Instructor: Valantis Fyndanis
The course is taught in English. It will be delivered in the spring semester 2017.
The following topics will be covered:
- The impact of bilingualism/multilingualism on the cognitive and language abilities of healthy children, younger adults, and older adults
- The impact of bilingualism/multilingualism on the cognitive and language abilities of demented and aphasic individuals
- Methodological challenges in this line of research
- Presentation of Valantis Fyndanis’ MultiLing project Language and cognitive abilities in multilingual healthy aging
- Familiarization with cognitive and linguistic experiments
- Training in administration of experiments
- Training in data collection, transcription, and analysis
- Carrying out original research!
A research-led teaching approach will be taken. The active participation of students in the classroom will be encouraged. For example, they will present selected papers on the above topics, and time will be reserved for discussion among all attendees. Moreover, the students will be actively involved in the current MultiLing project of Valantis Fyndanis (for a brief description, see here:
http://www.hf.uio.no/multiling/english/projects/postdoc-projects/chrysovf/index.html ). Students will work alone or in groups to collect, transcribe, analyze, and discuss data, as well as to write up the results in the format of a scientific paper. Drafts of these papers will be presented and discussed in the classroom. These papers could also form the basis for the students’ MA theses.
Prerequisites: Basic knowledge of Linguistics and/or Speech-Language Pathology and/or Psychology.
Requirements for students taking the course for credit:
- Preparing for each class session by reading at least one required scientific article
- Presenting an article orally in class (only once)
- Participating in class discussions
- Preparing and presenting orally a draft of a paper that will report the data that will be collected during the course
- Revising the paper to integrate useful suggestions made by attendees and instructor
- Handing the revised draft to a fellow student for editing
- Editing the draft of another fellow student
- Finalizing and submitting the paper
The course uses a grading scale from A to F, where A is the highest grade and F stands for fail. Grading will be based on class participation and paper quality.