JYU English seminars 2020-21

Series convenor: Dave Sayers. Please send any queries to dave.j.sayers@jyu.fi. 

ABSTRACTS

Maarit Koponen, Multilingual accessibility and audiovisual media: Can technology help with crossing language barriers?

Accessibility of information, media and communication is an increasingly important question in society. In the context of audiovisual media like television broadcasts and streaming content on various platforms, barriers to accessibility may involve sensory issues such as impaired hearing or vision but also linguistic issues like limited language ability. Demand for multilingual content is growing and content producers are also facing increasing pressure for shorter turnaround times, while limited resources available for accessibility measures like subtitling pose their own challenges. Technological developments may offer solutions and tools for supporting accessibility measures. During its three year duration (2018-2020), the EU funded research project "Methods for Managing Audiovisual Data" (MeMAD) has researched and developed machine-assisted tools and approaches for improving accessibility of multilingual audiovisual content. This presentation will outline the goals and outcomes MeMAD with a particular focus on the work carried out on machine translation and automatic speech recognition for interlingual subtitling. I will discuss experiences from the development work and usability tests carried out with potential users of the machine translation solutions, both professional subtitle translators and prospective audience members. Based on these experiences, I will also take a look into the future, considering the challenges of machine translation for subtitling and its potential role play in further advancing multilingual accessibility of audiovisual media content.

Sviatlana Höhn, Chatbots: myths and reality

The French National Digital Ethics Steering Committee (CNPEN) published a call to discuss ethical issues of conversational agents, a.k.a. chatbots. Looking at the questions, I realised that many of them are based on myths, and not on a technical understanding of the chatbot's capabilities and purpose. I will address some of the most prominent myths related to chatbot technology, and then explain what chatbots really are, how they work, and how we can make them useful. I will also outline how researchers from linguistics, social sciences and dialogue systems can work together to build amazing and useful chatbots.

Ritu Jain, When more isn’t better: Towards a typology of complementary schools for heritage languages

In scholarly discourses around non-dominant languages, institutional support and mainstreaming have been suggested as gold standards for facilitating maintenance and transmission. In this talk, I offer Singapore as an example of affirmative language planning for societal multilingualism. While official support is reserved for the three official languages (Mandarin, Malay, and Tamil), the government also extends semi-official support to five non-mainstream languages (Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Punjabi, and Urdu). Accepted as full subjects in education, the languages are delivered through a unique model of state-community partnership. The pragmatic design allows for state resources to be reserved for languages with historical or political statuses while the provision of ‘second-language’ status encourages an ongoing commitment and investment from interested communities. Evaluated on a spectrum of support for non-dominant languages in various countries, I find that Singapore offers a more sustainable model. I conclude that mainstreaming community languages is more of a romantic than practical goal for education policies in increasingly globalized societies.

Abigail Parrish, Motivation and thriving in language learning: using self-determination theory to create an optimal environment for learners

Self-determination theory (SDT) is a broad theory of human motivation, originating in psychology. It has been applied in language learning contexts; both to the learning of English and the learning of other languages. This talk will explore two areas within SDT: the continuum of motivation described by the theory, and the three basic psychological needs of autonomy, competence and relatedness (positive relationships), and their implications for both (language) learner motivation and (language learner) well-being and thriving.

Britta Schneider, Language as Posthuman – The Role of Media Technologies in Normative Ideologies, from Literary to Digital Culture

The formation and reproduction of language standards, as well as the linguistic study of language, have been discussed as influenced by the technologies of writing and print (see e.g. Ong 1982, Linell 2005). At the same time, the development of written language standards dialectically interacts with the formation of national public spaces (Gal & Woolard 2001). Understanding that language practice, concepts of language and concepts of language cultural spaces depend on the media technologies with which we use and study language, it is crucial to ask what happens to language cultures in an age of digital media technologies (see also Heyd & Schneider 2019). How do we imagine the object of language if literate standards exist besides other, newly emerging practices of informal digital writing? How may algorithms and artificial intelligence impact on our conception of linguistic correctness? And which new public spaces and interactional practices emerge on grounds of digital interaction?

