Page 4 - ELG1702 Feb Issue 444

Page 4 ELresearch February 2017

Got the Machines, masters and music

moves?

Claudia Civinini presents a round-up of the latest ELT and applied linguistics research
HOW CAN you verify if an L2
speaker can think in their L2?
They have the moves of a native
speaker of that language. Lan- Mapping the masters market Grammar
guages conceptualise the world
in different ways, and the L1’s
lexico-semantic and morpho- groove
syntactic structures are difficult A TEAM of researchers at the ing processes. The third phase
to completely leave behind when University of Stirling has set out consisted of four focus groups
speaking an L2. The study Getting to take the pulse of the ELT mas- with students – two in Eng- MUSICAL ABILITY and lan-
it Right: Advanced Danish Learners ters provision in the UK. With land, one in Scotland and one in guage skills are related, a number
of Italian Acquire Speech and Ges- our experience in compiling huge Northern Ireland. of studies have suggested. How-
ture L2 Forms by the University of lists of masters, it doesn’t come The team is still going through ever, a 2014 study sheds some
Copenhagen tested the ability of as a surprise that such research the data, but they have shared light on which specific aspect of
a group of highly advanced Dan- would attract our attention. with the Gazette some interesting language is correlated to musical
ish learners of Italian to reproduce In a study funded by the insights emerging from their work. ability. A sample of 25 children
L2 semantic representation and British Council, the team has On the providers’ side, the team aged five-to-seven years old per-
gesture patterns. It analysed the indexed UK ELT masters pro- has some good news. Although formed four standardised tests:
concept of motion: in verb-framed vision and elicited students’ the ELT-related masters course rhythm perception, phonologi-
languages (such as Romance lan- opinions on a range of topics provision could be considered cal awareness, morpho-syntactic
guages) the path is expressed in related to their programmes. overcrowded, the UK has an edge competence (grammar) and non-
the verb (think of ‘enter’) and As well as practical guidance over its US and Australian com- verbal cognitive ability. After
the manner in other parts of the for providers and recruiters, the petitors, as one-year programmes controlling for non-verbal IQ,
sentence such as adverbs. In team hopes to develop a theoret- seem to be a pull factor for inter- socioeconomic status and prior
satellite-framed languages (such ical understanding of the student national students. musical activities, rhythm per-
as English or Danish), the path experience, which has been lack- However, the student body ception ‘accounted for 48 per
is usually expressed outside the ing to date for Tesol students. has changed over the years, and cent of the variance in morpho-
main verb (think of phrasal verbs) The study was articulated the researchers urge providers syntactic competence’.
and the manner in the main verb. over three phases. The first one to know their students well and The authors comment in the
When Italian speakers divide path audited all ELT masters courses make sure they offer what they Courtesy Professor Fiona Copland discussion that children with
and manner (‘the ball entered the in the UK with the help of their ask for. Compared to the past, higher rhythm discrimination
room rolling’), they also produce programme directors, and will more and more pre-service teach- skills may be more sensitive
two gestures. When they express be transformed into a list of 144 ers choose courses that were to those variations in speech
path and manner in the main verb courses with details of key fea- before populated only by expe- rhythm that mark ‘grammati-
and particle construction (‘the ball tures. This will be available on rienced teachers. The team said MASTERING THE THEORY Dr Vander Viana, Prof Fiona cal events’. n
rolled into the room’), they produce the British Council website in that students are starting to see Copland and Dr David Bowker, part of the research team
one gesture. The study participants’ the next couple of months. The ELT masters as an ‘entry level Reyna L. Gordon et al. ‘Musical
gestures while recounting short second part surveyed 500 stu- qualification’ into the teaching ules are the most popular; apart into the top 10. rhythm discrimination explains indi-
cartoon videos showed that they dents at the start of their courses profession. This shows also in from second language acquisi- The study will be published vidual differences in grammar skills
mastered the underlying Italian con- and 350 at the end, gauging the modules that students choose: tion, only one theoretical module soon on the British Council’s web- in children,’ Developmental Science,
ceptualisation of motion. n expectations and decision-mak- practical and pedagogical mod- (research methodology) made it site – maybe in time for Iatefl. n 2014; DOI: 10.1111/desc.12230
Do you speak science?

