Andrea C. Schalley

The Importance of Literacy in the Home Language: The View From Australia

While advantages of literacy in the home language have been widely documented, the Australian education system has not been proactive in providing institutional support for its development. This paper investigates the impact of (il)literacy in the home language on the academic, affective, and social development of bilingual/multilingual children and proposes principles that home-language-literacy programs should meet to be effective. It discusses programs that, although designed to develop literacy or second-language proficiency mainly in classroom contexts, could be easily adapted to address the needs of the linguistically and culturally diverse Australian context. We argue that the cost of not investing in successful home-language-literacy programs will be higher in the long run than their implementation costs and recommend that Australia should consider supporting grassroots home-language-literacy programs in a push to improve overall literacy outcomes for Australian home-language speakers.

Multilingualism and assimilationism in Australia's literacy-related educational policies

Australia is a country of high linguistic diversity, with more than 300 languages spoken. Today, 19% of the population aged over 5 years speak a language other than English at home. Against this background, we examine government policies and prominent initiatives developed at national level in the past 30 years to address the challenge of offering ‘Literacy for all’, in particular focusing on minority language speaking children. Across the examined policies and initiatives, a distinct negative correlation can be observed: the more multilingual Australia has become, the more assimilationist the policies, and the more monolingual the orientation of the society that governments have sought to establish through policy. We argue that to enhance literacy outcomes more generally, this orientation needs to be reversed. We explain why policy understanding and approach need to instead promote the maintenance of home languages and support literacy acquisition in these languages.

Ontolinguistics: How Ontological Status Shapes the Linguistics Coding of Concepts

Current progress in linguistic theorizing is more and more informed by cross-linguistic investigation, focusing on the concepts that are part of every language users ontology, the network of cross-connected conceptualizations the mind uses in coping with the world. How are ontological structures reflected in intra- and cross-linguistic regularities? The volume unites contributions from Linguistics, Neuroscience, Philosophy, and Artificial Intelligence into the outline of an approach that promises to develop into a vital branch of cognitive science.

Cognitive Modeling and Verbal Semantics: A Representational Framework Based on UML

This book presents a unique approach towards the study of verbal meaning. It develops a frame-work for capturing the semantics of verbs that is based on the Unified Modeling Language (UML), the lingua franca for the design and modeling of object-oriented systems in computer science. The new graphical framework combines formal precision with conceptual flexibility and allows the representation of very complicated details of verbal meaning, thereby offering a solution for different semantic problems such as polysemy and context-dependency. Besides the frameworks development, the book contains a cognitive interpretation of important modeling elements, a discussion of general issues in connection with and well-elaborated applications of the framework. Since the framework is graphical in nature, the book contains many annotated figures, and the frameworks modeling elements are illustrated by example diagrams. Not only scholars working in the field of linguistics, in particular insemantics, will find this book illuminating because of its new graphical approach, but also researchers of cognitive science, computational linguistics and computer science in general will surely appreciate it.

Communicating about Communication: Intercultural Competence as a Factor in the Success of Interdisciplinary Collaboration

Many disciplines describe themselves as studying ‘communication’. However observation of interdisciplinary discussion suggests that ‘communication’ may be conceptualized in different ways by different disciplines. This paper aims to promote mutual understanding among disciplines, not by proposing a universally valid definition of communication to which all disciplines should subscribe, but by, first, offering a set of questions that can be used to help disciplinary groups communicate their own views on communication to colleagues from other disciplines, and then creating a (preliminary) typology to map out the range of possible positions that can be taken in relation to those questions. Noting that academic disciplines have distinct cultures, the paper presents some concepts of intercultural communication as understood in applied linguistics that may be useful in facilitating interdisciplinary communication about communication.

Multilingualism and literacy: attitudes and policies

In this special issue we shine light on the relationship between multilingualism and literacy and on dominant forces that shape it. Here we present a selection of peerreviewed papers presented originally at the Multilingualism and Literacy workshop held at the 19th International Congress of Linguists in Geneva, 21–27 July 2013. That workshop explored the impact of multilingualism on the literacy development of both children and adults, seeking to identify how literacy skills or lack of them in one language can affect development of literacy in other language(s). This special issue focuses on two particular factors that strongly affect achievement of literacy in multilingual contexts – educational policies and societal attitudes – and therefore also considers community responses these may generate. We would like to take this opportunity to thank the Multilingualism and Literacy workshop’s International Program Committee for their assistance in helping us to select the abstracts for presentation and thank workshop participants and audience for constructive comments and suggestions. We are also grateful to the editors of International Journal of Multilingualism, Professor Danuta Gabrys-Barker and Professor Eva Vetter, for the opportunity to share these papers with a wider audience. Last but not least, we express our gratitude to the papers’ peer reviewers, whose expertise and assistance have helped make this special issue possible.

