream Classroom

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Higgins, Christina; Ponte, Eva

    2017-01-01

    This article explores the identities of a group of elementary teachers who participated in a professional development (PD) project on multilingual language learners. We study how the participating teachers drew on different aspects of their identities to respond to encouragement to increase their attention to students' diverse multilingual…

  5. CLIL as a Way to Multilingualism

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Merino, Jon Ander; Lasagabaster, David

    2018-01-01

    Content and language integrated learning (CLIL) programmes are mushrooming in many different contexts. However, research has mainly focused on their impact on foreign language learning and to a lesser extent on L1 development, whereas the number of studies undertaken in multilingual contexts in which more than two languages coexist is negligible.…

  6. Exploring Learner Autonomy: Language Learning Locus of Control in Multilinguals

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Peek, Ron

    2016-01-01

    By using data from an online language learning beliefs survey (n?=?841), defining language learning experience in terms of participants' multilingualism, and using a domain-specific language learning locus of control (LLLOC) instrument, this article examines whether more experienced language learners can also be seen as more autonomous language…

  7. Employability for Languages: A Handbook

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Corradini, Erika, Ed.; Borthwick, Kate, Ed.; Gallagher-Brett, Angela, Ed.

    2016-01-01

    Languages sit firmly in the skill-set of the 21st-century graduate. In an increasingly multicultural and multilingual job market, monolingual graduates are at a disadvantage: as the recent Born Global report (2016) notes, "multilingualism has now become the new normal". The contributions in this collection are imbued with this idea and…

  8. Language Learning Strategies of Multilingual Adults Learning Additional Languages

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Dmitrenko, Violetta

    2017-01-01

    The main goal consisted in identifying and bringing together strategies of multilinguals as a particular learner group. Therefore, research was placed in the intersection of the three fields: language learning strategies (LLS), third language acquisition (TLA), and the didactics of plurilingualism. First, the paper synthesises the major findings…

  9. Social Inclusion and Metrolingual Practices

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Otsuji, Emi; Pennycook, Alastair

    2011-01-01

    In this paper, we explore the implications of metrolingual language practices for how we understand social inclusion. A vision of social inclusion that includes bi- and multilingual capacities may comprise an appreciation of a diversity of languages other than English, and the skills and capabilities of multilingual language users, yet it is all…

  10. Multilingual Education in South Africa: The Role of Publishers

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Edwards, Viv; Ngwaru, Jacob Marriote

    2011-01-01

    The South African constitution and related legislative tools provide a supportive framework for multilingual education. Successful implementation, however, requires appropriate learning materials and questions remain as to the vision and commitment of publishers to producing them. Based on an analysis of currently available books for children and…

  11. Languages in Adult Literacy: Policies and Practices in Education for All and Beyond

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Robinson, Clinton

    2016-01-01

    Linguistic diversity characterizes many countries with large literacy needs. Meeting these needs will require a multilingual approach based on learning initial literacy in the learner's mother tongue, with other languages used subsequently. This article identifies five major challenges in implementing multilingual programmes and traces the…

  12. The Moroccan Educational Context: Evolving Multilingualism

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Daniel, Mayra C.; Ball, Alexis

    2010-01-01

    This article begins an investigation of the educational system of Morocco and its context of language diversity. It examines the Moroccan cultural environment and the ways the multilingualism and education of its people has been and continues to be influenced by geography, colonization periods, religion, and history. The effects of the Educational…

  13. Cognitive Linguistic Performances of Multilingual University Students Suspected of Dyslexia

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Lindgren, Signe-Anita; Laine, Matti

    2011-01-01

    High-performing adults with compensated dyslexia pose particular challenges to dyslexia diagnostics. We compared the performance of 20 multilingual Finnish university students with suspected dyslexia with 20 age-matched and education-matched controls on an extensive test battery. The battery tapped various aspects of reading, writing, word…

  14. Immigrants Outperform Canadian-Born Groups in French Immersion: Examining Factors That Influence Their Achievement

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Mady, Callie

    2015-01-01

    This paper examines the French achievement results of three groups of students: Canadian-born English/French bilingual, Canadian-born multilingual and immigrant multilingual Grade 6 French immersion students, by investigating how the variables of integrative and instrumental motivations, attitudes to the learning situation, French language…

  15. Teacher Code Switching Consistency and Precision in a Multilingual Mathematics Classroom

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Chikiwa, Clemence; Schäfer, Marc

    2016-01-01

    This paper reports on a study that investigated teacher code switching consistency and precision in multilingual secondary school mathematics classrooms in South Africa. Data was obtained through interviewing and observing five lessons of each of three mathematics teachers purposively selected from three township schools in the Eastern Cape…

  16. ????--Implicit Learning and Imperceptible Influence: Syncretic Literacy of Multilingual Chinese Children

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Curdt-Christiansen, Xiao Lan

    2013-01-01

    This article reports on an ethnographic study involving the literacy practices of two multilingual Chinese children from two similar yet different cultural and linguistic contexts: Montreal and Singapore. Using syncretism as a theoretical tool, this inquiry examines how family environment and support facilitate children's process of becoming…

  17. Improving Meaningful Use of Accommodations by Multilingual Learners

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Shafer Willner, Lynn; Mokhtari, Kouider

    2018-01-01

    For more than two decades, accommodations have served as the primary strategy for ensuring the valid participation of multilingual learners (MLLs) in high-stakes summative assessments. Using historical analyses of the evolution of testing accommodation guidelines and related instructional practices, the authors explain how the application of…

  18. Multilinguality, Education and Harmony

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Agnihotri, Rama Kant

    2014-01-01

    Language conceptualised as multilinguality is constitutive of being human and may be a potential site for negotiating conflict and exploring paths of harmony in education. In various domains of activity, most people would rather see "a language" as a homogeneous, pure and standard pairing of a lexicon and syntax. There is substantial…

  19. Multilingualism in Cyberspace: Conceptualising the Virtual Linguistic Landscape

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Ivkovic, Dejan; Lotherington, Heather

    2009-01-01

    The linguistic landscape (LL) is a sociolinguistic concept that captures power relations and identity marking in the linguistic rendering of urban space: the city read as text. As such, LL is embedded in the physical geography of the cityscape. However, with the increasing scope of multilingual capabilities in digital communications, multilingual…

  20. Connecting Worlds: Interculturality, Identity and Multilingual Digital Stories in the Making

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Anderson, Jim; Macleroy, Vicky

    2017-01-01

    Based on findings from a 5-year research project called "Critical Connections", this article sets out an integrated framework for language learning in the context of multilingual digital storytelling. Following an explanation of the theoretical approach, four vignettes are presented which illustrate the principles in practice.…

  1. Receptive Multilingualism in the Swiss Army

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Berthele, Raphael; Wittlin, Gabriele

    2013-01-01

    In this paper a particular context where receptive multilingualism at work can be observed is discussed. The Swiss armed forces underwent a series of quite dramatic downsizing measures, which lead to a situation with increased amount of mixed groups and linguistically mixed situations regarding the first/native language of officers and the…

  2. English in the Japanese Linguistic Landscape: A Motive Analysis

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Rowland, Luke

    2016-01-01

    Linguistic landscape (LL) research seeks to account for the visible displays of multilingualism on public signage. While surveys of signage in the LL produce quantitative descriptions of language contact in a given area, such analyses shed little light on people's interpretations of multilingual signs. Moreover, even within more qualitative…

  3. Linguistic Landscapes and the Sociolinguistics of Language Vitality in Multilingual Contexts of Zambia

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Banda, Felix; Jimaima, Hambaba

    2017-01-01

    The article illustrates a sociolinguistics of language vitality that accounts for "minority" and unofficial languages across multiple localities in dispersed communities of multilingual speakers of Zambia where only seven out of seventy-three indigenous languages have been designated official and "zoned" for use in specified…

  4. Learning Values about Languages in the Multilingual Preschools of Malaysia.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Banks, Ellen C.

    In multilingual nations, young children learn early about the social and educational importance that adults attribute to different languages. In Malaysia, parents express their values about languages by choosing specific kindergartens. Preschools' language values are reflected in the amount of time devoted and the seriousness of approach to each…

  5. Who's the Boss? How Communicative Competence Is Defined in a Multilingual Preschool Classroom.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Tsai, Min-Ling; Garcia, Georgia Earnest

    2000-01-01

    Investigates how classroom communicative competence was defined in a multilingual preschool classroom. Sociolinguistic analysis of a conflict event, and the larger classroom context, reveals norms and values influencing the behaviors of the English-speaking teacher, bilingual teaching assistant, and Chinese-speaking preschoolers. Identifies…

  6. Multilingual Processing in the Brain

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    van den Noort, Maurits; Struys, Esli; Kim, Kayoung; Bosch, Peggy; Mondt, Katrien; van Kralingen, Rosalinde; Lee, Mikyoung; van de Craen, Piet

    2014-01-01

    In this paper, in contrast to previous neuroimaging literature reviews on first language (L1) and second language (L2), the focus was only on neuroimaging studies that were directly conducted on multilingual participants. In total, 14 neuroimaging studies were included in our study such as 10 functional magnetic resonance imaging, 1 positron…

  7. Multilingual Literacies in the Primary Classroom: Making the Connections.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Diaz, Criss Jones

    This report explores how students' multilingual literacies can become part of everyday classroom practices. It discusses the contribution made by the home language in English language learning and literacy by highlighting the connections between languages in mainstream classroom settings. The strategies highlighted here focus on the representation…

  8. Contesting Public Monolingualism and Diglossia: Rethinking Political Theory and Language Policy for a Multilingual World

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    May, Stephen

    2014-01-01

    In many language policy and political theory discussions, there is an overt skepticism, and at times outright hostility, towards the ongoing maintenance of private and, especially, public multilingualism, particularly when these include/incorporate the languages of linguistic minorities. For linguistic minority individuals, ongoing multilingualism…

  9. Multilingualism among Brussels-Based Civil Servants and Lobbyists: Perceptions and Practices

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Krizsán, Attila; Erkkilä, Tero

    2014-01-01

    This article explores the multilingual and multicultural aspects of community-building, networking and communication in the European Union's (EU) political and administrative system. We investigated the networking and communicative preferences of EU civil servants and lobbyists using survey data and thematic interviews. Our aim was to gain a…

  10. Does multilingualism affect the incidence of Alzheimer's disease?: A worldwide analysis by country.

    PubMed

    Klein, Raymond M; Christie, John; Parkvall, Mikael

    2016-12-01

    It has been suggested that the cognitive requirements associated with bi- and multilingual processing provide a form of mental exercise that, through increases in cognitive reserve and brain fitness, may delay the symptoms of cognitive failure associated with Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia. We collected data on a country-by-country basis that might shed light on this suggestion. Using the best available evidence we could find, the somewhat mixed results we obtained provide tentative support for the protective benefits of multilingualism against cognitive decline. But more importantly, this study exposes a critical issue, which is the need for more comprehensive and more appropriate data on the subject.