HAS ENGLISH removed all understood without appropri- reports, often find it challenging The paper puts forward some
barriers to the global sharing of ate foreign language skills, and to have their work published in solutions to these issues: mul-
knowledge? A paper published cannot be found using English English if this is not their first tilingual panels conducting
in PLOS Biology, ‘Languages keywords. This lack of access language. systematic reviews; use of non-
are still a major barrier to global to non-English knowledge can Conversely, the over-repre- English search terms; developing
science’, thinks otherwise. cause gaps and biases in the sentation of English as the lingua a database of non-English lit-
Using Google Scholar in understanding of global issues franca of science has made sci- erature relevant to each field; and
sixteen languages, research- – and the paper explains that entific knowledge unavailable translation of paper summaries in
ers surveyed 75,513 scientific systematic reviews, for exam- in local languages, as more and multiple languages. The authors
documents on biodiversity con- ple, could be biased, as positive more researchers aim to publish also suggest that institutions
servation published in 2014 or statistically significant results in English. A survey of 44 pro- should invest more in outreach
and found that 35 per cent of are more likely to be published tected areas in Spain revealed activities aimed at overcoming
them were not in English, with in high-impact English language that half of their directors iden- language barriers. n
most of these providing neither journals. Also, some local and tified languages as a barrier to
an abstract nor a title in Eng- indigenous knowledge could using scientific knowledge as a See http://journals.plos.org/
lish. This means that most of be underrepresented in English, source of information for man- plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/
those documents cannot be fully as field practitioners, the paper agement. journal.pbio.2000933

Sheffield’s £1m for natural learning

A RESEARCH team from the over five years and will consist understanding of pragmatics and classroom intervention studies.
University of Sheffield in the UK of three components. semantics, Dr Divjak explained The aim is to mirror natural lan-
has been awarded a £1 million The first three-year com- that their previous work had guage learning, moving towards
grant by the Leverhulme Trust ponent will gather data on the shown that a standard statistical replacing explicit grammar
to carry out a major research linguistic knowledge of native classifier can actually predict as instruction with implicit learn-
project with an ambitious aim: speakers. What do speakers well as a native speaker which ing. This will be achieved, for
make language learning more know about their own language? of six synonyms to choose, with- example, by exposing students
natural for adults. This will be conducted through out the semantic knowledge. Dr to comprehensible input packed
Team members Dr Dagmar a series of experiments, from Milin explained that the learning with examples of the pattern they
Divjak and Dr Petar Milin repre- cloze (gap-fill) and correction algorithms they plan to use are intend to learn. ‘We’ll try to stay
sent expertise from a wide range exercises to other lab-based all biologically (or psychologi- as close as possible to how peo-
of fields, from linguistics and techniques such as eye-tracking. cally) plausible. For example, ple learn their first language,’ the
psychology to machine learning, The second component will one of the core algorithms, which team said. ‘Learning may not be
and are supported by research focus on machine learning and was co-developed by Dr Milin, easier, but more natural.’
software engineer Dr Mike run parallel to the first. The is similar to conditioning, refer- We take the opportunity to
Croucher. two components will cross- ring to the famous Pavlov’s Dog congratulate the team on the
In their project, they aim to inform one another. The patterns experiment. Cues such as words achievement and wish them well
reach a deeper understanding of of learning that emerge from that co-occur in a context can for their project. Since last year,
what speakers know about their the tests performed by native allow machines to predict what we have started to interview aca-
first language and, with the aid speakers will inform a series of comes next – in the same way demics again with our long-time
of machine-learning techniques algorithms. These will be tested that humans do. favourite question: what would
that mimic the way humans by using them to predict the out- The third and final compo- you do with a £1 million grant?
learn, find a new way to teach come of the experiments from nent, of about three years, will be Since then, two research teams
foreign languages to adults. the first component of the study, dedicated to the development of have won such grants in ELT
They will concentrate on the two to try and replicate the way teaching materials based on the – one in the US (January 2017
most widely spoken languages humans learn. patterns that the machines have Gazette, we’ll interview them
in the UK, Polish and English. When asked how they would flagged up as important. The soon) and one in Sheffield. We
The study will be carried out account for the machines’ lack of materials will be tested through start to sense a pattern here. n

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