Communication is central to all people and societies. Our ability to communicate impacts our identity, relationships, education, employment, self-determination, and engagement in community, social, ...and civic life. Our nation's prosperity, health, wellbeing, and security requires successful communication. Communication is enshrined by the United Nations as a human right (McLeod, 2018; United Nations, 1948). Communication mediates children's behaviour, learning, and socialisation. There is a strong link between children's communication ability and their educational, social and occupational outcomes, behaviour, mental health issues, and involvement with criminal justice (Cronin et al., 2020; McCormack et al., 2011; McGregor, 2020; McLeod, 2018; McLeod, Harrison et al., 2019).
This book explores the growing tension between multilingualism and monolingualism in the European Union in the wake of Brexit, underpinned by the interplay between the rise of English as a lingua ...franca and the effacement of translations in EU institutions, bodies and agencies.
English and Translation in the European Union draws on an interdisciplinary approach, highlighting insights from applied linguistics and sociolinguistics, translation studies, philosophy of language and political theory, while also looking at official documents and online resources, most of which are increasingly produced in English and not translated at all – and the ones which are translated into other languages are not labelled as translations. In analysing this data, Alice Leal explores issues around language hierarchy and the growing difficulty in reconciling the EU’s approach to promoting multilingualism while fostering monolingualism in practice through the diffusion of English as a lingua franca, as well as questions around authenticity in the translation process and the boundaries between source and target texts. The volume also looks ahead to the implications of Brexit for this tension, while proposing potential ways forward, encapsulated in the language turn, the translation turn and the transcultural turn for the EU.
Offering unique insights into contemporary debates in the humanities, this book will be of interest to scholars in translation studies, applied linguistics and sociolinguistics, philosophy and political theory.
Multilingual higher education Van der Walt, Christa
Multilingual Matters,
2013., 2013, 2013-04-12, Letnik:
91
eBook, Book
The general perception that a good command of English is enough to gain access and to be successful in higher education hides the complexity of learning and teaching in multilingual environments, and ...this book shows that all higher education environments are multilingual to some extent. Strategies like translation, interpreting and switching from one language to another not only support learning but also build competence for multilingual professional environments. Whether institutions focus on widening access to minoritised communities or whether they want to attract more international students, the book argues that a multilingual pedagogy is needed to improve student access and success. Building on work by Nancy Hornberger, Colin Baker and Ofelia Garcia, the book extends strategies and techniques from bilingual education at school level to multilingual higher education.
This volume approaches current multilingualism as a new linguistic dispensation, in urgent need of research-led, reflective scrutiny. The book addresses the emergent global and local patterns of ...multingual use and acquisition across the world and explores the major trends that characterize today's multilingualism. Its fifteen chapters discuss a range of issues relating to the quintessential and unique properties of multilingual situations.
Abstract Multiple-choice test generation is one of the most complex NLP problems, especially in languages other than English, where there is a lack of prior research. After a review of the ...literature, it has been verified that some methods like the usage of rule-based systems or primitive neural networks have led to the application of a recent architecture, the Transformer architecture, in the tasks of Answer Extraction (AE) and Question Generation (QG). Thereby, this study is centred in searching and developing better models for the AE and QG tasks in Spanish, using an answer-aware methodology. For this purpose, three multilingual models (mT5-base, mT0-base and BLOOMZ-560 M) have been fine-tuned using three different datasets: a translation to Spanish of the SQuAD dataset; SQAC, which is a dataset in Spanish; and their union (SQuAD + SQAC), which shows slightly better results. Regarding the models, the performance of mT5-base has been compared with that found in two newer models, mT0-base and BLOOMZ-560 M. These models were fine-tuned for multiple tasks in literature, including AE and QG, but, in general, the best results are obtained from the mT5 models trained in our study with the SQuAD + SQAC dataset. Nonetheless, some other good results are obtained from mT5 models trained only with the SQAC dataset. For their evaluation, the widely used BLEU1-4, METEOR and ROUGE-L metrics have been obtained, where mT5 outperforms some similar research works. Besides, CIDEr, SARI, GLEU, WER and the cosine similarity metrics have been calculated to present a benchmark within the AE and QG problems for future work.
