Foreign Languages and Translation

This article takes its outset in findings from an ongoing research project investigating the use of digital and multimodal resources in teacher education (TE) in Norway. The material studied is mandatory assignments in different courses in TE, asking how teacher students collaborate through digital media in their production of texts for learning, and how the design of these literacy practices can be influenced through the teachers’ design of the assignments. In focus group interviews the researchers found that the students preferred organizing collaborative processes through Facebook groups rather than through the university’s learning management system. This created a space between formal and informal learning, often mediated by “power users” performing a curatorial function on behalf of the group. Furthermore, the quality of the processes seemed to depend on how the assignments were designed for different modes and for individual or group work. The tasks that inspired genuine coll...

In this article we compare teenagers' use of swearing by mother (SBM) in three audio-recorded corpora, The Bergen Corpus of London Teenage Language (COLT), Corpus Oral de Lenguaje Adolescente de Madrid (COLAm), and Språkkontakt och Ungdomsspråk i Norden (UNO-Oslo). Applying Ljung's (2011) theoretical framework, we distinguish between 'ritual insults' (Your mummy's got no lips), 'name-calling' (You motherfucker), 'expletive interjections' (Motherfucker!) and 'intensifiers' (A motherfucking bastard). The study showed, as expected, that SBM was more common in the Spanish than in the English data and far exceeded the use in the Norwegian data. The most common expressions were hijo de puta ("son of a whore"), your mum, and mora di ("your mum"), respectively, while the most frequent pragmatic function of SBM was 'name-calling' in Spanish and 'ritual insults' in English and Norwegian. A possible reason for the Spanish dominance might be the strong taboo on "whore mother", as Spain is a Catholic country.

Una mirada al pasado Para poner la situación actual de la enseñanza del español como lengua extranjera en la escuela noruega en un contexto más amplio, quero empezar con mi historia personal. Cuando yo era estudiante de Bachillerato, ya hace algunos años, aquí en Kristiansand había un solo instituto que ofrecía la asignatura español: Kristiansand Katedralskole. La asignatura era optativa en la modalidad de lenguas ('Språklinje'), y

This article explores specific aspects of literacy practices in teacher education in Norway, building upon data collected within the research project Digital literacy and use of learning resources in teacher education in Norway (DigiGLU). Our main aim is to explore how teachers in different subject courses in teacher education (TE) design mandatory assignments, and how students respond to these designs. After the extensive TE-reform in 2010, in revised plans and documents guiding professional training, mandatory assignments (both form and content) were considered more important for the students' learning process. In our investigation, the concepts of design for learning and design in learning, as described by Selander and Kress (2010), are considered fruitful as theoretical perspectives. The analysis focuses on oral presentations and traditional academic texts in four different TE-subjects. Our main finding, across subjects, is that there seem to be mismatches between the intentions behind the designs on the part of the assignment designers and the actual interpretation: hence the redesigned result by the receiver of the design. The article concludes with some reflections on why these mismatches occur, and what the implications might be for the students' academic development and the possible transfer of certain literacy practices to their occupational lives.

I denne artikkelen drøfter jeg hvordan teknologi kan skape nye undervisnings- og læringsmåter i fremmedspråksundervisningen fram mot 2030. Jeg starter med å skissere et mulig framtidsscenario i form av et blogginnlegg skrevet av en 15 åring i året 2030. Videre i artikkelen tar jeg utgangspunkt i dette framtidsscenarioet og sammenligner det med dagens situasjon, i tillegg til at jeg drøfter hva som må til for at scenarioet kan oppfylles. Læreren spiller en nøkkelrolle i utviklingen av nye undervisnings- og læringsmåter, og det er først når læreren integrerer teknologien i sin undervisning at nye praksiser oppstår. Jeg viser noen konkrete eksempler på bruk av teknologi på nye måter, samt refleksjon rundt utviklingen framover.

The present article aims at describing and comparing the use of slang words and swearwords in teenage talk from three different Spanish speaking communities. The analysis builds on spontaneous teenage conversations from the corpus of teenage language Corpus Oral de Lenguaje Adolescente (COLA). This corpus contains informal conversations from Madrid, Buenos Aires and Santiago de Chile; and for this study one conversation from each city has been selected. The aim of the analysis is twofold, in the first place to describe and compare the slang words and swearwords registered in the three conversations, and secondly to study the pragmatic functions of these words. The analysis of the slang words shows that there is variation in the informal words and expressions used in the three communities, and that these expressions seem to be mostly regional. Regarding the swearwords used, there are similarities in the three communities. There are also similarities in the pragmatic functions of the ...

