Throughout the history of contemporary Translation Studies, theoretical, empirical and pedagogically oriented work has made use of a range of notions that assume a translator’s metalinguistic ...knowledge, or knowledge about language, rather than knowledge of a language or languages. Examples include ideas such as ‘translation strategies’, translational ‘problem-solving’, ‘the monitor model’ and models of translator competence. Issues related to learning, automatization, and consciousness also figure in many of the discussions. At the same time, studies in bi- and multilingualism and second (and third) language acquisition have also developed a range of related ideas and concepts to deal with some of the same issues and concerns in bi- and multilingual language production more broadly (see e.g. Jessner 2006: 40-43). Some recent translation process studies have begun to target questions related to metalinguistic awareness (e.g. Ehrensberger-Dow/Künzli 2010, Ehrensberger-Dow/Perrin 2009) while the underlying assumptions of some of the commonly used ideas are also being questioned (e.g. Muñoz Martín 2016a). The range of available ideas, the significant differences between them, and the increasingly important role these ideas are playing in cognitive translation research mandate a critical look at this conceptual field. In this paper, I present some current views on metalinguistic knowledge/awareness/ability within the bi- and multilingualism and second language acquisition (SLA) literature, and compare these to some of the most widely used constructs in Cognitive Translation Studies (CTS). The aim is to clear the conceptual ground and to single out some of the most pressing questions to be addressed regarding this particular aspect of translational cognition.
There is no consensus on how the disruption or maintenance of heritage culture and language affect mental health outcomes in adolescents with a migrant (also known as "immigrant" or "international ...migrant") background. Even though previous literature reviews have investigated the association between acculturation and mental health in migrants, none have explicitly focused on adolescents.
The aim of the scoping review described in this protocol is to understand (1) the focus, scope, and nature of quantitative empirical research investigating heritage cultural maintenance, including linguistic maintenance, and mental health outcomes in adolescents with a migrant background worldwide and (2) the potential effects of cultural and linguistic maintenance or disruption on migrant adolescent mental health outcomes.
A total of 11 key electronic health, medical, social science, and language databases (APA PsycArticles Full Text; Embase Classic+Embase; Ovid MEDLINE All and Epub Ahead of Print, In-Process, In-Data-Review and Other Non-Indexed Citations and Daily; Ovid MEDLINE All; APA PsycInfo; University of Melbourne full-text journals; Science Citation Index Expanded; Social Sciences Citation Index; Arts & Humanities Citation Index; Scopus; Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts) were searched. Databases were searched without time restrictions from the beginning of their coverage. Publication date, location, and quantitative study design (except for literature reviews) were not restricted; however, the search was only conducted in English. Data from included studies will be extracted using a template with predefined data items, and results will be summarized in a structured, narrative summary.
A search was conducted on April 20, 2021, returning 2569 results. We are currently at the final stages of screening titles and abstracts of our search results, which will be followed by a full-text review and the data extraction of included studies. We expect to submit the full review for publication by the end of 2023.
The scoping review aims to provide a better understanding of existing research on the association between cultural (including linguistic) maintenance and mental health in migrant adolescents. It will help identify gaps in the existing literature and develop hypotheses that could inform future research, eventually facilitating the development of targeted prevention initiatives and improving migrant adolescents' well-being.
DERR1-10.2196/40143.
In the process of internationalization of universities, the articulation between local and global contexts depends on various factors including that of linguistic capital, that is to say, the sum of ...resources and language skills that allow stakeholders, teachers, researchers and students to participate in different levels of knowledge flows. To better understand how this works, the paper proposes some principles of analysis of knowledge flows, based on one of the author's interventions and expertise in academic fieldwork in South America, inspired by the concept of glottopolitics which highlights the impact of speakers as linguistic policy stakeholders whose linguistic activity should be considered in the strategic analysis of organizations. In conclusion, it is suggested that improved knowledge of available linguistic capital within universities will lead to better governance of internationalization strategies by managing language practices between local, regional and international languages.
Multilingual pedagogies draw on learners' prior language knowledge and can offer considerable advantages in learning the target language. Yet language instruction, particularly in foreign language ...learning contexts, does not often capitalise on the multilingual assets of learners. The goal of this study is to understand what determines the implementation of multilingual pedagogies in two institutes of German as Foreign Language, one in the US and one in India. In this comparative case study, ecological perspectives are adopted to examine what factors impede or foster the use of multilingual pedagogies in adult foreign language instruction in both schools. Data collection methods involved open-ended questionnaires, semi-structured interviews with teachers and an analysis of context-specific documents. Findings revealed that there were encouraging, constraining and contingent factors across both schools. While some factors were common to both schools, and there were other context-specific factors that determined the adoption of multilingual teaching. The results of the study also reflect larger issues such as a gap between theory and practice and a lack of teacher collaboration. The paper concludes with some suggestions on how such issues might be addressed.
