The Clarion Online
Issue 1 | Summer 2004

Welcome to the Clarion Online!

Welcome to the first issue of the Clarion Online. Since Eric Kellerman laid down the burdens of editing the hardcopy Clarion - a role in which, as we all know, he acquitted himself with great distinction - we have had enormous difficulty finding a new editor. In the end I decided to offer myself for the job, an offer which the new Executive Committee accepted formally at its meeting in February. This first issue was put together rather rapidly and is consequently somewhat on the thin side. I hope that future issues will contain more - and a greater variety of - material. Please contact me if you have an idea for a contribution. My e-mail address is dsnglton@tcd.ie. I would hope to produce a second 2004 issue before Christmas.

David Singleton

What the new committee has to say for itself

The Clarion asked each member of the new EUROSLA Executive Committee to write a short piece about her/himself.  Below (very minimally edited) are the fruits of this request.


President: Simona Pekarek Doehler
Born in Prague, Simona Pekarek Doehler has spent most of her life in Switzerland. She obtained her PhD in 1996 from the University of Basel, and then stayed two years as a visiting researcher abroad, at the Universities of Georgetown and of Paris V. She is currently Assistant Professor of French Linguistics at the University of Neuchâtel, where she will hold a Professorship in Applied Linguistics from October 1^st, 2004.

Understanding the social, linguistic and cognitive dimensions of social interaction is at the centre of her scientific interests. Within the field of second language acquisition and use, her work concentrates on classroom interaction, interactional competence, and processes of social mediation. A second research focus is concerned with the relation between the linguistic system and the dynamics of social interaction. She is specifically attempting to understand – mainly in native speakers' discourse – how the grammatical coding of reference and some word-order variations (e.g. left-dislocations or clefts) function on both the level information structure and the level of interactional organization. First findings on advanced learners' interactions show that the functional diversity of these linguistic resources differs in some regards from has been found in narrative discourse.

The following upcoming publications most clearly represent her current work on SLA:

- Pekarek Doehler, S. (in press): "Une approche interactionniste de la grammaire: Réflexions autour du codage grammatical de la référence et des topics chez l'apprenant avancé d'une L2", AILE, no. 21, June 2004 (D. Véronique & M. Matthey, eds.).

- Mondada, L. & Pekarek Doehler, S. (in press): "Second language acquisition as situated practice: Task accomplishment in the French second language classroom". Modern Language Journal, vol. 88/4, 2004.


Vice President: Christine Dimroth
Christine Dimroth is 36 years old and currently working as a staff member at the Max Planck Institut for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen in the Netherlands. She is the scientific co-ordinator of a project called “Learner Varieties”, which is devoted to the study of (mainly) untutored second language acquisition in adults and involves colleagues from France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Poland and the UK. In this project, the focus is on shared domains of interest like, for example, the acquisition of aspect, finiteness, scope items, the construction of discourse, and lexical development. The project  takes a comparative perspective and seeks to establish what is specific about

- L2 acquisition as compared to L1 acquisition
- L2 acquisition in young learners as compared to L2 acquisition in older learners
- the acquisition of different target languages

Her own research in this project is mainly concerned with the development of finiteness and the scope properties of particles like also, only, still, again in L2 as opposed to L1 acquisition. More recently she started working on what is known as the age factor, focusing on the differences in the development of early learner varieties in younger and older learners. Together with her co-Vice-President, Marianne Gullberg, she is also involved in a project studying what people can learn from first exposure to an as yet unknown (and unrelated) second language.

She spends most of her free time with her family. She has three children (7, 4 and 9/12) growing up with three languages: Polish (her husband’s native language), German (her own native language) and Dutch (at kindergardens and schools). She thinks that she should maybe start studying multilingual language development at home…

Vice-President: Marianne Gullberg
Marianne Gullberg heads the project “The Dynamics of Multilingual Processing” together with Dr Peter Indefrey at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, the Netherlands. She received her PhD from Lund University, Sweden, for a dissertation on cognitive and interactional aspects of gestures as communication strategies in second language production, comparing learners of French and Swedish. Combining traditional psycholinguistic methods with gesture analysis and eye-tracking techniques, she is currently working in three different areas: (1) input processing after minimal exposure at the earliest stages of L2 acquisition (with Dr C. Dimroth); (2) cross-linguistic interactions in the domain of lexical semantics and discourse production, focussing on advanced second language or bilingual production, including code-switching; (3) attention to and integration of gesture-speech information in native and non-native interaction.

She spends her spare time enriching airlines by commuting to her family in Sweden once every six weeks, she disturbs her neighbours musically, reads, plans the next meal, thinks about becoming serious about photography, or dreams of her next Apple purchase.