  11. Towards a Practical Proposal for Multilingualism in Education in Kenya

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Oduor, Jane A. N.

    2015-01-01

    This article proposes multilingualism in education, where indigenous languages are used alongside English as the media of instruction in schools to eventually promote their use in Kenya. It begins by stating Kenya's language policy in education. It then states the responses given by some primary and secondary school teachers who were interviewed…

  12. Modelling Linguistic Diversity at School: The Excluding Impact of Inclusive Multilingualism

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Jaspers, Jürgen

    2015-01-01

    This paper discusses data from a Dutch-medium secondary school in Brussels where almost all pupils speak a different language than Dutch at home. It illustrates that teachers' preference for maintaining the school's monolingual policy did not preclude their creation of haphazard or humorous multilingual interstices that temporarily alleviated the…

  13. Schools as Laboratories for Exploring Multilingual Assessment Policies and Practices

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    De Backer, Fauve; Van Avermaet, Piet; Slembrouck, Stef

    2017-01-01

    Across Europe we can observe the reinforcement of monolingual education policies, despite increasing multilingualism. Recent research has shown that the emphasis is on language proficiency in the socially dominant language. This is viewed as the key to educational success. The use of other languages or linguistic repertoires is not valued in…

  14. School Leadership along the Trajectory from Monolingual to Multilingual

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Ascenzi-Moreno, Laura; Hesson, Sarah; Menken, Kate

    2016-01-01

    This article explores the critical role of school leaders in language policy change, and specifically in shifting their language education policies and practices from monolingual to multilingual. We examine the process of language policy change in three schools that were involved in a project aimed at increasing the knowledge base of school…

  15. Building Self-Efficacy, Strategy Use, and Motivation to Support Extensive Reading in Multilingual University Students

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Lipp, Ellen

    2017-01-01

    This pilot study examined multilingual university students' willingness to engage in voluntary extensive reading (ER) of books after they received training. The research questions were whether training appeared to promote self-efficacy, motivation for the task, use of metacognitive strategies, and independent reading. University freshmen in an ESL…

  16. Acquisition des competences discursives dans un contexte plurilingue (Acquisition of Discourse Competencies in a Multilingual Context).

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Berthoud, Anne-Claude, Ed.

    1996-01-01

    This collection of articles on second language learning in a multilingual environment includes: "Franzosisch-Deutsch: Zweisprachiges Lernen au der Sekundarstufe 1" (French-German: Learning Two Languages at Secondary School, Level 1) (Otto Stern, Brigit Eriksson, Christine Le Pape, Hans Reutener, Cecilia Serra Oesch); "Das Projekt…

  17. Umberto Eco, l'esperanto, et le plurilinguisme de l'avenir (Umbert Eco, Esperanto, and the Multilingualism of the Future).

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Ertl, Istvan; Lo Jacomo, Francois

    1994-01-01

    An interview with Umberto Eco, novelist and linguist, addresses issues in international communication of the future, and particularly the role of Esperanto in a rapidly changing, culturally diverse world society. Topics discussed include translation, native language and multilingualism, and politics of language. (MSE)

  18. Exploring the Complex Computer-Mediated Communication Needs of Learners in a Multilingual, Multicultural Online Learning Environment

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Burger, William Peter

    2013-01-01

    The purpose of this study was to understand student perceptions of social presence that resulted from communicating and collaborating via different forms of Internet-based communication technologies in a diverse, multicultural, multilingual online learning environment. In that it describes how non-native English speaking students from different…

  19. Translingual Practices and Monoglot Policy Aspirations: A Case Study of Pakistan's Plurilingual Classrooms

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Ashraf, Hina

    2018-01-01

    Current research in multilingual countries supports local languages and recognizes plurilingual practices as a proficiency (e.g. Luxembourg and Nordic countries in Europe, Bolivia, Argentina, and Columbia in South America). Yet linguistically diverse and multilingual regions, such as Pakistan, continue to be challenged by monoglot language…

  20. Multilingualism as Utopia: Fashioning Non-Racial Selves

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Stroud, Christopher; Williams, Quentin

    2017-01-01

    The challenge of contemporary South Africa is that of building a (post)nation of postracial equity in a fragmented world of a globalized ethical, economic and ecological meltdown. In this paper, we seek to explore the idea of multilingualism as a technology in the conceptualization of alternative, competing futures. We suggest that multilingualism…

  1. Code-Switching and Vernacular Support: An Early Middle English Case Study

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Skaffari, Janne

    2016-01-01

    In the multilingual history of England, the period following the Norman Conquest in 1066 is a particularly intriguing phase, but its code-switching patterns have so far received little attention. The present article describes and analyses the multilingual practices evinced in London, British Library, MS Stowe 34, containing one instructional prose…

  2. Operationalizing Multilingualism: Language Learning Motivation in Turkey

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Thompson, Amy S.; Erdil-Moody, Zeynep

    2016-01-01

    This study is an examination of language learning motivation and multilingual status in the Turkish English as a foreign language (EFL) context. Using Dörnyei's L2 Motivational Self System (L2MSS) framework, specifically the ideal and ought-to L2 selves, this study examines the relationship between motivation and two operationalizations of…

  3. Multilingualism in a Post-Industrial City: Policy and Practice in Manchester

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Matras, Yaron; Robertson, Alex

    2015-01-01

    Manchester (England), one of the first industrial cities, is now home to over 150 languages. Ethnic minority and migrant communities take active steps to maintain heritage languages in commerce and through education. The paper introduces a model for a holistic approach to profiling urban multilingualism that relies on triangulating a variety of…

  4. Language Education Needs for Multilingualism in Fiji Primary Schools

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Shameem, Nikhat

    2007-01-01

    This paper looks at current practice in teaching multilingual Indo-Fijian children in eight Fiji primary schools. Indo-Fijians speak Fiji Hindi (FH) as their mother tongue, learn Shudh Hindi (SH) or Urdu, and English for formal and literacy purposes and use English and Fijian for interethnic communication. The current education policy states that…

  5. Comparing Multilingual Children with SLI to Their Bilectal Peers: Evidence from Object and Action Picture Naming

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Kambanaros, Maria; Grohmann, Kleanthes K.; Michaelides, Michalis; Theodorou, Elena

    2013-01-01

    Against the background of the increasing number of multilingual children with atypical language development around the world, this study reports research results on grammatical word class processing involving children with specific language impairment (SLI). The study investigates lexical retrieval of verbs (through picture-naming actions) and…

  6. "Let's Talk about the Books": The Complexity of Book Discussions in a Multilingual Preschool Classroom

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Fassler, Rebekah

    2014-01-01

    This sociolinguistic study explores complexities of supporting preschool emergent bilinguals' communicative competence in multilingual classrooms. These complexities were highlighted in the author's qualitative research of a three-month school-home literacy project in one Head Start classroom. This article investigates what supported the…

  7. Code-Switching in Persian-English and Telugu-English Conversations: With a Focus on Light Verb Constructions

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Moradi, Hamzeh

    2014-01-01

    Depending on the demands of a particular communicative situation, bilingual or multilingual speakers ("bilingualism-multilingualism") will switch between language varieties. Code-switching is the practice of moving between variations of languages in different contexts. In an educational context, code-switching is defined as the practice…

  8. Symbolic Competence in Multilingual Interactions in a University Setting: A Complexity Analysis

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Gu, Michelle

    2017-01-01

    This paper, drawing on the notion of symbolic competence and insights from complexity theory, investigates the multilingual practices of university students in group discussions. The data analysis reveals that the protagonists' language uses index the various ways in which their rehearsal of potential identities, language ideologies, histories,…

  9. "We Don't Do Anything": Analysing the Construction of Legitimate Knowledge in Multilingual Schools

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Patiño-Santos, Adriana; Pérez-Milans, Miguel; Relaño-Pastor, Ana María

    2015-01-01

    This article explores the ways in which what counts as "legitimate" knowledge is produced and negotiated in two multilingual classrooms of two different programmes designed to "attend to diversity" at secondary schools in the Madrid region. Following a sociolinguistic approach, the article focuses on the ways in which local…

  10. Strategies and Tactics in Academic Knowledge Production by Multilingual Scholars

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Curry, Mary Jane; Lillis, Theresa M.

    2014-01-01

    In the past decade, academic evaluation systems worldwide have markedly increased the use of mechanisms that privilege the use of English in journal publishing. In the context of these trends, this article highlights our findings from more than 12 years of research on the experiences and perspectives of 50 multilingual European scholars with…

  11. Codeswitching in the Multilingual English First Language Classroom

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Moodley, Visvaganthie

    2007-01-01

    This paper focuses on the role of codeswitching (CS) by isiZulu (Zulu) native language (NL) junior secondary learners in English first language (EL1) multilingual classrooms in South Africa. In spite of the educational transformation in South Africa, and the recognition of CS (by education policy documents) as a means of fulfilling pedagogical…

  12. Multilingual Language Policy and Mother Tongue Education in Timor-Leste: A Multiscalar Approach

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Caffery, Jo; Coronado, Gabriela; Hodge, Bob

    2016-01-01

    This article looks at multilingual, mother-tongue-based language policies influenced by colonial and postcolonial histories and globalization processes. We use multiscalar analysis to show these policies as creative responses to problems affected by national and international forces. Our study focuses on Timor-Leste, specifically a pilot…

  13. Lessons in Literacy: Case Studies of Successful Strategies for Raising Achievement in Multilingual Schools.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Campbell, Bernard, Ed.

