EVS - EDULING VIRTUAL SEMINARS

"Students’ writing skills are typically underdeveloped at various stages of education. Recent research suggests that very basic writing skills, such as the ability to build clear and correct sentences, are a major problem in secondary school students’ writing. To remedy this problem, it has been suggested that students should be taught more grammar. This is an intuitive, yet controversial solution."

Jimmy H.M. van Rijt (2024), "Rrevisiting the relationship between explicit grammar teaching and writing", EVS-Eduling Virtual Seminar.

"Learning effective writing skills is a priority in secondary education. Consequently, high-quality writing instruction is important to support secondary students in developing their writing skills. The program Reading and Writing in pairs is based on paired writing (Duran, 2010), using peer tutoring to improve writing skills. This study aims to evaluate the effectiveness of this program using a quasi-experimental pre-post test design."

Mariona Corcelles-Seuba, Patricia Jara Calaforra-Faubel, Jesús Ribosa (2024). Reading and writing in pairs: A peer tutoring program in secondary education. EVS-Eduling Virtual Seminar.

"In our study, classroom observations and dialogues show that the students’ language competence is more developed than we can see in their texts (and throughtesting and assessment). The dialogues allow for the students to show different types of metalinguistic competence and express it in different ways, work in the space between repertoire and choices, move from normative approaches to more playful, dialogic exploration, and have flexible support based on own projects and understandings."

Randi Solheim, Mari Nygård (2023). Young students’ knowledge about language expressed through writing and in dialogues. EARLI-Thessaloniki, August 22-26. 

"The native language knowledge that each student brings to the classroom provides a rich, accessible database, which can be used to give students the opportunity to become familiar with the methods, concepts, and attitudes of scientific work in a quite familiar domain. Problem sets about diverse languages are an effective instrument for developing the scientific “style” and exploring features of language."

Maya Honda (2023). Investigating mental grammar: Linguistics in the school curriculum, Communication presented at the 5th Eduling Seminar, Barcelona, 29-30 June.

"Grammatical knowledge can be built both by focusing our attention on use and by exploring the relationships between elements within the grammatical system provisionally disconnected from use. We defend the idea that knowing a language is knowing how to use it and knowing how to turn it into an object of reflection and scrutiny, assuming that without this reflective component, effective linguistic communication is not really possible."

Xavier Fontich (2023). 'Grammar pills' for a challenging metalinguistic reflection both on language use and on the linguistic system. Communication presented at the 5th Eduling Seminar, Barcelona, 29-30 June.

Welcome everyone to the 4th cycle of EVS-Eduling Virtual Seminars, an event in which so far, and since 2021, 15 researchers from 11 countries have presented their cutting-edge research on the interplay between education and linguistics:

Debra Myhill - University of Exeter (UK)

Andrea Parapatics – University of Pannonia (Hungary)

Rosianne Arseneau - Université du Québec à Montréal (Canada)

Ana Costa - Instituto Politécnico de Setúbal (Portugal)

Jimmy Van Rijt - Fontys University of Applied Sciences (the Netherlands)

Kaisu Rättyä - University of Tampere (Finland)

Reinold Funke - Pädagogische Hochschule Heidelberg (Germany)

Peter-Arno Coppen - Radbout University Nijmegen (the Netherlands)

Ángel Gallego - Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Spain)

Kristine Kabel - Aarhus University (Denmark)

Joana Batalha - NOVA University of Lisbon (Portugal)

Mirta Castedo - Universidad Nacional de la Plata (Argentina)

Eduardo Calil - Federal University of Alagoas (Brazil)

Inês Cardoso - University of Aveiro (Portugal)

Enrique Bernárdez - Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain)

We hope you enjoy these cycle of 4 new seminars.

Ana Costa & Xavier Fontich - Eduling coordinators

"Reality, the world, appears in the text fundamentally through the lexicon. Words, in effect, can be seen as the minimum elements that refer to the states, events, processes and objects of reality. Two aspects have to be highlighted, because they represent traditional problems of linguistics: the definition of words and the referents of words in reality."

Bernárdez, E. (2010). El léxico como motor de la organización del texto. Revista de Investigación Lingüística, 13, 41-59.

"When the teacher is the only person in the classroom with the power to revise (and to make normative corrections), children are prevented from becoming autonomous writers. In addition, they are kept away from the metalinguistic activity that consists of 'rephrasing' in order to adjust the intended meaning to specific requirements of the communicative situation."

Castedo, M. & Ferreiro, E. (2010). Young children revising their own texts in school settings. In Bazerman, Ch. et al. (eds.), Traditions of Writing Research (pp.135-150). Taylor & Francis. 

"Understanding the written language implies the necessity of establishing hierarchical relationships between a series of elements that appear in a linear fashion, giving them a global meaning, and writing implies the mastering of language use as decontextualized from the real context. Both features can also be fostered in the oral (...). In such an approach, grammar, albeit not the only aspect in language education, stops being a marginal discipline that we do not know how to integrate in the class of Language Arts, and becomes its backbone." (162-63, italics added) 

Camps,  A.  (1986). La gramàtica a l’escola bàsica entre els 5 i els 10 anys [Grammar  at  basic  school with 5-to 10-year-old pupils]. Barcelona, Spain: Barcanova.

"Educational  linguistics  lays  at  the  interface  of  contributions  from  linguistics  (in  our  case  focused  on  L1) and education. It aims at teaching students in compulsory schooling how to engage in fruitful reflection when facing both language in use (especially in the written mode) and language as a system, approaching language as something worthwhile exploring and targeting the development of students’ encyclopaedic knowledge about it. In this context, the educational game can be seen as a process in which specific contents are made accessible to specific learners through mediation, which comprises well-articulated conceptual systems, as well as methodological procedures, directly provided  by teachers in the classroom. Nonetheless, such mediation can indirectly be provided by other agents (curriculum theorists, linguists, material  designers,  etc.) [...] The ultimate goal of this special issue is to contribute a common ground for a debate."

Fontich, X., Van Rijt, J., & Gauvin, I. (2020). Intro to the Special Issue Research on L1 grammar in schooling: Mediation at the heart of learning grammar. L1 - Educational Studies in Language and Literature, 20, 1-13. https://doi.org/10.17239/L1ESLL-2020.20.03.01