Treasurer/Membership Secretary: Paul Meara
Paul Meara is Research Director in the Centre for Applied Language Studies at the University of Wales Swansea. He is best known for his work on vocabulary acquisition in a second language, and has a particular interest in formal models of lexical processes. Since moving to Swansea in 1990, Paul has developed a team of young researchers at Swansea, and together they run a distance learning doctoral program that currently supports 20 PhD students, all working on aspects of vocabulary acquisition. Anxious not to turn into a boring old fart, Paul is also a keen musician. He plays the baritone sax in the City of Swansea Concert Band (www.swanseaconcertband.co.uk),


Secretary: Marta Medved Krajnovic
Marta Medved Krajnovic is a teaching and research assistant at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Zagreb. She received her MA in linguistics from the same university, and then spent a year as a visiting academic at Trinity College Dublin. There she got infected with the idea of SLA research which resulted in a PhD thesis on the acquisition of English as a second language observed in her 4-year-old son Kresimir. She also got influenced by the Irish style of life which did not result in her drinking too much beer but in a cute little girl Katarina.

Right now Marta is trying to spend as much time as possible with her family, and in her kids-free time she's peparing for the next teaching session. She is a research member of an applied linguistics project, "The English language in Croatia," and of a psycholinguistic project, "Language processing in Croatia." Her main research interest is the acquisition of English as a foreign language at the early shool age, and she will start being serious about it when she stops playing with lego blocks. However, she is already very serious about having a successful EUROSLA 15 in Dubrovnik.


Committee Member: Jean-Marc Dewaele
Jean-Marc Dewaele is Reader in French and Applied Linguistics at Birkbeck College, University of London.  He has published on psycholinguistic, sociolinguistic, pragmatic and psychological aspects of second language production and edited - with Li Wei and Alex Housen – in 2002, the book Opportunities and Challenges of Bilingualism (Mouton De Gruyter) and, in 2003, the book Bilingualism: Basic Principles and Beyond (Multilingual Matters). An edited book entitled Focus on French is scheduled to appear in the autumn of 2004 (Multilingual Matters). It is based on papers presented in a workshop at the Eleventh EUROSLA conference in Paderborn in 2001. It brought together “veterans” and younger researchers working in different theoretical paradigms but focusing on French as a target language.

His current research interests include the acquisition of sociolinguistic and sociopragmatic competence in a second language.  He co-edited - with Raymond Mougeon from the University of York (Canada) - a special issue on this topic in the French applied linguistic journal Acquisition et interaction en langue étrangère (17, 2002) and a special issue of the International Review of Applied Linguistics (42, 4, 2004).

A second complementary research interest is intercultural pragmatics and more specifically the complex interplay between multilingualism and emotions in a variety of contexts. He guest-edited two special issues on this topic in Estudios de Sociolinguistica (5, 1, 2004) and the Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development (25, 1-2, 2004) with Aneta Pavlenko (Temple University, Philadelphia).

His international service responsibilities include membership of the editorial boards of Estudios de Sociolinguistica, Intercultural Pragmatics, and International Journal of Multilingualism.  He is principal editor (with Jasone Cenoz) of the AILA Review.

He is a member of the Executive Committees of the Association for French Language Studies, the International Association of Multilingualism and The International Association of Applied Linguistics (AILA), where he is Scientific Commissions Co-ordinator.

Committee Member: Carmen Muñoz  
Carmen Muñoz is Assistant Professor at the Department of English and German Philology at the University of Barcelona. At present her teaching activities are in the area of applied linguistics and second language acquisition, but for many years she has also taught English grammar and linguistics. Her duties in the department include the co-ordination of a doctoral programme in applied linguistics with a special focus on second language acquisition.

Her research activities began in the field of first language acquisition and Catalan-Spanish bilingualism, where she worked with her colleagues from Psychology (that was her first degree before my second first degree in English Philology and her MA in Applied Linguistics). With the passing years there were enough people in language departments of three nearby universities to form a research group in second language acquisition. For the last nine years the group has been engaged in a longitudinal research project, the Barcelona Age Factor (BAF) Project, which has studied age effects on the acquisition of English as a foreign and third language.

In her personal life, she is the proud mother of two children. She and her family live in Barcelona and love it.


Committee Member: Antonella Sorace
Antonella Sorace was born in Padova, Italy. She holds a first degree (Laurea) in Foreign Languages and Literatures from the University of Rome, an MA in Applied Linguistics from the University of Southern California, and a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Edinburgh. She has held visiting appointments at various institutions including the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Hamburg. She is currently Professor of Developmental Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh. Her research focuses on a number of interrelated questions: the development of syntactic knowledge in adult second language acquisition and in early bilingual acquisition; the syntactic changes in the native language resulting from long-term exposure to a second language; the syntax-semantics interface and variation in syntax; the psychology of linguistic intuitions and the development of techniques for eliciting linguistic judgments in experimental linguistic research; and the cognitive neuroscience of the bilingual brain. The common thread of these questions is a focus on the cognitive factors that underlie syntactic variation in the grammar of individual speakers.