    The group of case studies details ways in which elementary, middle, and secondary schools in Bradford (England) have responded to recent developments in literacy education and developed whole- school approaches to improving achievement in literacy within multilingual school populations. Case study titles include: "The Literacy Lesson: A…

  14. Raising Multilingual Children: Foreign Language Acquisition and Children.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Tokuhama-Espinosa, Tracey

    This book illustrates how children learn foreign languages and when they can do so with the best results. The most recent studies in linguistics, neurology, education, and psychology are evaluated, and the findings are presented in a recipe format. Parents are encouraged to evaluate the multilingual children in their lives with the use of tools…

  15. Language Policy, Multilingual Encounters, and Transnational Families

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    King, Kendall A.

    2016-01-01

    The study of what has come to be known as family language policy has evolved and expanded significantly over the last hundred years, from its early beginnings in the diary studies of Ronjat and Leopold, to the interdisciplinary and transnational research found in this thematic issue of the "Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural…

  16. On Comparing Multilingual Societies: The Linguistic Situation of the Slavic Minorities in the Republic of Austria.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Eichinger, Ludwig M.; Jodlbauer, Ralph

    1987-01-01

    Examples of the Croats in the Burgenland and the Slovenes in Carinthia (Slavic minorities in Austria) are presented to illustrate the importance of comparing different multilingual communities to make a typologically relevant description of them to understand typological similarities and certain idiosyncratic characteristics. (Author/CB)

  17. Perspectives on Linguistic Repertoires in Adult Multilinguals: An Epilogue

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Gorter, Durk

    2017-01-01

    This article introduces this special issue by declaring that the studies contained here build on the idea that multilinguals, in the sense of learners or speakers that have more than two languages in their linguistic repertoire, are different from bilinguals and monolinguals in various ways. Several authors in the area of third language…

  18. "Perezhivanija" Discovered through Narrative Analysis: Emotive and Motivational Foci in Parent's Diverse Heritage Language and Cultural Sustaining in Australia

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Babaeff, Robyn

    2016-01-01

    Extensive linguistic research and theorising relating to maintaining the family heritage, as bilingual or multilingual family in differing language contexts, is currently available. Substantial research beneficially explores approaches to multilingual parenting, outcomes for individuals through parent and child perspectives, among linguistic and…

  19. Analysis of Spoken Narratives in a Marathi-Hindi-English Multilingual Aphasic Patient

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Karbhari-Adhyaru, Medha

    2010-01-01

    In a multilingual country such as India, the probability that clinicians may not have command over different languages used by aphasic patients is very high. Since formal tests in different languages are limited, assessment of people from diverse linguistic backgrounds presents speech- language pathologists with many challenges. With a view to…

  20. European Training Thesaurus: A Multilingual Synopsis

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Cedefop - European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training, 2012

    2012-01-01

    Education and training issues are similar across Europe, but how can we ensure we mean the same things with the same terms? The new format of the European training thesaurus (ETT) is a multilingual synopsis. It is an online tool enabling those working in education, training and employment to have a common understanding of terms. It helps…

  1. Literacy at a Distance in Multilingual Contexts: Issues and Challenges

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Ofulue, Christine I.

    2011-01-01

    Literacy is perhaps the most fundamental skill required for effective participation in education (formal and non-formal) for national development. At the same time, the choice of language for literacy is a complex issue in multilingual societies like Nigeria. This paper examines the issues involved, namely language policy, language and teacher…

  2. Race, Difference, Meritocracy, and English: Majoritarian Stories in the Education of Secondary Multilingual Learners

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Mitchell, Kara

    2013-01-01

    In this study, empirical and conceptual scholarship (approximately 100 studies) regarding the education of secondary multilingual learners and their teachers are analyzed through the lens of critical race theory (CRT). Specifically, four common majoritarian stories are identified that are both challenged and endorsed in the research literature:…

  3. The Multilingual Turn in Languages Education: Opportunities and Challenges

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Conteh, Jean, Ed.; Meier, Gabriela, Ed.

    2014-01-01

    Starting from the key idea that learners and teachers bring diverse linguistic knowledge and resources to education, this book establishes and explores the concept of the 'multilingual turn' in languages education and the potential benefits for individuals and societies. It takes account of recent research, policy, and practice in the fields of…

  4. Language Education Policy and Multilingual Assessment

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Gorter, Durk; Cenoz, Jasone

    2017-01-01

    In this article, we establish direct links between language policy on the one hand and assessment in multilingual contexts on the other hand. We illustrate the bi-directional relationship with the examples of the USA, Canada, and the Basque Country. That comparison is placed in the context of the changing views about the use of languages in…

  5. Multilingual Asia: Looking Back, Looking across, Looking Forward

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Bruthiaux, Paul

    2009-01-01

    In any discussion of multilingual Asia, caution is in order, for two reasons. One is that Asia is a vast land mass connecting variegated peoples cartographically but not sociologically. Second, describing and accounting for the sociolinguistic complexities of Asia (or anywhere else, for that matter) is history in the making in that, just like…

  6. Hidden Bilingualism: Ideological Influences on the Language Practices of Multilingual Migrant Mothers in Japan

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Nakamura, Janice

    2016-01-01

    This study examines the challenges of minority language transmission in exogamous families in a society where linguistic and cultural homogeneity still prevails. Specifically, it investigates the macro and micro ideological influences that lead multilingual migrant mothers in Japan to speak Japanese to their children. Interview data with six Thai…

  7. Development of Code-Switching: A Case Study on a Turkish/English/Arabic Multilingual Child

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Tunaz, Mehmet

    2016-01-01

    The purpose of this research was to investigate the early code switching patterns of a simultaneous multilingual subject (Aris) in accordance with Muysken's (2000) code switching typology: insertion and alternation. Firstly, the records of naturalistic spontaneous conversations were obtained from the parents via e-mail, phone calls and…

  8. Defining "Native Speaker" in Multilingual Settings: English as a Native Language in Asia

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Hansen Edwards, Jette G.

    2017-01-01

    The current study examines how and why speakers of English from multilingual contexts in Asia are identifying as native speakers of English. Eighteen participants from different contexts in Asia, including Singapore, Malaysia, India, Taiwan, and The Philippines, who self-identified as native speakers of English participated in hour-long interviews…

  9. Indigenous Languages: Nahuatl, Quechua, & Maya--A Study of Multilingual Immigrant Students & Their Families

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Perez, Carlos

    2009-01-01

    This study investigated how immigrants from Latin America who speak indigenous languages perceive and respond to social, racial, linguistic, and cultural factors in the United States. It examined the multicultural and multilingual experiences of six participants, five of whom speak an indigenous language. There were three interviews conducted with…

  10. Researching Multilingualism and Superdiversity: Grassroots Actions and Responsibilities

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Wei, Li

    2014-01-01

    The articles in this thematic issue document studies of grassroots actions in promoting multilingualism across different sectors of society as well as in different social and professional domains. In doing so, the contributors raise issues of the relevance of the notion of community in the age of superdiversity and the researcher's…

  11. The Relationship between Student Achievement and Multilingualism: A Quantitative Causal-Comparative Study

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Thomson, Jennifer Barbara

    2010-01-01

    Student performance in basic math and reading skills in the United States trails behind other developed countries, providing the rationale for more research to determine how performance might be improved. Following evidence to conclude that multilingualism enhances cognitive, neuro-linguistic and meta-linguistic development, it is proposed that…

  12. Shaping Tourist LL: Language Display and the Sociolinguistic Background of an International Multilingual Readership

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Bruyèl-Olmedo, Antonio; Juan-Garau, Maria

    2015-01-01

    Linguistic landscape studies increasingly focus on the variables that intertwine to generate the meaning of texts on display. International tourist resorts, largely multilingual, reveal how languages in signage combine and respond to the sociolinguistic profile of their readership. However, these settings have received scant attention in the…

  13. The Multilingual Mind: Issues Discussed by, for, and about People Living with Many Languages.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Tokuhama-Espinosa, Tracey, Ed.