Denne artikkelen tar for seg ulike aspekter ved utviklingen av skriftlige ferdigheter i spansk blant norske elever. Artikkelen starter med å beskrive fremmedspråkenes posisjon i norsk skole generelt og situasjonen for spansk spesielt. Videre presenteres de skriftlige tekstene som analyseres og metoden som anvendes. De skriftlige tekstene er autentiske elevtekster samlet inn som en del av korpuset TRAWL (Tracking Written Learner Language). Analysen besvarer to hovedspørsmål: Hva og hvordan skriver elevene i spansk? Analysen av hva elevene skriver, viser at det første året på videregående skole skriver elevene stort sett tekster som handler om elevenes umiddelbare nærhet og dagligliv, der de mest frekvente ordene er verb og pronomen i første person entall. Andre året på videregående forbereder elevene seg på eksamen, og fokus flyttes fra personlige beskrivelser til tema knyttet til den spansktalende verden. Språket blir mer komplekst med bruk av bindeordene que og porque blant de mest...

The role of intonation in the perception of Brummie Praca licencjacka napisana w Instytucie Filologii Angielskiej Uniwersytetu im. Adama Mickiewicza pod kierunkiem prof. dra Geoffreya Schwartza Poznań, 2010 OŚWIADCZENIE Ja, niżej podpisany/a student/ka Wydziału Neofilologii Uniwersytetu im. Adama Mickiewicza w Poznaniu oświadczam, że przedkładaną pracę dyplomową pt. napisałem/am samodzielnie.

Although Birmingham English is commonly treated as a northern variety (Wells 1982, Cruttenden 2008), it has also got accentual features typical for the linguistic south. One of these traits is the diphthong shift, a phenomenon that originated in London and later spread on to many southern accents of England, as well as to places as remote as New Zealand or Australia (Wells 1982: 252, 257, Britain and Sudbury 2008: 1). It is a process where fronting diphthongs change their quality in a clockwise direction, e.g. FACE from /eɪ/ to /aɪ/, while the back-closing diphthongs move in quality towards an anti-clockwise direction, e.g. GOAT from /əʊ/ to /aʊ/ (Wells 1982: 308-310). Some recent data (Khan 2006, Kerswill et al. 2008) had suggested a reversal of this shift in London and Birmingham, which strongly inspired the present study.

This paper presents the results of field research performed in Birmingham in 2012. It investigates the pronunciation of diphthongs in speech of ten young middle-class speakers (mean age = 22.8). The wordlist read by the participants featured all diphthongs read in the b_d frame, together 254 tokens. All measurements were later performed in Praat (Boersma and Weenink 2012). The results stand mostly in opposition to Khan (2006) and Kerswill et al. (2008). Namely, in the researched group, there is no sign of the reversal of the diphthong shift. The diphthongs are considerably shifted across all speakers. For example, the CHOICE vowel starts relatively very close giving the realisation in [oɪ] and MOUTH is realised as [æʊ]. These results shed new light on the current adaptation of the diphthong shift in Birmingham and imply that the diphthong shift may not be very sociolinguistically marked in this urban area.

The Birmingham accent, also known as Brummie, is, possibly, the most stigmatized accent in the British Isles. It has been found the least preferred of all the accents examined in various language attitude studies (Giles, 1970, Hiraga 2005 or Coupland and Bishop 2007) that considered criteria like prestige, friendliness and intelligence. There is no one simple answer to the question why certain varieties are perceived worse than others. Apart from obvious connotations with their users, accents are also evaluated on the basis of their phonetic traits (van Bezooijen and Gooskens 1999). Lay observers proposed that in the case of Brummie this trait is its intonation (How to speak Brummie 2001).

Brummie intonation differs from standard British intonation. In particular, Birmingham English often uses rising tones where RP uses falls, that is, in declarative sentences (Cruttenden 1994). In Cruttenden’s terms these rises are „rise-plateaus” and „rise-plateau-slumps”. Ladd (1996), however, interprets Brummie declaratives as stylised low rises and its questions as rise-falls. These, in turn, convey negative attitudes in standard British intonation (O’Connor and Arnold 1967), which would go in line with arguments declared by folk linguists.

Two experiments in the form of an Internet questionnaire have been carried out among university students at the School of English at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan. The first part of the experiment was to answer if Brummie is indeed disfavoured when compared to other dialects. The subjects listened to three Brummie speakers and three speakers of different accents of English English, and rated attractiveness, friendliness and intelligence of their pronunciation on a 5-point Likert scale. The Birmingham accent was deemed the least attractive and intelligent.

The second, core part of the experiment investigated to what extent intonation is responsible for this bad perception of Birmingham speech. This time, the subjects were to listen to two versions of a speech sample of a given accent. The first version contained only intonation, the second one only segmentals. The modifications were made after Van Bezooijen and Gooskens (1999). To attain an intonational version of a speech sample, a lowpass filter at 350 Hz was used. Thus, the speech was unintelligible, and only intonation was heard. In the segmental version, all the pitch points were removed but for one which was then placed at 109 Hz, i.e., an average pitch level for all speakers. Intonation was, therefore, flattened. All modifications were performed in PRAAT. Then the results of the two versions of each recording were compared. It turned out that some results do indeed suggest that rising tones may be conducive to bad reactions towards the Birmingham accent.