In her so-called "spare time" she indulges in music, yoga and tennis, but most of all she enjoys being with her family and her two sons, who are fully bilingual and like, among many other things, having fun with language.


Editor of the EUROSLA Yearbook: Susan Foster-Cohen
Susan Foster-Cohen works in both second and first language acquisition and bilingualism. Her main field of expertise is developmental pragmatics, specifically within the frameworkof Relevance Theory. She has taught and researched in the UK, USA and France (where she co-organized the 8th EUROSLA conference in Paris). Currently, she is the Director of an early intervention centre for children with multiple developmental delays in Chrichurch, New Zealand. That work, while very different from her previous positions, is a richly rewarding experience, allowing time for research and reflection in, and well beyond the borders of, language development. Susan is the editor of the EUROSLA Yearbook. Each year, she teams up with co-editors from the immediately previous conference organisation to produce the volume in time for the next conference. This year will see the publication of Yearbook 4. 

Editor of the Clarion: David Singleton  
David Singleton is Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics at Trinity College Dublin, where he also functions as College Steward and Chairman of the Fellows. He was EUROSLA’s founding Secretary (1989-1993) and later served as the association’s President (1999-2003). His research interests relate mainly to the age factor, cross-linguistic influence and the lexicon, and he has published widely on each of these topics.  In his leisure moments he enjoys spending time in the company of his two sons, making music, writing poetry, and generally pursuing a policy of carpe diem.

A day in the life...
Simone Pekarek Doehler

Simona Pekarek Doehler is in a bit of a time bind. She would like to introduce herself in the form of an informal day-in-the-life, so as to further the collegial atmosphere of EUROSLA, and maybe cast some light on the inspirations and background of some of her recent interests. However pleasant this would be for her, like enjoying the nicest days of spring, she is instead putting out fires that started last winter. Because of course she is a social interactionist, whatever you are now reading is inevitably a co-construction.... 

Morning then: a slowly unfolding flower of the new day, and sunlight creeps into the bedroom. 

Morning now: suddenly waking from deep sleep at some unrecorded time of night because of the tiniest little cough or squeal from a helpless warm body in a crib in a room on the other end of the apartment. 

I recently gave birth to both of our children in a timeframe tighter than I would have rationally imagined. That was definitely not very Swiss of me. In Switzerland, rules are followed, and more than 1.2 children per family is frowned upon. (I never understood how you get the .2 ). I must insist, though: we ARE a decent family: both of the children, and father and mother DO have shoes, but we are looking forward to running barefoot as soon as possible.... 

Any parent knows that after the first days of shock and awe, a major concern for the parents is understanding the child. When the kid begins to speak, this task does not become easier. The parent is the learner in this phase. 

First language acquisition stages: 
1) quiet or crying 
2) noises including chuckles, laughs, gagging and muffled with a hand or hands 
3) one type of sound: BUH (fan, book, watch, anything) 
4) one syllable words: BURD (bird), BOOTZ (no: not booze! but: boots, shoes, slippers) 
5) Two syllable words >> egocentric needs as motors for lexical development: 
BOTTA (bottle), 
BABU ("papu"=food, in Czech), 
GUGGA ("Nuggi"=pacifier, in Swiss German) 
(NB: Who's to blame for the Czech input?) 
6) The two word phase -> sign of a striking sense of reality (and a clear 
proof of the socially situated nature of language development): MOMMY BUSY, DADDY NO, HAPPI JZUUS (wine) 
7) The three word-phase : MOMMY SIT MOTORBIKE (while holding mommy's hand and pointing at the bike across the sidewalk) (I'd better not comment on this one) 

This is as far as I have researched. One thing is sure: there must be an innate set of principles in children which set aside a majority of the language region of the brain for the sole purpose of constructing barriers to parents’ comprehension, or else comfort. Multilingualism is an everyday situation for me, not simply because I work in French, chat in Schwytzerdütsch (the Swiss dialect), listen to my parents' stories in Czech, or speak English at home, but also because we like travelling: 

TRAVEL IN ITALY. WIFE DRIVING, HUSBAND NAVIGATING, CHILDREN QUIET (!!!) IN THE BACK: SIGN ON THE ROAD: PERICOLO: NEBBIA! HUSBAND: (PULLING OUT THE ROADMAP, STARTS TO STUDY IT EAGERLY) SIMI, IT LOOKS LIKE THERE WILL BE SOME FOG OR NEBULOSITY AT THIS PLACE NAMED PERICOLO. I CAN’T FIND IT ON THE MAP... WIFE: ??? 