This book promotes understanding of multilingualism based on the research efforts at the frontiers with state-of-the-art approaches or novel interdisciplinary perspectives. It addresses issues of the ...impact of multilingualism on cultural awareness and national identity, gives an overview on how multilingual speakers benefit themselves in learning and communicative competence, and describes the association between multilingualism and media, health, and society.
This innovative collection explores critical issues in understanding multilingualism as a defining dimension of identity creation and negotiation in contemporary social life. Reinforcing ...interdisciplinary conversations on these themes, each chapter is co-authored by two different researchers, often those who have not written together before. The combined effect is a volume showcasing unique and dynamic perspectives on such topics as rethinking of language policy, testing of language rights, language pedagogy, meaning-making, and activism in the linguistic landscape. The book explores multilingualism through the lenses of spaces and policies as embodied in Elizabeth Lanza’s body of work in the field, with a focus on the latest research on linguistic landscapes in diverse settings. Taken together, the book offers a window into better understanding issues around processes of change in and of languages and societies. This ground breaking volume will be of particular interest to students and scholars in multilingualism, applied linguistics, and sociolinguistics.
This book interrogates and problematises African multilingualism as it is currently understood in language education and research. It challenges the enduring colonial matrices of power hidden within ...mainstream conceptions of multilingualism that have been propagated in the Global North and then exported to the Global South under the aegis of colonial modernity and pretensions of universal epistemic relevance. The book contributes new points of method, theory and interpretation that will advance scholarly conversations on decolonial epistemology by introducing the notion of coloniality of language – a summary term that describes the ways in which notions of language and multilingualism in post-colonial societies remain colonial. The authors begin the process of mapping out what a socially realistic notion of multilingualism would look like if we took into account the voices of marginalised and ignored African communities of practice – both on the African continent and in the diasporas.
Although working memory (WM) figures centrally in many theories of second language (L2) proficiency development and processing, some have argued that the importance of WM is overstated (e.g., Juffs,
...Transactions of the Philological Society, 102
, 199–225,
2004
). Despite many studies over the past two decades, the literature lacks a quantitative synthesis of the extant results. In this article, we report a meta-analysis of data from 79 samples involving 3,707 participants providing 748 effect sizes. The results indicate that WM is positively associated with both L2 processing and proficiency outcomes, with an estimated population effect size (
ρ
) of .255. In additional analyses, we assessed whether the WM–criterion relationship was modulated by potential covariates identified in the literature search (i.e., participant characteristics, WM measure features, criterion measure factors, and publication status). The results of the covariate analyses indicated larger effect sizes for the executive control (vs. storage) component of WM, and for verbal (vs. nonverbal) measures of WM. Minimal publication bias was detected, suggesting that WM has a robust, positive relationship with L2 outcomes. We discuss the implications of these results for models of WM and theories of L2 processing and L2 proficiency development.
Unsupervised pre-training of large neural models has recently revolutionized Natural Language Processing. By warm-starting from the publicly released checkpoints, NLP practitioners have pushed the ...state-of-the-art on multiple benchmarks while saving significant amounts of compute time. So far the focus has been mainly on the Natural Language Understanding tasks. In this paper, we demonstrate the efficacy of pre-trained checkpoints for Sequence Generation. We developed a Transformer-based sequence-to-sequence model that is compatible with publicly available pre-trained BERT, GPT-2, and RoBERTa checkpoints and conducted an extensive empirical study on the utility of initializing our model, both encoder and decoder, with these checkpoints. Our models result in new state-of-the-art results on Machine Translation, Text Summarization, Sentence Splitting, and Sentence Fusion.
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