    This collection of 21 essays focuses on people who experience the world with multiple languages: (1) "Myths about Multilingualism" (Tracey Tokuhama-Espinosa); (2) "Teaching Languages using the Multiple Intelligences and the Senses" (Tracey Tokuhama-Espinosa); (3) "The Role of the Sense of Smell in Language Learning"…

  14. The Effect of Multilingualism/Multiculturalism on Personality: No Gain without Pain for Third Culture Kids?

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Dewaele, Jean-Marc; van Oudenhoven, Jan Pieter

    2009-01-01

    The present study investigates the link between multilingualism/multiculturalism, acculturation and the personality profile (as measured by the Multicultural Personality Questionnaire) of 79 young London teenagers, half of whom were born abroad and had settled down in London during their childhood "Third Culture Kids" (TCKs; Pollock…

  15. Project-Based Community Language Learning: Three Narratives of Multilingual Story-Telling in Early Childhood Education

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Lotherington, Heather; Holland, Michelle; Sotoudeh, Shiva; Zentena, Mike

    2008-01-01

    At Joyce Public School (JPS) in the Greater Toronto Area, we are engaged in ongoing collaborative action research to develop pedagogical approaches to emergent literacies that engage multilingual, multicultural, and multimodal perspectives in complex interplay. Our research is grounded in the challenges children experience in acquiring literacy…

  16. Linguistic and Cultural Appropriations of an Immigrant Multilingual Literacy Teacher Educator

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Smith, Patriann; Warrican, S. Joel; Kumi-Yeboah, Alex

    2016-01-01

    This autoethnographic self-study describes my interpretations of multicultural awareness, with special attention to multilingual awareness (MLA), based on my interactions with 52 students in the context of two literacy courses over a period of one year. An autoethnographic self-study provided an avenue to harness my reflections on practice and to…

  17. "I Am What I Am": Multilingual Identity and Digital Translanguaging

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Schreiber, Brooke Ricker

    2015-01-01

    This paper presents a case study of the multilingual writing practices of a Serbian university student on Facebook, examining how he uses multiple varieties of English and Serbian images and video to shape his online identity and establish membership in local and global communities. Drawing on data from stimulated-recall interviews, online…

  18. The Challenges of Spanish Language Teaching in Multilingual India: A Case Study of Delhi

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Rai, Dhiraj Kumar

    2017-01-01

    The multilingual surrounding of Spanish Language Teaching (SLT) in India has presented a unique linguistic principle. This principle relies upon the application of English language instructions (as FL1) to combine several methods for teaching-learning Spanish language (as FL2). However, the effectiveness and appropriateness of this linguistic…

  19. Developing Collaboratively an International School Special Needs Plan for Multicultural, Multilingual, and Multinational Secondary Students.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Jonietz, Patricia L.

    The International School of Brussels (Belgium) developed a program of Curriculum-Based Assessment (CBA) to increase support for "at risk" multicultural, multilingual, and multinational students. The at-risk population included three groups: those who passed standardized English as a Foreign Language tests but were not literate enough for…

  20. Teaching Mathematics in Multilingual Classrooms: Developing Intercultural Competence via a Study Abroad Program

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Kasmer, Lisa Anne; Billings, Esther

    2017-01-01

    This study investigated how a study abroad experience teaching mathematics in Tanzania, Africa impacted a group of secondary education pre-service teachers (PSTs) from the United States. In particular we discuss their ability to facilitate the learning of students in multilingual mathematics classrooms while personally developing intercultural…

  1. The M/M Center: Meeting the Demand for Multicultural, Multilingual Teacher Preparation

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Wong, Pia Lindquist; Murai, Harold; Berta-Avila, Margarita; William-White, Lisa; Baker, Susan; Arellano, Adele; Echandia, Adriana

    2007-01-01

    The Multilingual/Multicultural Teacher Preparation Center (M/M Center), a teacher preparation program offered by the Bilingual/Multicultural Education Department (BMED) at California State University, Sacramento, is entering its third decade of operation. The M/M Center was established by a group of progressive teacher educators, most with a…

  2. Multilingual Education in Kenya: Debunking the Myths

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Orwenjo, Daniel Ochieng

    2012-01-01

    Arguments that have been advanced against multilingual education in Kenya and Africa in general are not new. Most post-colonial African governments have stuck to the pre-colonial education policies which have no relevance to the present day Africa and were, at best, guided by the interests of the colonial power. Unfortunately, most of the claims…

  3. Language Policy-Making in Multilingual Education: Mass Media and the Framing of Medium of Instruction

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Tollefson, James W.

    2015-01-01

    In some settings, medium of instruction (MOI) policies in multilingual education break out into public debates in mass media involving politicians, business leaders, government officials, parents, and school children. These public discussions of MOI often index struggles over the distribution of political power and economic resources, and issues…

  4. Challenging Minority Language Isolation: Translanguaging in a Trilingual School in the Basque Country

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Leonet, Oihana; Cenoz, Jasone; Gorter, Durk

    2017-01-01

    Learning two or more languages at school is quite common all over Europe, but languages are often isolated from each other. This pedagogical practice is in contrast to the way multilingual speakers use their whole linguistic repertoire when communicating in social contexts. These multilingual solitudes are challenged when translanguaging…

  5. Invited Colloquium on Negotiating the Complexities of Multilingual Assessment, AAAL Conference 2014

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Menken, Kate; Shohamy, Elana

    2015-01-01

    The invited colloquium on New Directions in Language Assessment held at the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) annual meeting in Portland, Oregon on March 22, 2014 brought together an international panel of scholars to together explore the possibilities and challenges of translanguaging and bi/multilingual approaches in…

  6. Translanguaging Knowledge and Identity in Complementary Classrooms for Multilingual Minority Ethnic Children

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Wei, Li

    2014-01-01

    This article examines multilingual interactions in the complementary school classroom for ethnic Chinese children in the UK. Through a detailed analysis of classroom exchanges amongst the children and their teachers, the study aims to demonstrate how they alternate between different varieties of Chinese and English and different modes of…

  7. Free Your Stuff Luxembourg! Language Policies, Practices and Ideologies in a Multilingual Facebook Group

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    de Bres, Julia; Belling, Luc

    2015-01-01

    This article considers the dynamic relationship between language policies, practices and ideologies in a multilingual Facebook group in Luxembourg. The group under focus, "Free Your Stuff Luxembourg", was created to facilitate the cost-free exchange of consumer goods between members located in Luxembourg. The article traces the…

  8. Khmer Rap Boys, X-Men, Asia's Fruits, and Dragonball Z: Creating Multilingual and Multimodal Classroom Contexts

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    McGinnis, Theresa Ann

    2007-01-01

    In our rapidly changing global culture, students' social worlds are becoming increasingly multilingual and multimodal, yet school practices do not often reflect the complexities or diversity of students' literacy and language practices. Valuing students' experiences with language and culture is important in creating supportive learning…

  9. Mathematics and Multilingual Learners: Transformative Learning through In-Service Teacher Professional Development

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Holdway, Jennifer

    2016-01-01

    In response to the increasing linguistic and cultural diversity in US schools, in-service teachers are faced with the significant challenge of addressing both the linguistic and instructional needs of their multilingual learners (MLLs). This study provides evidence of the linguistic obstacles faced in the academic mathematics classroom and how…

  10. Laboratory Studies on Multilingual Cognition and Further Language Development

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Sanz, Cristina; Cox, Jessica G.

    2017-01-01

    Multilingualism is now seen as the norm rather than the exception in an age of migration and supranational entities, and where minority language rights and the consequent educational policies have become more common. The field of applied linguistics reflects that transition: second language acquisition (sla) research is slowly being replaced by…

  11. The ICSI+ Multilingual Sentence Segmentation System

    DTIC Science & Technology

    2006-01-01

    these steps the ASR output needs to be enriched with information additional to words, such as speaker diarization , sentence segmentation, or story...and the out- of a speaker diarization is considered as well. We first detail extraction of the prosodic features, and then describe the clas- ation...also takes into account the speaker turns that estimated by the diarization system. In addition to the Max- 1) model speaker turn unigrams, trigram

  12. Building the Joint Battlespace Infosphere. Volume 2: Interactive Information Technologies

    DTIC Science & Technology

    1999-12-17

    G. A . Vouros, “ A Knowledge- Based Methodology for Supporting Multilingual and User -Tailored Interfaces ,” Interacting With Computers, Vol. 9 (1998), p...project is to develop a two-handed user interface to the stereoscopic field analyzer, an interactive 3-D scientific visualization system. The...62 See http://www.hitl.washington.edu/research/vrd/. 63 R. Baumann and R. Clavel, “Haptic Interface for Virtual Reality Based

  13. Spanish Language Processing at University of Maryland: Building Infrastructure for Multilingual Applications

    DTIC Science & Technology

    2001-09-01

    translation of the Spanish original sentence. Acquiring bilingual dictionary entries In addition to building and applying the more sophisticated LCS...porting LCS lexicons to new languages, as described above, and are also useful by themselves in improving dictionary -based cross language information...hold much of the time. Moreover, lexical dependencies have proven to be instrumental in advances in monolingual syntactic analysis (e.g. I-erg MY

  14. Information Management Systems for Monitoring and Documenting World Heritage - the Silk Roads Chris

    NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

    Vileikis, O.; Serruys, E.; Dumont, B.; van Balen, K.; Santana Quinterod, M.; de Maeyer, P.; Tigny, V.

    2012-07-01

    This paper discusses the application of Information Management Systems (IMS) for documenting and monitoring World Heritage (WH) properties. The application of IMS in WH can support all stakeholders involved in conservation, and management of cultural heritage by more easily inventorying, mining and exchanging information from multiple sources based on international standards. Moreover, IMS could assist in detecting damages and preparing management strategies to mitigate risks, and slowing down the deterioration of the integrity of WH properties. The case study of the Silk Roads Cultural Heritage Resource Information System (CHRIS), a Belgian Federal Science Policy Office funded project, illustrates the capabilities of IMS in the context of the nomination of the Central Asian Silk Roads on the WH List. This multi-lingual, web-based IMS will act as a collaborative platform allowing for the completion of improved transnational nomination dossiers and subsequent monitoring activities with all necessary baseline information to easily verify consistency and quality of the proposal. The Silk Roads CHRIS Geospatial Content Management System uses open source technologies and allows to georeference data from different scales and sources including data from field recording methods and combine it with historical and heritage features documented through various means such as textual descriptions, documents, photographs, 3D models or videos. Moreover, tailored maps can also be generated by overlaying a selection of available layers and then be exported to support the nomination dossier. Finally, by using this innovative information and decision support system, the State Parties and other interested stakeholders will have access to a complete nomination dossier and could therefore respond more effectively to hazards and disaster phenomena.

