Susana Alicia Eisenchlas

Developing intercultural communication skills through intergroup interaction

The call to internationalise the curriculum has become firmly ensconced in Australian educational discourse and university mission statements. Yet, scholars in this area agree that there are few concrete examples of how educators actually set about internationalising the curriculum in a tangible and easily replicable way. This paper adopts a definition of internationalisation of the curriculum which takes into account the experiential aspects of the process of becoming an intercultural communicator. The goal of internationalising the curriculum responds to the recognition that students need to develop a degree of intercultural competence in order to function efficiently in an increasingly globalised environment. Both international and local students need to be partners in this process, and the cultural diversity of contemporary universities in the west is an ideal setting to foster the ability to mediate across cultures. In this paper, we explore some practical ways in which key issues in intercultural communication can be implemented into university curricula through programmes that promote interaction across groups. La llamada a internacionalizar el currículo se encuentra firmemente afianzada en el discurso académico y en las declaraciones de las universidades australianas. Sin embargo, estudios en esta área convienen que hay pocos ejemplos concretos que indiquen cómo los educadores pueden internacionalizar el currículo de una manera tangible y fácilmente replicable. Este artículo adopta una definición de la internacionalización del currículo que considera los aspectos experienciales en el desarrollo del proceso de comunicación intercultural. La meta de internacionalizar el currículo responde al reconocimiento de que los estudiantes necesitan desarrollar un grado de capacidad intercultural para desempeñarse eficientemente en un ambiente cada vez más global. Tanto los estudiantes internacionales como los locales necesitan colaborar en este proceso. La diversidad cultural que caracteriza a las universidades contemporáneas en occidente hace de éstas un ámbito ideal para fomentar la capacidad de mediar entre culturas. En este artículo exploramos algunos programas prácticos que pueden ser implementados en currículos universitarios para promover la interacción entre grupos.

Clitics in child Spanish

This paper investigates the knowledge young children have about clitic pronouns. In particular, it examines whether children ever make mistakes that suggest discontinuity between child and adult Spanish. An elicited imitation task and spontaneous data are used to study childrens responses to a number of constructions involving clitics. Results indicate that, from the earliest testable age, children have the grammatical competence for clitic placement and never make certain logical, but unattested, errors.

Teaching intercultural communication in the university setting: an Australian perspective

Part of the tasks of internationalizing the university curriculum involves developing into courses and academic programs generally, activities and assessment practices that provide opportunities for linguistic and cultural input through interaction between local and international students. In this paper, we discuss the challenges and pitfalls of internationalizing the curriculum through the description of an innovative course that we developed to teach Intercultural Communication to languages and linguistics students. The programs innovation lies in the way in which teaching and learning strategies from disparate areas of academia are brought together under the rubric of teaching culture within a university culture. We conceptualize culture broadly in this course as the experiences of everyday living and we argue that students best appreciate the connection between communication, language and culture through the immediate micro-level of everyday living with and in culture.

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.

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.

Gender Roles and Expectations: Any Changes Online?

One consequence of the advent of cyber communication is that increasing numbers of people go online to ask for, obtain, and presumably act upon advice dispensed by unknown peers. Just as advice seekers may not have access to information about the identities, ideologies, and other personal characteristics of advice givers, advice givers are equally ignorant about their interlocutors except for the bits of demographic information that the latter may offer freely. In the present study, that information concerns sex. As the sex of the advice seeker may be the only, or the predominant, contextual variable at hand, it is expected that that identifier will guide advice givers in formulating their advice. The aim of this project is to investigate whether and how the sex of advice givers and receivers affects the type of advice, through the empirical analysis of a corpus of web-based Spanish language forums on personal relationship difficulties. The data revealed that, in the absence of individuating information beyond that implicit in the advice request, internalized gender expectations along the lines of agency and communality are the sources from which advice givers draw to guide their counsel. This is despite the trend in discursive practices used in formulating advice, suggesting greater language convergence across sexes.

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

Conceptualizing 'Communication' in Second Language Acquisition

Overviewing how the field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) conceptualizes ‘communication’ is a complex task. First, researchers differ in their interpretations of the nature of the object of inquiry and the goals of their research, based on different philosophical assumptions about the nature of language and the processes involved in language learning. Second, the concept ‘communication’ is generally taken as widely understood and is seldom defined. This paper uses the definitions of SLA in three paradigms within the field to explore how each paradigm conceptualizes ‘communication’ and its role in the development of the linguistic system of the second language.