I first introduce theoretical concepts on language ideologies (concepts of language) from an age of literacy. Secondly, I give examples from digital language practices, programming and uses of artificial intelligence that reproduce but partly also reframe traditional language standards where new language form but also new public spaces and sociolinguistic hierarchies may develop. Finally, I give insight into data from an exploratory interview study with users of voice-controlled digital devices such as Alexa or Siri. The study shows that there is not only a dialectic relationship between speech patterns of humans and sound productions of machines (meaning machines adapt to humans and humans adapt to machines at the same time) but, furthermore, speakers are more likely to develop social relationships with machines if they control them by sound rather than by hand – potentially hinting at the development of new ‘social’ actors (?) in society.

Overall, observations on changing cultures of mediation – from sound to literacy and digitality, based on air waves, paper, ink, the printing press or electric circuits that flow through processors – hint at the role of human-non-human networks (Latour 2005, Hutchins 1995) in understanding language ideologies and linguistic patterns. The field of posthumanism, questioning the centrality of human rationality and cognition, is here fruitful to develop new theoretical and empirical agendas for future language research (Pennycook 2018).

References

Gal, Susan & Kathryn A. Woolard. 2001. Languages and Publics: The Making of Authority. Manchester: St. JeromeHeyd, Theresa & Britta Schneider. 2019. "The sociolinguistics of late modern publics." Journal of Sociolinguistics 23: 435-449
Hutchins, Edwin. 1995. Cognition in the Wild. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Linell, Per. 2005. The Written Language Bias in Linguistics. Its Nature, Origins and Transformations. London: Routledge
Ong, Walter J. 1982. Orality and Literacy. The Technologizing of the Word. London: Routledge
Pennycook, Alastair. 2018. Posthumanist Applied Linguistics. London: Routledge

Katerina Zourou, Digital activism: challenges and opportunities for language learning

Recent developments in language learning and teaching pedagogies broaden the scope of language education by expanding the "social turn" in language education. Thus, socially informed Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) research emphasizes learner centeredness, autonomy, and agency, as well as informal, “wild” ways of learning. This comes at a time of increasing civic participation, namely the engagement of citizens in digitally mediated actions claiming for fairer and more sustainable societies on a diversity of topics (indicatively: climate change, social justice, crisis response).

By resituating the L2 learner as a social actor in light of contemporary activism for a social purpose, this presentation aims to illustrate and discuss some prevailing forms of digital activism: citizen science, maker movement, open innovation challenges (hackathons), and open data/open educational practice. The challenges and opportunities for language learning and teaching practice and research will be discussed with the audience.

Nana Aba Appiah Amfo, Making the secular sacred: Sociolinguistic domains and performance in Christian worship

In this talk, I interrogate Domain Theory (cf. Fishman 1972; Parasher 1980) within the context of some modern African Christian worship activities. The study is conducted within the framework of the sociology of language and religion (SRL, Omoniyi and Fishman 2006; Omoniyi 2010). In conjunction with Fishman’s (2006) Decalogue of Theoretical Principles for SLR, I interrogate the adoption of sociolinguistic principles such as the Domain Theory in SLR within multilingual contexts.

Using the context of an African (multilingual) community, and Christian worship services, I demonstrate that the association of the religious domain with a particular ‘religious’ language may be misleading and rather single-dimensional. I therefore suggest an alternative way of analysing language use in religion within multilingual settings. I provide specific examples where both the religious space and Domain has been used for education on health issues (talk on HIV AIDS by a medical doctor), as an information source on community and national news (a make-shift radio station where news on current affairs, sports, etc are presented), announcements relating to social needs (job advertisements, fitness programs, etc), and an avenue for the performance of traditional ceremonies (child naming).

Our conclusion is that what pertains within a Domain (both in terms of topic and language choice) is driven by the needs of the community, and a captive audience may be used for several purposes. These real-life examples, obtained through participant observation, demonstrate that perhaps more often than it has been suggested, there are no clear-cut Domains, and this realization provides the impetus for a consideration of multi-domain analysis rather than the existing theoretical strait-jacket.