We investigated the impact of narrative task complexity on macrostructure in both languages of bilingual kindergarten children and the relationship of macrostructure across languages to guide ...practitioners' choice of assessment tools and aid in interpretation of results.
Thirty-nine English-Hebrew bilingual kindergarten children (
= 65 months) retold two narratives in each language: a one-episode story and a three-episode story. Stories were coded for macrostructure using five story grammar (SG) elements: Internal State-Initiating Event, Goal, Attempt, Outcome, and Internal State-Reaction. Linear mixed and generalized linear mixed models were used to analyze scores for total macrostructure, episode, and SG elements; correlations were conducted to examine cross-language relations in macrostructure.
In general, performance on the single-episode story was significantly better than for the three-episode story: higher percentages of SG elements were produced, with better performance in the home language/English. In addition to Task and Language effects, Age and Episode (Episodes 1/2/3 of the three-episode story vs. one-episode story) emerged as predictors of macrostructure. Performance on the different episodes of the three-episode story varied, with Episode 3 yielding scores similar to those on the one-episode story. Children produced more Attempts and Outcomes than other SG elements. Finally, the total macrostructure scores yielded low to moderate correlations across languages for both one-episode and three-episode stories, but there were no significant cross-task (one-episode/three-episode story) correlations.
The study illustrates the importance of task complexity in narrative performance. Ideally, assessment should include a variety of tools, which would include narratives varying in complexity. However, time constraints do not always permit this luxury. The findings here may offer more to therapists than to diagnosticians. Narratives should be manipulated for episodic complexity not only in the number of episodes but also with regard to characters, goals, feelings, and reactions to events.
https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.25222094.
The purpose of this study was to investigate the diagnostic accuracy of two measures derived from spontaneous language samples, mean length of utterance in words (MLUw) and percentage of grammatical ...utterances (PGU), in identifying developmental language disorder (DLD) in Spanish-English bilingual children. We examined two approaches: best language and total language.
The participants in this study included 74 Spanish-English bilingual children with (
= 36) and without (
= 38) DLD. Language samples were elicited through a story retell and story generation task using Frog wordless picture books in English and Spanish. Stories were transcribed and coded using the Systematic Analysis of Language Samples (Miller & Iglesias, 2020) to extract MLUw and PGU in both languages.
Logistic regression analyses suggested that a model that included PGU, MLUw, and age achieved the best diagnostic accuracy in predicting group membership. Both approaches, best language and total language, had fair diagnostic accuracy.
In combination, PGU and MLUw seem to be useful diagnostic tools to differentiate bilingual children with and without DLD. Clinical implications and usability are discussed.
As translanguaging gains traction in language education, its political and ideological implications are becoming central considerations to researchers and practitioners. In this introductory article ...to the special issue, “Translingual and Multilingual Pedagogies” for the EuroAmerican Journal of Applied Linguistics and Languages, we provide a conceptual point of departure on the notion of translanguaging by revisiting Li Wei’s (2011) threefold description of its prefix trans- (i.e., transcending, transformative, transdisciplinary), which we expand by adding a new definitional element, transgressive, to reflect our understanding of translanguaging as politically charged and disruptive by virtue. We then move on to provide an overview of the articles and book reviews included in this special issue.
The use of online videos as a teaching resource is gaining importance. It opens up opportunities for the creation of knowledge, as educational content can now be accessed by anyone with an Internet ...connection. This democratisation of access to knowledge can also be seen in the language learning context, where English language teachers create online videos for a transnational audience. In this paper, we present a case study of how two online English teachers ‘do expertise’ in their lessons, drawing on their multilingual and multimodal repertoire so that expertise is talked into being. We conducted semi-structured interviews and analysed them by interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) to make sense of the teachers’ experiences of designing online teaching materials, and how their expertise was talked into being in the process. The aim of this paper is to contribute to understanding of expertise in the context of online language teaching. We argue that online teachers ‘do expertise’ by drawing on their multimodal design knowledge, pedagogical knowledge and linguistic knowledge.
Acquiring the desired font for various design tasks can be challenging and requires professional typographic knowledge. While previous font retrieval or generation works have alleviated some of these ...difficulties, they often lack support for multiple languages and semantic attributes beyond the training data domains. To solve this problem, we present FontCLIP – a model that connects the semantic understanding of a large vision‐language model with typographical knowledge. We integrate typography‐specific knowledge into the comprehensive vision‐language knowledge of a pretrained CLIP model through a novel finetuning approach. We propose to use a compound descriptive prompt that encapsulates adaptively sampled attributes from a font attribute dataset focusing on Roman alphabet characters. FontCLIP's semantic typographic latent space demonstrates two unprecedented generalization abilities. First, FontCLIP generalizes to different languages including Chinese, Japanese, and Korean (CJK), capturing the typographical features of fonts across different languages, even though it was only finetuned using fonts of Roman characters. Second, FontCLIP can recognize the semantic attributes that are not presented in the training data. FontCLIP's dual‐modality and generalization abilities enable multilingual and cross‐lingual font retrieval and letter shape optimization, reducing the burden of obtaining desired fonts.
Switzerland is known for its multilingualism, yet not all languages are represented equally in society. The situation is exacerbated by the influx of heritage languages and English through migration ...and globalization processes which challenge the traditional education system. This study is the first to investigate how schools in Grisons, Fribourg, and Zurich negotiate neoliberal forces leading to a growing necessity of English, a romanticized view on national languages, and the social justice perspective of institutionalizing heritage languages. It uncovers power and legitimacy issues and showcases students' and teachers' complex identities to advocate equitable multilingual education.
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