  15. Modeling workflow to design machine translation applications for public health practice

    PubMed Central

    Turner, Anne M.; Brownstein, Megumu K.; Cole, Kate; Karasz, Hilary; Kirchhoff, Katrin

    2014-01-01

    Objective Provide a detailed understanding of the information workflow processes related to translating health promotion materials for limited English proficiency individuals in order to inform the design of context-driven machine translation (MT) tools for public health (PH). Materials and Methods We applied a cognitive work analysis framework to investigate the translation information workflow processes of two large health departments in Washington State. Researchers conducted interviews, performed a task analysis, and validated results with PH professionals to model translation workflow and identify functional requirements for a translation system for PH. Results The study resulted in a detailed description of work related to translation of PH materials, an information workflow diagram, and a description of attitudes towards MT technology. We identified a number of themes that hold design implications for incorporating MT in PH translation practice. A PH translation tool prototype was designed based on these findings. Discussion This study underscores the importance of understanding the work context and information workflow for which systems will be designed. Based on themes and translation information workflow processes, we identified key design guidelines for incorporating MT into PH translation work. Primary amongst these is that MT should be followed by human review for translations to be of high quality and for the technology to be adopted into practice. Counclusion The time and costs of creating multilingual health promotion materials are barriers to translation. PH personnel were interested in MT's potential to improve access to low-cost translated PH materials, but expressed concerns about ensuring quality. We outline design considerations and a potential machine translation tool to best fit MT systems into PH practice. PMID:25445922

  16. Speaking, Reading and Writing in Three Languages. Preferences and Attitudes of Multilingual Malaysian Students

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Karchner-Ober, Renate

    2012-01-01

    This study presents the main findings from a study which investigated Malaysian multilingual students' practical use of three languages with respect to reading, speaking and writing in Bahasa Malaysia (BM), English and German. In addition, two further aspects have been examined: students' motivation to learn a language, and the respondents'…

  17. Language Education in a Multilingual City: The Case of Limassol

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Nicolaou, Anna; Parmaxi, Antigoni; Papadima-Sophocleous, Salomi; Boglou, Dimitrios

    2016-01-01

    This paper aims to provide an overview of the current situation of multilingualism and language education in the city of Limassol, Cyprus. The multicultural character of Limassol is reflected in every aspect of city life, and is notably reflected in the sector of education.Therefore,there is a need to delve into the situation of language…

  18. Multilingual and Multicultural Task-Based Learning Scenarios: A Pilot Study from the MAGICC Project

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Álvarez, Inma; Pérez-Cavana, María Luisa

    2015-01-01

    In this article we report on the results of a pilot study on the use of task-based multilingual and multicultural professional scenarios for higher education teachers and learners at BA and MA level. The scenarios reflect new learning outcomes and assessment criteria for the presently under-conceptualised domain of communication in multilingual…

  19. The "Fun with Languages" Project: Making Learning Another Language an Early Priority

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Saint-Paul, Thérèse; Hendley, Valérie

    2016-01-01

    There is no denying the importance of multilingualism in the 21st century; increased travels, student exchanges, global business, diplomacy, and security are mediated by communication. Education is the key to building a strong multilingual world community that will work for peace and stability. However, it may be often overlooked that a successful…

  20. The Role of Mother Tongue Literacy in Language Learning and Mathematical Learning: Is There a Multilingual Benefit for Both?

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Dahm, Rebecca; De Angelis, Gessica

    2018-01-01

    The present study examines the multilingual benefit in relation to language learning and mathematical learning. The objective is to assess whether speakers of three or more languages, depending on language profile and personal histories, show significant advantages in language learning and/or mathematical learning, and whether mother tongue…

  1. Literacy Instruction in Multilingual Classrooms: Engaging English Language Learners in Elementary School. Language & Literacy Series--Practitioners Bookshelf

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Helman, Lori

    2012-01-01

    This hands-on guide shows elementary school teachers how to create multilingual classroom communities that support every learner's success in reading, writing, and general literacy development. The author provides a practical overview of key ideas and techniques and describes specific literacy activities that lead to vocabulary and oral English…

  2. Multilingual Aspects of Fluency Disorders. Communication Disorders across Languages

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Howell, Peter; Van Borsel, John

    2011-01-01

    This book contains contributions by scholars working on diverse aspects of speech who bring their findings to bear on the practical issue of how to treat stuttering in different language groups and in multilingual speakers. The book considers classic issues in speech production research, as well as whether regions of the brain that are affected in…

  3. Internationalisation in Higher Education and Its Impact in Multilingual Contexts: Redefining Identities of Basque-Speaking Academics

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Larrinaga, Ane; Amurrio, Mila

    2015-01-01

    This article analyses aspects of the impact of internationalisation in higher education in multilingual contexts where both a state language and a minority language are present and where English is gradually being introduced. The analysis focuses primarily on the consequences for the professional identities of academics who work in a minority…

  4. Beyond "Write-Talk-Revise-(Repeat)": Using Narrative to Understand One Multilingual Student's Interactions around Writing

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Pomerantz, Anne; Kearney, Erin

    2012-01-01

    This paper offers a narrative framework for understanding how multilingual graduate students make sense of the continuous and frequently contradictory talk they engage in as they write. It illustrates how attention to the telling, form, and content of the stories such students relate about their ongoing interactions around academic writing can…

  5. Professionals' Guidance about Spoken Language Multilingualism and Spoken Language Choice for Children with Hearing Loss

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Crowe, Kathryn; McLeod, Sharynne

    2016-01-01

    The purpose of this research was to investigate factors that influence professionals' guidance of parents of children with hearing loss regarding spoken language multilingualism and spoken language choice. Sixteen professionals who provide services to children and young people with hearing loss completed an online survey, rating the importance of…

  6. George W. Wingate High School Multilingual Survival Skills Program, 1985-1986. OEA Evaluation Report.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    New York City Board of Education, Brooklyn. Office of Educational Assessment.

    The Multilingual Survival Skills Program, in its final year of a three-year funding cycle, provided instructional and support services to 350 Haitian and Hispanic students of limited English proficiency (LEP) at George Wingate High School (Brooklyn, New York). The program emphasized the acquisition of English language skills, using students'…

  7. Bilingual Life in a Multilingual High School Classroom: Teaching and Learning in Cantonese and English.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Goldstein, Tara

    1997-01-01

    Explores how Cantonese-speaking math students and their teacher use different languages to achieve academic and social success in their multilingual classroom in Toronto. The article discusses inter-ethnic tensions related to the use of languages other than English and raises questions regarding the advantages and disadvantages of multilingual…

  8. Plagiarism and the Culture of Multilingual Students in Higher Education Abroad

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Sowden, Colin

    2005-01-01

    The cultural values of multilingual students are sometimes at variance with Western academic practice, in matters such as plagiarism. In accepting this, however, it is important to avoid stereotyping. Instead we should respect and make use of the students' own traditions of study. It is also time to acknowledge that ideas and language are…

  9. Literacy Practices and Linguistic Choices: A Sociocultural Study of a Multilingual Adult Literacy Student Group.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Black, Stephen R.; Thorp, Kay

    The report describes a study of a multilingual group of six adult literacy students, five women and one man, enrolled in an English literacy class at an Australian college. Subjects' countries of origin include Afghanistan, Indonesia/China, Lebanon, Iran, and China. The study examined factors affecting subjects' daily literacy practices and…

  10. Diaspora: Multilingual and Intercultural Communication across Time and Space

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Wei, Li; Hua, Zhu

    2013-01-01

    The nature of diaspora is changing in the 21st century. Yet many of the communication issues remain the same. At the heart of it is multilingual and intercultural communication across time and space. There is much that applied linguists can contribute to the understanding of diaspora in the era of globalization. This article discusses some of the…

  11. Assessment and d/Deaf and Hard of Hearing Multilingual Learners: Considerations and Promising Practices

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Pizzo, Lianna; Chilvers, Amanda

    2016-01-01

    The authors address considerations and promising practices relating to assessment of d/Deaf and Hard of Hearing Multilingual Learners. DMLs' unique culture(s), language(s), and learning needs must be considered when assessments of this population are being planned, conducted, and interpreted. The authors address theory and research on (a) general…

  12. Communication Based on Receptive Multilingualism: Advantages and Disadvantages

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Braunmüller, Kurt

    2013-01-01

    This paper tries to give answers for successful receptive multilingualism (RM) but also for its failure. It is mainly based on the results of two projects, one on inter-dialectal communication in the Baltic area during the era of the Hanseatic League and the other analyses inter-Scandinavian communication today. The main purpose of this survey is…

  13. Multilingual Codeswitching in Quebec Rap: Poetry, Pragmatics and Performativity

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Sarkar, Mela; Winer, Lise

    2006-01-01

    Quebec rap lyrics stand out on the world Hip-Hop scene by virtue of the ease and rapidity with which performers in this multilingual, multiethnic youth community codeswitch, frequently among three or more languages or language varieties (usually over a French and/or English base) in the same song. We construct a framework for understanding…

  14. 2B or Not 2B Plurilingual? Navigating Languages Literacies, and Plurilingual Competence in Postsecondary Education in Canada

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Marshall, Steve; Moore, Danièle

    2013-01-01

    In this article, the researchers employ the framework of plurilingualism and plurilingual competence in a field that has traditionally been dominated by reified conceptualizations of multilingualism that view bi/multilingualism as balanced and complete competence in discrete codes. They present data from a qualitative, longitudinal study of the…

  15. The Magical Frontier between the Dominant and the Dominated: Sociolinguistics and Social Justice in a Multilingual World

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Blackledge, Adrian

    2006-01-01

    Research in multilingual societies often attends to the micro level of linguistic interactions, as linguistic minority speakers negotiate their way through a majority-language world. However, this research does not always engage with the social, political and historical contexts that produce and reproduce the conditions within which some…

  16. "It's Not Comfortable Being Who I Am"--Multilingual Identity in Superdiverse Dubai

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    ONeill, Gary Thomas

    2017-01-01

    This ethnographic case study examines the factors that contribute to multilingual choices and the construction of identities in a linguistically diverse family within a linguistically diverse city, Dubai in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Based on interviews with a female Emirati in her early thirties, the article examines this young woman's…

  17. Space, Scale and Languages: Identity Construction of Cross-Boundary Students in a Multilingual University in Hong Kong

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Gu, Mingyue Michelle; Tong, Ho Kin

    2012-01-01

    Drawing on the notions of scale and space, this paper investigates identity construction among a group of mainland Chinese cross-boundary students by analysing their language choices and linguistic practices in a multilingual university in Hong Kong. The research illustrates how movement across spaces by these students produces varying index…

  18. How Multilingual African Contexts Are Pushing Educational Research and Practice in New Directions

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Benson, Carol

    2010-01-01

    A strong case can be made for developing more flexible and relevant multilingual strategies for teaching and learning within the field of bilingual education. This paper aims to demonstrate how current linguistic and educational practices in countries like Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique and Ethiopia suggest new directions for research and practice. A…

  19. From Global Jobs to Safe Spaces: The Diverse Discourses That Sell Multilingual Schooling in the USA

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Dorner, Lisa M.

