Course content Autumn 2014

This is a 5-day intensive course 08.09.2014–12.09.2014, involving a maximum of 16 PhD students, in addition to participating researchers from MultiLing. The program will consist of lectures (2 x 45 minutes) in the morning by the invited experts, and short student presentations followed by discussions in the afternoon. The students will send in their presentation in advance and they will each have an opponent from among the other students as well as from one of the lecturers. The students will also be assigned a certain amount of readings (about 500–700 pages, suggested by the lecturers) as a preparation for the course.

Socio-interactional Perspectives on Second Language Learning

Instructor: Gabriele Kasper, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa

Following a brief overview over several socio-interactional approaches to second language acquisition (SLA), the course will center on Conversation Analysis (CA) as a perspective on second language learning and development.

The course will begin with a review of CA's conceptual premises and methodological principles and practices, the structure of interaction, and CA’s perspective on social and psychological context, with particular attention to cognition.

The main section of the course will consider themes such as:

1. Learning as a social practice in L2 speakers’ activities inside and outside of classrooms.
2. The development of interactional competencies over time.
3. Classic cognitive SLA topics such as noticing and focus on form as participant concerns; methodological issues of data collection and analysis.

Usage-Based Approaches for the Study of Cognitive-Linguistic Dimensions of Multilingual Development

Instructor: Lourdes Ortega, Georgetown University

Following a brief overview of traditional approaches to the study of cognitive-linguistic questions in the field of second language acquisition (SLA), the course will center on usage-based linguistics (UBL) as a metatheory of language and four approaches within SLA that participate from it: Emergentism, Constructionism, Complexity Theory, and Dynamic Systems Theory.

The course will begin with a critical overview of UBL’s conceptualization of the key constructs involved in the study of multingualism: language, cognition, and development.

The main section of the course will characterize and compare the four usage-based SLA approaches along several axes of research:

1. Metatheoretical tenets and prototypical research practices that ensue from the UB view of language learning as a usage driven phenomenon shaped by individual-ecological histories of use in multimodal soundscapes/signscapes/textscapes.
2. The nature of multicompetence among users of multiple (earlier and later learned) languages.
3. Methodological issues of study design, data collection, and analysis in UB SLA.
4. Tensions, contradictions, challenges, and strategies when studying multilingual usage and development as fundamentally social yet probabilistically patterned along cognitive-linguistic-developmental lines.

The course will also include a session on journal publishing by Lourdes Ortega.