International Fall School Multilingualism: European and Asian Perspectives

The world in which we live is increasingly multilingual. Multilingualism in today’s modern societies requires new expertise, skills and leadership to understand and meet the challenges of linguistic and cultural diversity.

The forces of post-colonial settings, globalization and and increasing levels of migration and mobility have created distinct multilingual realities in European and Asian contexts. This fall school will tackle multilingualism in an interdisciplinary fashion and compare and contrast different and complementary dimensions of multilingualism in Europe and Asia.

If you are interested in viewing language from crossdisciplinary perspectives and within a global context – this fall school is what you are looking for.

Hamburg Fall School: 26^th September till 1^st October 2011

Prof. Dr. Nicole Baumgarten (University of Southern Denmark)
Prof. Dr. Francesco Cavallaro (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore)
Prof. Dr. Ng Bee Chin (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore)
Prof. Dr. Sharon Millar (University of Southern Denmark)
Prof. Dr. Mary O'Brien (University of Calgary)
Prof. Dr. Bao Zhiming (National University of Singapore)

Contact:

Monika Schulz, M.A.

LiMA, UHH
Mittelweg 177
20148 Hamburg

0049-(0)40-413307-266
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Program: International Fall School Multilingualism: European and Asian Perspectives

Registration/Costs:

Registration will start June 13th 2011 and close August 26th 2011 with two modes of participation (see below). The fee includes participation in one or two classes, participation in the workshop, a reception and coffee breaks. The fee does not include accommodation. The registration form including payment information can be downloaded here. Please download this form, fill it in and send it to Diese E-Mail-Adresse ist gegen Spambots geschützt! JavaScript muss aktiviert werden, damit sie angezeigt werden kann. . This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. You will receive an official registration confirmation once we have received your course fees.

Accomodation and Public Transport:

For more information please click here.

Credit:

4 ECTS points will be awarded for participation in one course and the workshop, complete with preparatory reading and active participation in class. 8 ECTS points will be awarded for participation in two courses, the workshop and submittal of a 4,000 – 5,000 word course paper in one of the courses.

Course descriptions:

Prof. Dr. Francesco Cavallaro: Singapore - multilingual society, bilingual individuals?
Course Readings

With active planning policies in force since its independence as a nation, the linguistic situation in Singapore has undergone dramatic changes in its 45 years of history. A number of linguistic issues have arisen as a result of these policies. These include a rapid shift in the languages used by Singaporeans to English only and the demise of the Chinese vernaculars.
In this course students will come to understand the language policies, planning and implementation in Singapore and discuss the impact of such policies. The course will be based on reading recent and current research on the attitudes and use of the varieties of English; on the maintenance and shift of the non-English official languages of Singapore; and the marginalization of elderly Chinese Singaporeans.

Prof. Dr. Nicole Baumgarten and Prof. Dr. Sharon Millar: Non-native English and English as a Lingua Franca in the European context
Course Readings

In this seminar we will look at non-native English and English as a Lingua Franca as a social, political and individual phenomenon. This includes considering

• the systematic features of non-native English,
• the role of English as a so-called international language,
• the relation between English and multilingualism in settings such as academia, business and social media platforms,
• the characteristics of communicative interaction between non-native speakers of English (aka the use of English as a Lingua Franca),
• conceptions of standard language, norm and variation for English, and
• the question of how and what to teach when teaching English as a foreign language.

This class also includes a guest lecture by Sharon Millar on the topic of English as a lingua franca in multinational corporations.

Prof. Dr. Bao Zhiming: Usage, Structure and New English
Course Readings

Singapore English exhibits two types of influence from its linguistic substratum, mainly Chinese. I call the two types substratum transfer and convergence-to-substratum. In substratum transfer, a grammatical subsystem is appropriated from the linguistic substratum (eg. Chinese) and is ‘fleshed out’ by the morphosyntactic materials from English. In convergence-to-substratum, English-origin grammatical constructions converge in usage pattern with the functionally equivalent constructions in the linguistic substratum. A systematic study of these two types sheds light on the way English adapts to its new linguistic ecology. In the series of seminars, I hope to develop a usage-based theory to study contact-induced grammatical restructuring that characterizes the emergence of Singapore English.

Prof. Dr. Ng Bee Chin: Assessing children in multilingual contexts
Course Readings

This course aims to arrive at a better understanding of multilingual children and the diverse and dynamic contexts they grow up in. First, students will be introduced to the wideranging definitions of multilingualism by critically tracing the development of this phenomenon. Next, the different instruments and tasks adopted by researchers working with bilingual and multitlingual children will be evaluated. The evaluation of multilingual children in the context of speech pathology will be examined with a focus on the complexities and challenges faced by practioners in clinical settings. Finally, the course will discuss how prevailing attitude and perception about what consitutes as “norms” influence the private and public assessment of multilingualism.

Workshop: Linguistic diversity and its management in the Asian context

The research cluster Linguistic Diversity Management in Urban Areas (LiMA) at Hamburg University is hosting a one-day workshop „Linguistic diversity and its management in the Asian context“ on September 29th, 2011. The workshop provides a forum for contributions in the realm of multilingualism and language contact in post-colonial settings, with a focus on the Asian context. Particular points of interest will be language background profiles which take into account the particulars of post-colonial multilingual settings, issues in language identity and language attitudes, data collection, and methods of analyzing, comparing and evaluating contact-induced phenomena including transfer from different linguistic domains. The workshop’s focus on Singapore English covers those aspects of linguistic diversity that arise in post-colonial multilingual settings, complementing LiMA’s research on migration-induced multilingualism in a European context. A detailed workshop program can be found downloaded here