    2015-01-01

    While much research has demonstrated that English-only rhetoric negatively affects bilingual education for the children of US immigrants, few studies have examined the local negotiations and discourses that shape the development of multilingual programming for English-speaking students. Across the USA, educational leaders and policy-makers today…

  20. The Meaning of Mathematics Instruction in Multilingual Classrooms: Analyzing the Importance of Responsibility for Learning

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Hansson, Ase

    2012-01-01

    In the multilingual mathematics classroom, the assignment for teachers to scaffold students by means of instruction and guidance in order to facilitate language progress and learning for all is often emphasized. In Sweden, where mathematics education is characterized by a low level of teacher responsibility for students' performance, this…

  1. Language Choice in an Acutely Multilingual Society: Communication and Development in Papua New Guinea.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Smith, Geoff P.

    Acute intercultural communication problems posed by multilingualism in Papua New Guinea are discussed, and ways in which they are being addressed are examined. An introductory section outlines the language situation in Melanesia. It is noted that the area's language diversity and colonization and missionary activity have resulted in the emergence…

  2. Spelling Improvement through Letter-Sound and Whole-Word Training in Two Multilingual Greek- and English-Speaking Children

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Niolaki, Georgia Z.; Masterson, Jackie; Terzopoulos, Aris R.

    2014-01-01

    Case studies of two children with spelling difficulty are reported. LK was multilingual and ED bilingual. A training programme that targeted phonic decoding (or sublexical) spelling processes was conducted with both children. Immediate and delayed post-training assessments showed improvement in spelling nonwords for LK but not for ED. Training…

  3. Towards a Dynamic Conceptual Framework for English-Medium Education in Multilingual University Settings

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Dafouz, Emma; Smit, Ute

    2016-01-01

    At a time of increasing internationalization in tertiary education, English-Medium Education in Multilingual University Settings (EMEMUS) has become a common practice. While there is already ample research describing this phenomenon at a local level (Smit and Dafouz 2012a), the theoretical side needs to be elaborated. This article thus aims to…

  4. "I Want to Do Things with Languages": A Male Karenni Refugee's Reconstructing Multilingual Capital

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Duran, Chatwara Suwannamai

    2016-01-01

    This article discusses how a male Karenni refugee in the United States has constructed multilingual capital along the way of his multiple movements across national borders. As a member of an ethnic minority group in three different countries (Burma, Thailand, and the United States), he has invested in learning multiple languages throughout the…

  5. Variables Associated with Grade R English Additional Language Acquisition in Multilingual Rural Mpumalanga Schools

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Moodley, P.; Kritzinger, A.; Vinck, B.

    2016-01-01

    In a previous study Moodley, Kritzinger and Vinck (2014) found that formal English Additional Language (EAL) instruction contributed significantly better to listening and speaking skills in Grade R learners, than did a play-based approach. The finding in multilingual rural Mpumalanga schools was in agreement with numerous studies elsewhere.…

  6. Multilingual Writing in an Age of Accountability: From Policy to Practice in U.S. High School Classrooms

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Enright, Kerry Anne; Gilliland, Betsy

    2011-01-01

    This article considers the influence of the U.S. accountability- and standards-driven context on the writing experiences of multilingual writers in "New Mainstream" linguistically diverse high school classrooms. Qualitative data from 12 ninth grade subject-matter classes were examined to note how uses of writing in subject-matter classrooms…

  7. Unlocking the Grid: Language-in-Education Policy Realisation in Post-Apartheid South Africa

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Plüddemann, Peter

    2015-01-01

    This paper reflects on the state of educational language policy two decades into a post-Apartheid South Africa caught between official multilingualism and English. The focus is on the national language-in-education policy (LiEP) that advocates additive bi/multilingualism, and a provincial counterpart, the language transformation plan (LTP). Using…

  8. Peer Interaction and Learning in Multilingual Settings from a Sociocultural Perspective: Theoretical Insights

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Kibler, Amanda

    2017-01-01

    Reflecting on contributions to this special issue along with my own research, I suggest ways in which sociocultural understandings of peer interactions in multilingual contexts are and should be evolving to encompass the increasingly complex settings that research has come to document. I argue that in order to realize the potential of research in…

  9. Conflicted Worlds of Multilingual Communities in Africa: Literacy Tangled in Words

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Maganda, Dainess

    2016-01-01

    Drawing from a sociocultural perspective of literacy, with the goal to promote the use of African Native Languages (ANL) in schools, I conducted a Participatory Action Research in one multilingual primary school community in North West Tanzania. For three weeks, 19 teachers, 19 parents and 119 6th grade students collaborated with each other in a…

  10. Challenges of Chinese Language Education in Multi-Lingual Societies: Hong Kong and Singapore

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Tong, Ho-kin; Goh, Yeng-seng

    2008-01-01

    This paper aims to study the current challenges of Chinese language education in the multilingual societies of Hong Kong and Singapore through policy documents. After the handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997, the role of "Putonghua" is far more important than before due to political and economic reasons. However, the medium of…

  11. Multilingual Students in Greek Schools: Teachers' Views and Teaching Practices

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Mitits, Lydia

    2018-01-01

    The purpose of the study was to investigate the views held by teachers in Thrace, Greece with respect to their multilingual students and the teaching practices. A questionnaire (De Angelis, 2011) was used to assess teachers' beliefs about the role of prior linguistic knowledge, the teacher, the school and the family in the education of…

  12. Multilingualism among University Staff: A Case Study of Language Management at an Australian University

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Marriott, Helen

    2013-01-01

    Employing the language management framework, this paper reports on multilingual use among the staff of a major metropolitan university in Melbourne and covers both simple and organised management. It describes a top-down attempt to survey staffs' (academic and general) background in Languages other than English (LOTE), LOTE usage and evaluative…

  13. Multilingual Paraprofessionals: An Untapped Resource for Supporting American Pluralism. Pathways to Prosperity: Growing a Multilingual Teacher Workforce

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Williams, Conor P.; Garcia, Amaya; Connally, Kaylan; Cook, Shayna; Dancy, Kim

    2016-01-01

    The nation's linguistic diversity is growing steadily, particularly among the youngest children. A growing body of research shows that these children are most successful when they participate in bilingual instructional programs (such as dual immersion, transitional bilingual and other models). But as good as instructional language diversity might…

  14. The Bilingual Advantage for Immigrant Students in French Immersion in Canada: Linking Advantages to Contextual Variables

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Mady, Callie

    2017-01-01

    This study compares the English and French proficiencies of three groups of early French immersion participants at the Grade 6 level: Canadian-born English-speaking, Canadian-born multilingual, and immigrant multilingual students. In addition to English and French multi-skills tests, the participants completed a questionnaire designed to gather…

  15. Language Learning Experience in School Context and Metacognitive Awareness of Multilingual Children

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Le Pichon Vorstman, Emmanuelle; De Swart, Henriette; Ceginskas, Viktorija; Van Den Bergh, Huub

    2009-01-01

    What is the influence of a language learning experience (LLE) in a school context on the metacognitive development of children? To answer that question, we presented 54 multilingual preschoolers with two movie clips and examined their reactions to an exolingual situation of communication. These preschoolers were aged four and a half to six and a…

  16. Using Close Reading as a Course Theme in a Multilingual Disciplinary Classroom

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Freedman, Leora

    2015-01-01

    An adaptation of the traditional literary concept of close reading was developed for use in a largely multilingual classroom in which both first language (L1) and second language (L2) students were struggling to comprehend theoretical, lexically dense texts in English. This simplified method of reading a text iteratively and critically is proving…

  17. Creative and Critical Approaches to Language Learning and Digital Technology: Findings from a Multilingual Digital Storytelling Project

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Anderson, Jim; Chung, Yu-Chiao; Macleroy, Vicky

    2018-01-01

    This article presents findings from the global literacy project, Critical Connections: Multilingual Digital Storytelling (MDST), which provides a means of nurturing and reflecting multiliteracies in practice. It recognises the power of storytelling and the space stories offer both for self-representation and for engaging with otherness. It draws…

  18. Putting Multiliteracies into Practice: Digital Storytelling for Multilingual Adolescents in a Summer Program

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Angay-Crowder, Tuba; Choi, Jayoung; Yi, Youngjoo

    2013-01-01

    In this article we demonstrate how we created a context in which digital storytelling was designed and implemented to teach multilingual middle school students in the summer program sponsored by a local nonprofit organization, the Latin American Association, in a city in the southeastern United States. While implementing the notion of…

  19. The Pursuit of Multilingualism in Transnational Educational Migration: Strategies of Linguistic Investment among Korean "Jogi Yuhak" Families in Singapore

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Bae, So Hee

    2013-01-01

    "Jogi yuhak" (early study abroad) has become a prominent educational and linguistic investment strategy for middle-class Korean families to raise their children as global elites, allowing them to attain multilingual competence through transnational educational migration. Singapore, a newly emerging center of "jogi yuhak",…

  20. Performing "Authentic" Bilingualism: Authenticity, Novel Respelling Forms, and Language Ideology in South Korea

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Choi, Lee Jin

    2017-01-01

    The process of globalization, along with the advent of Internet technology, has resulted in the increasing presence of written mixed-language discourses produced and used by multilinguals in online spaces (e. g. online chat, instant messaging, and online discussion boards). Despite the fact that multilingual texts have become more visible and…

