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The Bloomsbury Round Table on Communication, Cognition and Culture 2018

Starts:
Finishes:
Venue: Birkbeck Main Building, Malet Street

No booking required

DAY 1

PLENARY SPEECH 10-11AM

  • Second language comprehensibility from multiple perspectives
  • Speaker: Pavel Trofimovich (Concordia University)

A growing belief in the field of second language speech learning is that successful communication (generally measured through mutual understanding achieved by interlocutors) should be prioritized over matters of linguistic accuracy or native-likeness, especially if learners’ goal is to communicate successfully in academic and workplace settings. This talk examines second language comprehensibility (listeners’ perceived ease or difficulty in understanding speech) as one construct central to this argument. Although comprehensible second language speech appears to be a straightforward target attainable by most learners, it is a complex phenomenon linked to individual differences across many cognitive, social, and experiential factors, both for the speaker and the listener. The speaker will highlight the complexity of comprehensibility from meta-cognitive, linguistic, social, and assessment perspectives and will discuss some implications of research on comprehensibility for the teaching and learning of second language pronunciation.

Pavel Trofimovich is Professor of Applied Linguistics in the Department of Education at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. His research focuses on cognitive aspects of second language processing and learning, the acquisition of second language pronunciation and speaking skills by children and adults, sociolinguistic aspects of second language acquisition, and the teaching of second language pronunciation. He has published extensively in many top scholarly venues in the fields of language learning, psycholinguistics, and language teaching, and is a co-author of three books on the use of psycholinguistic research methods in second language research and on assessment of second language pronunciation. He currently serves as Journal Editor of Language Learning.

PLENARY SPEECH 13.20PM - 14.10PM

  • Researching motivation as an individual difference factor: The growth of qualitative inquiry
  • Speaker: Ema Ushioda (University of Warwick)

As Boo, Dörnyei and Ryan (2015) highlighted in their systematic survey of L2 motivation studies from 2005–14, this sub-area of individual differences research in applied linguistics has seen not only ‘a publication surge’ but also ‘a changing landscape’. Their analysis shows that this changing landscape is characterized by significant diversification in research approaches, with qualitative and mixed methods studies now becoming mainstream. This contrasts sharply with the time when Ushioda took her own first tentative steps into applied linguistics research in the early 1990s – an era when a single quantitative methodological tradition dominated the study of L2 motivation. As a novice PhD researcher then, Ushioda sought to promote a qualitative approach to exploring L2 motivation, in counterpoint to this quantitative research agenda. Now, well over twenty years later, the research landscape has evolved and grown significantly, along with her own thinking and understanding. In this talk, from the vantage point of a more ‘mature’ perspective, Ushioda will re-evaluate the contribution of qualitative inquiry in L2 motivation research. This talk is based on a chapter written for a special anthology commemorating sixty years since Gardner and Lambert’s (1959) seminal paper on motivational variables in second language acquisition that launched this area of inquiry.

Ema Ushioda is a Professor at the Centre for Applied Linguistics, University of Warwick, where she has been working since 2002. Currently Director of Graduate Studies with responsibility for the Centre’s doctoral programme and postgraduate teaching and learning provision, she will be taking up the role of head of the department from September this year. Ema is internationally renowned for her work on motivation and autonomy in language learning, particularly for promoting qualitative approaches to researching motivation, and she has published widely in these areas. Recent books include International perspectives on motivation: Language learning and professional challenges(2013), Teaching and researching motivation (co-authored by Dörnyei, 2011), and Motivation, language identity and the L2 self (coedited by Dörnyei, 2009). She has also co-edited with Dörnyei a special issue of the Modern Language Journal (Fall 2017) on ‘Beyond global English: Motivation to learn languages in a multicultural world’. Ema is currently working on a monograph addressing ethical perspectives on language learning motivation research, and (with Dörnyei) on a third revised edition of Teaching and researching motivation.

STUDENTS PRESENTATIONS 14.10-5PM

DAY 2

MASTER CLASS 10-11AM

  • Same question, different lens: Looking at research issues through multiple methods
  • Pavel Trofimovich (Concordia University)

MASTER CLASS 11.20AM-12.20PM

  • Cherry-picking and anecdotalism: How not to report qualitative research
  • Ema Ushioda (University of Warwick)

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