This study reports on how students construct new language knowledge by indirect feedback in web-based collaborative writing. Indirect feedback (text organization, reader-based perspectives, and ...clarity of purpose) encourages students to negotiate meaning instead of merely copying peers' direct feedback on grammatical corrections. According to the pre-test, 54 students were divided into the more- and less-proficient groups with 27 students in each group. The pre- and post-tests, students' log files recorded in the system, and an open-ended questionnaire were used in this study. The results indicate that the more-proficient students were able to provide indirect feedback to elaborate their thoughts. They further made decisions on accepting or rejecting their peers' or the teacher's suggestions while they integrated previous knowledge with new information they had learned from their peers and the teacher, which lead to new ideas generated in the final drafts. In contrast, the less-proficient students had predominantly copied their peers' direct feedback and corrected grammatical errors as they were not capable of producing indirect feedback. After engaging in more learning with the help from the more-proficient peers, the less-proficient students made more writing progress with indirect feedback than the more-proficient students. Through indirect feedback to construct new language knowledge, web-based collaborative writing fostered the more- and less-proficient students to learn from each other by negotiating meaning for text improvement.
In a recent study of trends in language teaching pedagogy, I identified a major professional dichotomy regarding preferred approaches to the teaching of ‘language knowledge’. In general, it was shown ...that the theoretical discourse of language teaching favoured a ‘communicating-to-learn’ approach in the matter (e.g., task-based learning), whereas the practitioner ‘world’ leaned more towards a ‘learning-to-communicate’ approach (e.g., Presentation–Practice–Production). The purpose of this paper is to build on these findings by attempting to determine to what extent either of these pedagogic stances can be justified. In doing so, recent research and theorising on the workings of memory in relation to the learning of factual information is reviewed. On the basis of the characteristics of cognitive architecture that this literature describes, it is taken to indicate that i), long-term memorisation of knowledge is the key to skilled performance, and ii), guided or ‘direct’ instruction is superior to problem-solving or discovery-oriented forms of pedagogy in facilitating the long-term learning of factual information. Following this, the implications of these findings for language teaching pedagogy are discussed. In particular, they are seen to provide a rationale for current professional perspectives concerning the teaching of language knowledge to be re-conceptualised.
The importance of reading is especially emphasized nowadays when the majority of information, irrespective of the source (books, daily press, professional literature, web sources, etc.), is primarily ...accessed via reading. Therefore, effective reading and reading comprehension are important in everyday life, but also in an academic setting. This particularly refers to pre-service preschool and primary school teachers, whose teacher training courses imply a good command of reading skills, but also teaching skills required for the development and teaching of pre-reading and reading skills. In L2 reading, there are additional issues that need to be considered, principally the possibility of skill transfer between the mother tongue and the second/foreign language. Hence, this research aimed to test reading comprehension in both Croatian (L1) and English (L2) languages in a group of university students (N=83), studying to become pre-service preschool and primary school teachers. Reading comprehension tests and a background questionnaire were used as research instruments in this mixed-method research. Contrary to our expectations, reading comprehension test results were fairly low, i.e. out of a total of 17 points, the mean results for the Croatian language reading comprehension test were M=13.6 (SD=2.05), while for the English language reading comprehension test they were M=11.29 (SD=2.24). The results were further correlated with the participants’ self-assessed language knowledge and reading abilities in both languages. A positive correlation was found only between the English language reading comprehension test and the participants’ self-assessed language knowledge and reading ability. Based on the obtained results, it may be proposed that teachers should focus more on developing reading skills and reading comprehension at all levels as well as in all of the languages that the learners are acquiring, especially in view of the proposed possibility of the transfer of skills among languages.
Social media websites allow users to exchange short texts such as tweets via microblogs and user status in friendship networks. Their limited length, pervasive abbreviations, and coined acronyms and ...words exacerbate the problems of synonymy and polysemy, and bring about new challenges to data mining applications such as text clustering and classification. To address these issues, we dissect some potential causes and devise an efficient approach that enriches data representation by employing machine translation to increase the number of features from different languages. Then we propose a novel framework which performs multi-language knowledge integration and feature reduction simultaneously through matrix factorization techniques. The proposed approach is evaluated extensively in terms of effectiveness on two social media datasets from Facebook and Twitter. With its significant performance improvement, we further investigate potential factors that contribute to the improved performance.
Course materials play a vital role in the foreign language classroom. Relatively little attention has been paid, however, to analyzing the activities that foster oral interactional ability in course ...materials for English as a foreign language (EFL). For the purpose of this study, a coding scheme was designed that focuses specifically on the development of interactional ability. This was used to analyse the three most commonly used EFL course books for pre-vocational learners in the Netherlands. The analysis revealed that course books focus more on developing language knowledge than on developing the ability to use this knowledge in interaction, that interactional strategies practice is missing, and that interactional practice is limited to the personal and public context. We conclude that EFL course books lag behind current theories of second language acquisition (SLA) in the practical application of activities focused on developing interactional ability. Recommendations to strengthen the link between theory and practice are made.
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