  1. Case Studies of Multilingual/Multicultural Asian Deaf Adults: Strategies for Success

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Wang, Qiuying; Andrews, Jean; Liu, Hsiu Tan; Liu, Chun Jung

    2016-01-01

    Case studies of adult d/Deaf or Hard of Hearing Multilingual Learners (DMLs) are few, especially studies of DMLs who learn more than one sign language and read logographic and alphabetic scripts. To reduce this paucity, two descriptive case studies are presented. Written questionnaires, face-to-face interviews, and self-appraisals of language-use…

  2. The Isan Culture Maintenance and Revitalisation Programme's Multilingual Signage Attitude Survey: Phase II

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Draper, John

    2016-01-01

    This article contextualises and presents to the academic community the full dataset of the Isan Culture Maintenance and Revitalisation Programme's (ICMRP) multilingual signage survey. The ICMRP is a four-year European Union co-sponsored project in Northeast Thailand. This article focuses on one aspect of the project, four surveys each of 1,500…

  3. Language Visibility, Functionality and Meaning across Various Timespace Scales in Brussels' Multilingual Landscapes

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Vandenbroucke, Mieke

    2015-01-01

    This paper addresses the complex multilingual linguistic landscapes (LLs) of three strategically-chosen areas in global city Brussels by examining how language displays on public signage in these areas are used for different purposes, functions or intentions. The focus will be on meaning-construction in the post-Fordist globalised era as shaped by…

  4. The Cameroonian Experience in Mother Tongue Education Planning: The Community Response Framework

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Chiatoh, Blasius Agha-ah

    2014-01-01

    Although multilingualism is the norm in Africa the degree of linguistic complexity varies from one specific national context to another. While some countries are highly multilingual, others have fairly few languages. Similarly, whereas in some countries a good number of languages enjoy majority status; in others, we have a myriad of primarily…

  5. Saying What We Mean: Making a Case for "Language Acquisition" to Become "Language Development"

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Larsen-Freeman, Diane

    2015-01-01

    As applied linguists know very well, how we use language both constructs and reflects our understanding. It is therefore important that we use terms that do justice to our concerns. In this presentation, I suggest that a more apt designation than "multilingual" or "second language acquisition" (SLA) is "multilingual"…

  6. The Languages in Nigerian Socio-Political Domains: Features and Functions

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Ayeomoni, Moses Omoniyi

    2012-01-01

    This paper views Nigeria as a multilingual country with diverse languages and cultures to the extent that the total number of languages spoken right now in Nigeria is about 500 (See Adegbite 2010). This linguistic diversity in the country has occasioned the development and the spread of the concepts of bilingualism, multilingualism, diglossia and…

  7. Code-Switching in Higher Education in a Multilingual Environment: A Lebanese Exploratory Study

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Bahous, Rima N.; Nabhani, Mona Baroud; Bacha, Nahla Nola

    2014-01-01

    Research has shown that code-switching (CS) between languages in spoken discourse is prevalent in multilingual contexts and is used for many purposes. More recently, it has become the subject of much concern in academic contexts in negatively affecting students' language use and learning. However, while the concern has been increasing, no rigorous…

  8. Brought-Along Identities and the Dynamics of Ideology: Accomplishing Bivalent Stances in a Multilingual Interaction

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Williams, Ashley M.

    2008-01-01

    This paper examines how the interconnected aspects of the stance triangle (Du Bois 2007) allow speakers to tap into multiple ideological layers as they take a stance and reveal intra-ethnic group tensions. Using a detailed interaction analysis of a Chinese American family's multilingual interaction, the paper explores how such ideological dynamics…

  9. Multilingualism as Policy and Practices in Elementary School: Powerful Tools for Inclusion of Newly Arrived Pupils

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Wedin, Åsa; Wessman, Anneli

    2017-01-01

    In this article, language policy is analysed in relation to multilingual practices in primary school through an understanding of the policy on different levels--as management, perception and practice. The article is based on longitudinal ethnographic action research that was conducted parallel to local school development. Here we draw on material…

  10. When the Quiet Surfaces: "Transfer" of Argument Omission in the Speech of ASL-English Bilinguals

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Koulidobrova, Elena V.

    2012-01-01

    The main research question of this dissertation is the nature of language interaction effects observed in linguistic patterns of multilingual children. Such effects--often described as syntactic transfer/influence of one of the languages on the other--have been richly documented in the multilingualism literature. I review an influential model…

  11. Translanguaging on Facebook: Exploring Australian Aboriginal Multilingual Competence in Technology-Enhanced Environments and Its Pedagogical Implications

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Oliver, Rhonda; Nguyen, Bich

    2017-01-01

    In this study, we explore how Aboriginal multilingual speakers use technology-enhanced environments, specifically Facebook, for their translanguaging practices. Using data collected from Facebook posts written by seven Aboriginal youth over a period of 18 months, we investigate how the participants move between Aboriginal English (AE) and Standard…

  12. Patent Documents as a Resource for Studies and Education in Geophysics - An Approach.

    NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

    Wollny, K. G.

    2016-12-01

    Patents are a highly neglected source of information in geophysics, although they supply a wealth of technical and historically relevant data and might be an important asset for researchers and students. The technical drawings and descriptions in patent documents provide insight into the personal work of a researcher or a scientific group and give detailed technical background information, show interdisciplinary solutions for similar problems, help to learn about inventions too advanced for their time but maybe useful now, and to explore the historical background and timelines of inventions and their inventors. It will be shown how to get access to patent documents and how to use them for research and education purposes. Exemplary inventions by well-known geoscientists or scientists in related fields will be presented to illustrate the usefulness of patent documents. The data pool used is the International Patent Classification (IPC) class G01V that the United Nations' World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) has set up mainly for inventions with key aspects in geophysics. This class contains approximately 235,000 patent documents (July 2016) for methods, apparatuses or scientific instruments developed during scientific projects or by geophysical companies. The patent documents can be accessed via patent databases. The most important patent databases are for free, search functionality is self-explanatory and the amount of information to be extracted is enormous. For example, more than 90 million multilingual patent documents are currently available online (July 2016) in DEPATIS database of the German Patent and Trade Mark Office or ESPACENET of the European Patent Office. To summarize, patent documents are a highly useful tool for educational and research purposes to strengthen students' and scientists' knowledge in a practically orientated geophysical field and to widen the horizon to adjacent technical areas. Last but not least, they also provide insight into historical aspects of geophysics and the persons working in that area.

  13. Response practices in multilingual interaction with an older Persian woman in a Swedish residential home.

    PubMed

    Plejert, Charlotta; Jansson, Gunilla; Yazdanpanah, Maziar

    2014-03-01

    In the present case study, a care encounter between an older multilingual (Farsi/Swedish/English) Persian woman and staff in an ordinary, Swedish residential home is investigated. The woman is perceived as suffering from dementia symptoms, but has not received any formal diagnosis of the disease. More specifically, the study focuses on how the woman's contributions in her mother tongue, Farsi, are responded to by a carer, who is also multilingual and speaks Swedish as a second language (L2), but has a very limited knowledge of Farsi. The data consists of recorded material from a mundane morning activity in the residential home, as the woman is undressed and prepared to go to the shower. The method employed is conversation analysis, and the study addresses the interactional outcome of this type of multilingual encounters, highlighting the way the establishment of mutual understanding is negatively affected by the fact that the participants do not or only to a limited extent share a common language. Analysis of the data shows that most of the woman's contributions in Farsi are responded to in L2-Swedish by the carer, primarily by means of seven different response practices: soothing talk, instrumental talk, minimal responses, explicit expressions of understanding, mitigating talk, questions, and appraisal. The findings are discussed in light of new demands on Swedish (and Western) care- and health care systems to adapt to the increasing number of multilingual, older people, who will become residents in care facilities and attend day centers within the coming years.

  14. Use of Modality and Negation in Semantically-Informed Syntactic MT

    DTIC Science & Technology

    2012-06-01

    Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (LDOCE). 422 Baker et al. Modality and Negation in SIMT We produced the full English MN lexicon semi...English sentence pairs, and a bilingual dictionary with 113,911 entries. For our development and test sets, we split the NIST MT-08 test set into two...for combining MT and semantics (termed distillation) to answer the informa- tion needs of monolingual speakers using multilingual sources. Proper

  15. Language Learning Motivation and Language Attitudes in Multilingual Spain from an International Perspective

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Lasagabaster, David

    2017-01-01

    In Spain, more than 40% of the population lives in officially bilingual regions in which the minority language is used as a means of instruction at school and university. In addition, the increasing importance attached to learning English has led to the proliferation of multilingual school programs in which different languages are used to teach…

  16. Interactions between Three Phonological Subsystems of Young Multilinguals: The Influence of Language Status

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Kopecková, Romana; Marecka, Marta; Wrembel, Magdalena; Gut, Ulrike

    2016-01-01

    This study examines the interactions between three vocalic subsystems of multilingual speakers and explores the role language status might play in explaining variability across them. Eight 14-year-olds raised in Germany, who had learnt English at school for 6 years and Polish for 1 year, participated in the study. They were divided into three…

  17. From Biology to Education: Scoring and Clustering Multilingual Text Sequences and Other Sequential. Research Report. ETS RR-12-25

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Sukkarieh, Jane Z.; von Davier, Matthias; Yamamoto, Kentaro

    2012-01-01

    This document describes a solution to a problem in the automatic content scoring of the multilingual character-by-character highlighting item type. This solution is language independent and represents a significant enhancement. This solution not only facilitates automatic scoring but plays an important role in clustering students' responses;…

  18. "I Love This Book Because That's Like Me!" A Multilingual Refugee/Adolescent Girl Responds from Her Homeplace

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Stewart, Mary Amanda

    2017-01-01

    Research acknowledges the value of youths reading books that represent their lives and cultures, yet there is a growing need to better understand how youths of understudied groups respond to multicultural stories. This single-case study of a multilingual refugee adolescent from Burma (Myanmar) investigates how she draws from her lived experiences…

  19. Language Learning Motivation in the United States: An Examination of Language Choice and Multilingualism

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Thompson, Amy S.