TYTO - A Collaborative Research Tool for Linked Linguistic Data

In this paper, I introduce a computational tool, TYTO (“Typology Tool”), that utilises Semantic Web technologies in order to provide novel ways to process, integrate, and query cross-linguistic data. Its data store incorporates a set of ontologies (comprising linguistic examples, annotations, language background information, and metadata) backed by a logic reasoner software. This allows for highly targeted querying, and, with enough data on the relevant interest areas, TYTO can return answers to rather specific typological questions such as ‘Which other languages in the North America, in addition to Yuchi, do encode senior kin and in-group (such as belonging to the same ethnic group) in a suffixal case marking system?’ TYTO’s data store can be extended with additional ontologies and adapted to allow for project-specific analyses of linguistic data. It is further designed to facilitate collaboration and allow multi-user contributions, including automatic integration of data submitted at different stages by different contributors.

Play to learn: self-directed home language literacy acquisition through online games

Home language literacy education in Australia has been pursued predominantly through Community Language Schools. At present, some 1000 of these, attended by over 100,000 school-age children, cater for 69 of the over 300 languages spoken in Australia. Despite good intentions, these schools face a number of challenges. For instance, children may lack motivation and perceive after-hours schooling as an unnecessary burden. Trained teachers and suitable teaching materials are often not available. Moreover, not every language can be offered in each city or region. Hence, home language speakers’ needs are often not met. This situation has detrimental effects for children, families and communities, and entails a loss of opportunities for the country. Reporting on an alternative approach, this paper presents a pilot study conducted in Australia with English–German bilinguals. We sought to investigate whether primary school-aged children can self-direct their home language literacy acquisition through playing online educational games in the privacy of their homes and with little adult input. Results indicate that the games can be effective in promoting emergent literacy development. Thus, such a grassroots approach could become a viable option for multilingual societies, addressing some of the practical challenges faced by, for instance, Community Language Schools.

Multilingualism and literacy: practices and effects

Ensuing from such linguistic diversity in modern societies are multilingual speakers who display a range of proficiency levels across their languages. Often, one language of a multilingual speaker is considered their ‘strongest’ or most ‘dominant’ language. Yet, speakers develop different proficiency levels in each of the four macroskills of listening and speaking (‘oral skills’) and reading and writing (‘literacy skills’), for each of their languages. Research to date, however, has tended to focus on oral (and cognitive) skills of multilingual speakers or to explore the effects of multilingualism on the acquisition of literacy more generally (Baker 2011; Bialystok 2001). In this context, literacy is seen – quite rightly – as a general transferable skill. This perception has often, however, steered inquiry to focus on literacy in the speakers’ mainstream language (or language of schooling), while neglecting literacy development and maintenance in their other language(s). This special issue aims at slightly shifting the focus of inquiry. It refracts the research lens to explore multilingualism and literacy through inquiry into literacy in the nonmainstream language(s) of multilingual speakers. It also considers different notions of literacy – from emergent literacy skills and narrative creation to digital media and marketing literacy – and different bilingual populations – from young learners via high school and university students to adult speakers. As the following introduction to the papers reveals, authors of each contribution have selected the combination of features best suited to their line of inquiry. This has produced a set of papers that are mutually complementary and thus en bloc present a valuable source of insights on multilingualism and literacy. We argue that if high levels of proficiency in a minority language (including the mother tongue) are to be achieved, literacy in this minority language is essential – if a written form of the language exists (Eisenchlas, Schalley, and Guillemin 2015). Research indicates that initial literacy in a familiar language (i.e., the mother tongue) facilitates, rather than impedes, the acquisition of literacy in additional languages (e.g., the

Accessing Phonetic Variation in Spoken Language Corpora through Non-standard Orthography

Much of the sociolinguistic and stylistic variation which is of interest to linguists is phonetic in nature, but the access route to corpus data is typically via a textual transcription. This poses a significant problem for a researcher who wishes to access the original recordings of speech in order to analyse variation: how can they search for relevant data? Many transcription traditions allow for the representation of such variation through non-standard orthography, and such conventions should therefore allow access to data relevant to the study of variation. However, the specific conventions used vary between traditions (and indeed may not be applied consistently by individual transcribers). This then creates another problem where the researcher wishes to access data across an aggregated collection, which is a practical necessity given the relatively limited size of most corpora of spoken language. In this paper, we analyse the conventions used in two of the component collections in the Australian National Corpus, the Australian Radio Talkback Corpus and the Monash Corpus of Spoken English. On the basis of this analysis, we develop a fragment of an ontology which gives an explicit account of the phenomena related to non-standard pronunciation represented in the transcripts and which can therefore act as the basis for better searching of the collections and better access to relevant data for analysing sociolinguistic and stylistic variation.