SLATE Lecture Series
2009-2010

Dr. Numa Markee

Department of Linguistics, UIUC

September 23, 2009
Lucy Ellis Lounge, Foreign Language Building

"Doing Avoidance"

This paper develops the framework of learning talk analysis (LTA) to analyze the practice of doing avoidance in second language institutional talk.  More specifically, I first review and update what LTA is and then situate this post-cognitive approach to the analysis of language learning behavior within the broader field of second language acquisition studies.  Next, I analyze five fragments of classroom talk and associated cultural artifacts to identify when, how, and why a learner avoids, with the active co-participation of her instructor, the oral use of the word prerequisites.  In the conclusion, I first summarize the findings of this paper and then make some suggestions regarding what avenues of future research this paper may open up.

Prof. Adrienne Lo

Department of Anthropology, UIUC

October 14, 2009
2090 Foreign Language Building

Evaluating second language competence:
Globalization, racial, and linguistic ideologies in the case of South Korean “early study abroad” students

Recent work in linguistic anthropology has reframed the notion of competence, arguing that it is not a property of individuals, but rather a structural property of a situation. This line of research focuses on how individuals are positioned within globally stratified and unequal markets in which the “same” kind of linguistic ability can have very different values across contexts  (Blommaert, Collins, and Slembrouck 2005; Blommaert 2007). In this presentation, I examine how notions of value and competence are impacted by racial and linguistic ideologies in the case of South Korean early study abroad students. South Korea is currently undergoing a massive educational exodus, in which pre-college aged children are leaving to study abroad in English speaking countries.
This presentation traces the transnational linguistic ideologies which help spur such migration and discusses how South Koreans’ ideas about their incompetency in spoken English can be traced to American racial ideologies. It then discusses how racializing ideologies impact the experience of such students when abroad, drawing from retrospective accounts of students who spent their high school and college years in the US and Canada. Lastly, it examines how the search for valued linguistic and symbolic capital that drives early study abroad has been impacted by the shifting conditions of the market.

Prof. Nick Ellis

Department of Psychology
University of Michigan

November 12, 2009
Lucy Ellis, Foreign Language Building

"The emergence of second language constructions"

Learners' understanding of language, and how it works, is based upon their experience of language. They have to estimate the system from a sample of usage. This paper presents an analysis of interactions in the usage, structure, cognition, and acquisition of linguistic constructions. It focuses upon the naturalistic second language acquisition of English verb-argument constructions (VACs: VL verb locative, VOL verb object locative, VOO ditransitive) with particular reference to: (1) Construction learning as concept learning following the general cognitive and associative processes of the induction of categories from experience of exemplars in usage; (2) The empirical analysis naturalistic usage by means of corpus linguistics descriptions of input (native speech) and longitudinal acquisition (the interlanguage of second language learners); (3) The effects of the frequency and Zipfian type/token frequency distribution of exemplars within the Verb and other islands of the constructions archipelago (e.g., [Subj V Obj Oblpath/loc]), by their prototypicality, their generic coverage, and their contingency of form-function mapping, and (4) Computational (Emergent connectionist) models of these various factors as they play out in the emergence of constructions as generalized linguistic schema.