    2017-01-01

    With the L2 Motivational Self System (L2MSS) as a framework, this study is an investigation of the relationships among motivation, language choice, and multilingualism using data from 195 undergraduate learners of languages other than English (LOTEs) in the context of the United States. Motivation is operationalized by the three aspects of self…

  20. Traces of Globalised Discourses within and around Spaces for Multilingualism: Prospects for Education Policy Change in Vanuatu

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Willans, Fiona

    2015-01-01

    This paper examines the way language-in-education policy-making in Vanuatu has dealt with multilingualism at three points in the nation's short history: in 1980, as the country gained its independence from Britain and France; in 1999, during a period of intense change across government departments following the Comprehensive Reform Programme…

  1. Understanding Different Levels of Group Functionality: Activity Systems Analysis of an Intercultural Telecollaborative Multilingual Digital Storytelling Project

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Priego, Sabrina; Liaw, Meei-Ling

    2017-01-01

    An Activity Theory framework has been increasingly applied for understanding the tension or contradictions in telecollaboration. However, to date, few researchers have applied it to the analysis of digital stories, and none of them, to our knowledge, have used it to analyze the co-creation of multilingual digital stories. In this study, we explore…

  2. Learning French as a Second Official Language in Canada: Comparing Monolingual and Bilingual Students at Grade 6

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Mady, Callie

    2014-01-01

    This paper presents the results of a study that compared the French as a second official achievement of three groups of students: (1) Canadian-born English speaking (CBE), (2) Canadian-born multilingual (CBM), and (3) immigrant multilinguals (IMM) as determined by multiskills test results. ANOVAs and subsequent post hoc tests revealed that the…

  3. Multilingual Generalization of the ModelCreator Software for Math Item Generation. Research Report. ETS RR-05-02

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Higgins, Derrick; Futagi, Yoko; Deane, Paul

    2005-01-01

    This paper reports on the process of modifying the ModelCreator item generation system to produce output in multiple languages. In particular, Japanese and Spanish are now supported in addition to English. The addition of multilingual functionality was considerably facilitated by the general formulation of our natural language generation system,…

  4. English as a Global Lingua Franca: A Threat to Multilingual Communication and Translation?

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    House, Juliane

    2014-01-01

    In this paper I will look at the controversy surrounding the current status of English in the world. I will consider the question of whether the dominant role of English as a lingua franca (ELF) is a menace to other languages, to multilingual communication and to the profession of translation and interpreting, or whether a positive evaluation of…

  5. Reading in Multilingual Learners of Urdu (L1), English (L2) and Arabic (L3)

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Mirza, Amna; Gottardo, Alexandra; Chen, Xi

    2017-01-01

    The present study examined the language and literacy skills and their relations to each other in multilingual children, who have a broad range of oral and written language proficiency in each language that they "know". Reading and vocabulary skills were tested in 50 Canadian children (ages 6-10 years) who were Urdu-English speakers,…

  6. The Demand for Multilingual Human Capital in the U.S. Labor Market

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Damari, Rebecca Rubin; Rivers, William P.; Brecht, Richard D.; Gardner, Philip; Pulupa, Catherine; Robinson, John

    2017-01-01

    This article presents the results of a 2014 survey of more than 2,100 U.S. employers on their requirements for multilingual employees. The survey found a significant discrepancy: On the one hand, 93% of respondents "value[d] employees who…are able to work effectively with customers, clients, and businesses from a range of different countries…

  7. Speech, Sign, or Multilingualism for Children with Hearing Loss: Quantitative Insights into Caregivers' Decision Making

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Crowe, Kathryn; McLeod, Sharynne; McKinnon, David H.; Ching, Teresa Y. C.

    2014-01-01

    Purpose: The authors sought to investigate the influence of a comprehensive range of factors on the decision making of caregivers of children with hearing loss regarding the use of speech, the use of sign, spoken language multilingualism, and spoken language choice. This is a companion article to the qualitative investigation described in Crowe,…

  8. Linguicism in Hollywood Movies? Representations of, and Audience Reactions to Multilingualism in Mainstream Movie Dialogues

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Bleichenbacher, Lukas

    2012-01-01

    Hollywood movies have been a prime site for the representation of intercultural and multilingual encounters for decades. As such, they are not only of interest to everyday cinemagoers or home viewers, but have increasingly attracted the attention of scholars from various disciplines, including socio-linguistics. A main focus of much previous work,…

  9. Bruce Randolph High School: A Case Study of an Urban School Becoming Successful for Multilingual Learners

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Davis, Alan; Mitchell, Kara; Dray, Barbara; Keenan, Tracy

    2012-01-01

    Working in a research collaborative between Denver Public Schools and the University of Colorado Denver, the authors selected Bruce Randolph High School (BRHS) as a case study because of its growth on state academic achievement tests and because of its multilingual learners. After a difficult beginning, BRHS has established an inclusive culture of…

  10. Receptive Multilingualism as a Strategy for Sharing Mutual Linguistic Resources in the Workplace in a Swiss Context

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Lüdi, Georges

    2013-01-01

    The growing mobility of populations in important parts of the world has led, and is continuing to lead, to a lasting change from monolingual to multilingual teams of people working together, and the need for techniques for communication between people of different languages. A frequent stereotype envisages the most convenient solution as the…

  11. Learning Concepts, Language, and Literacy in Hybrid Linguistic Codes: The Multilingual Maze of Urban Grade 1 Classrooms in South Africa

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Henning, Elizabeth

    2012-01-01

    From the field of developmental psycholinguistics and from conceptual development theory there is evidence that excessive linguistic "code-switching" in early school education may pose some hazards for the learning of young multilingual children. In this article the author addresses the issue, invoking post-Piagetian and neo-Vygotskian…

  12. Diverse Multilingual Researchers Contribute Language Acquisition Components to an Integrated Model of Education

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Hobbs, Robert Dean

    2012-01-01

    Evidence-based outcomes in the literature have caused adjustments in neuro-psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic perspectives that indicate a need for a current model of education. Implications from research suggest the new model of education should use a multilingual framework: L3 enhances and reinforces L2 and L1, if L2 and L1 are supported. The…

  13. The Use of Indigenous Languages in Early Basic Education in Papua New Guinea: A Model for Elsewhere?

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Klaus, David

    2003-01-01

    Suggests Papua New Guinea offers a practical example of how a small, multilingual country with limited resources has developed a package of strategies for dealing with the challenges of multilingualism and using its multiplicity of languages in education as a tool for improving teaching and learning, saving resources, and moving towards education…

  14. Language Choice and Use of Malaysian Public University Lecturers in the Education Domain

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Mei, Tam Lee; Abdullah, Ain Nadzimah; Heng, Chan Swee; Kasim, Zalina Binti Mohd

    2016-01-01

    It is a norm for people from a multilingual and multicultural country such as Malaysia to speak at least two or more languages. Thus, the Malaysian multilingual situation resulted in speakers having to make decisions about which languages are to be used for different purposes in different domains. In order to explain the phenomenon of language…

  15. On Not Taking Language Inequality for Granted: Hymesian Traces in Ethnographic Monitoring of South Africa's Multilingual Language Policy

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Hornberger, Nancy H.

    2014-01-01

    South African higher education is at a critical juncture in the implementation of South Africa's multilingual language policy promoting institutional status for nine African languages, English, and Afrikaans. South African scholars, not content merely to comment from the sidelines on the policy, its promise, and challenges, have also engaged in…

  16. Composing a Narrative Story in a Third Language: Multilinguals' Reliance on Multiple Languages in an L3 Linguistic Task

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Pap, Emese Boksay

    2016-01-01

    This paper reports on the results of an exploratory study that employed the concurrent think-aloud method to investigate narrative text-creating strategies of multilingual Transylvanian-Hungarians in English, their third language. The study explored the participants' reliance on their different languages as they composed a story in English based…

  17. "Please Do Not Leave Any Notes for the Cleaning Lady, as Many Do Not Speak English Fluently": Policy, Power, and Language Brokering in a Multilingual Workplace

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Gonçalves, Kellie; Schluter, Anne

    2017-01-01

    This article investigates the covert language policy and micro-language planning practices of one female Brazilian-American entrepreneur, Magda, within her multilingual cleaning company. Because Magda is plurilingual (Spolsky in "Language policy." Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004), she is able to draw on her metalinguistic…

  18. Unexpected Languages: Multilingualism and Contact in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century North America

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Phillips, Lisa

    2011-01-01

    This exploration of the languages of contact in the North American British-US borderlands in the period between 1783 and 1860 provides insights into the types of extended contact that occurred in the areas north of 42[degrees] and south of 50[degrees]. Although multilingualism was the norm in the Old Northwest and the old Oregon Territory during…

  19. Translanguaging and the Multilingual Turn: Epistemological Reconceptualization in the Fields of Language and Implications for Reframing Language in Curriculum Studies

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Sembiante, Sabrina

    2016-01-01

    New challenges in education, stemming from the forces of globalization and the continued diversification of the student body, illuminate the need for a reexamination of the role of language in curriculum studies. Through a discussion of the issues around multilingualism and translanguaging and the shift in perspective that these topics have…

  20. The Development of Language and Reading Skills in the Second and Third Languages of Multilingual Children in French Immersion

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Berube, Daniel; Marinova-Todd, Stefka H.

    2012-01-01

    The relationship between first language (L1) typology, defined as the classification of languages according to their structural characteristics (e.g. phonological systems and writing systems), and the development of second (L2) and third (L3) language skills and literacy proficiency in multilingual children was investigated in this study. The…

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