Travelling, too, is pretty much an everyday business for me. Not that I spend all my time on vacation, but I have currently a commute of an hour and a half on the train from Basel to Neuchâtel several times a week. (It's quite an adventure, as is the thing that makes me go through this: a project on the relation between grammar and social interaction). One of the Swiss language divides occurs somewhere along the tracks. "It’s more obvious when you travel by car " says my husband, who has acquired German to join me in Switzerland, "the signs in German and the ads in English become blurred with French terms and then suddenly everything is incomprehensible". One of these days, an extraordinary thing occurs: The Swiss train runs late, very late. Some technical problem, they say. What is less surprising, given Swiss geography, is that we stop in a tunnel. I'm squeezed in a seat in second class with my computer on my knees, hunting for left and right dislocations in SLA classroom data. After ten endless minutes, the computer starts bumping up and down, and so do my knees: team meeting in 8 minutes, a course on "referential processes in social interaction" to teach at 12 o'clock, and an article to finish by the end of the month (not this month; LAST month) – and here I am stuck in a tunnel! Suddenly, a new finding on the screen; left and right dislocation at line 3: 

1. TEACHER: JE N’AI PLUS LE TEMPS DE .. DE ME LANCER DANS CE QUE JE 
2. VOUDRAIS FAIRE 
3. STUDENT: MOI JE L'AI LE TEMPS (BRIGHTLY) 
4 TEACHER: OUAIS ... (LONGINGLY) 

We pull out of the tunnel. The day continues. It's going to be a long day. When I am at home, the apéro is the beginning of the end of the workday. Though work can continue for a while longer, a good, or at least palatable Chardonnay is welcome as soon as ”the sun goes over the yardarm” with small nibbles accompanying it. All work is reviewed again the next day for errors and foodstains. The babies have been aggressively conditioned to go to bed at a reasonable hour. After feeding and final politeness class at around 19:00, there is a bit of post-feeding walkabout, ending abruptly in bed and crib. After that, as a cornerstone of family life, a premium is put on maximal culinary 
enjoyment and minimal cleaning afterwards. At moments of complete exhaustion, later evenings might be spent very efficiently collecting cultural signifiers from news programs or movies from different countries, usually on a glowing TV screen. While not interactive, the now-focussed parents often address the screen in the harshest of terms (especially during the news programs; an increasing tendency!). This rough work is from time to time accompanied by a cheese course and the rest of the red wine. When guests visit, they substitute for the glowing screen, and the complexity of the evening increases because, usually, the guests talk back. 

The little tête-à-têtes are not much better, as my husband does too! Despite of all this: I am a social interactionist.


EUROSLA 14: 
Let’s go to Donostia-San Sebastian! 
Goazen Donostiara!! 
Vamos a San Sebastián!
Jasone Cenoz

The next Eurosla conference (Eurosla 14) will take place in Donostia-San Sebastian from September 8 to September 11, 2004. Preparations are well advanced and we can confirm the four plenary speakers: Ellen Bialystok, Zoltan Dörnyei, Batia Laufer  and Carmen Muñoz. Other academic activities will include: the pre-conference Language Learning Roundtable on the age factor, doctoral workshops, and a wide range of oral and poster presentations. We received over 250 proposals, most of them for oral presentations and we have been able to accommodate fewer than 25% of them owing to space and time limitations. Because of the high quality of the proposals we have planned two poster presentation sessions so as to have the opportunity to include more papers. Please note that oral and poster presentations have the same academic value at this conference and that poster presentations will be associated with discussion slots scheduled in the programme. We would like to thank all those who sent in a submission and the members of the scientific committee for their intensive work evaluating the abstracts.

The conference also has an exciting social programme. The EUROSLA 14 welcoming reception will take place on Wednesday evening (September 8) at the Miramar Palace and will be sponsored by Multilingual Matters. On Friday we will have the conference dinner at a typical Basque Cider House. Cider tastings are part of Basque tradition but the Rioja area with its excellent wines is also close to San Sebastian.

The conference venue, the Miramar Palace, has beautiful views of San Sebastian bay and is very close to two of San Sebastian’s famous beaches, and so if the weather is nice (the landscape is green in the Basque Country!) you will be able to enjoy the beach at lunch time or even in the evening. The average temperature in September is 20° Celsius (68° F) during the day and a little cooler at night. The average water temperatures at this time of the year range from 19° to 22° Celsius (66°-72° F).

San Sebastian is a multilingual city of approximately 180,000 inhabitants. Basque and Spanish are the official languages and, as it is only 20 km away from the French border and a tourist resort, French and English can also be heard on the streets. Not many people are fluent in English so you may have to practise your Spanish or learn some Basque words (see http://www.bugeurope.com/essentials/basque.html).

September is still in the high season and our conference is right before the International Film Festival, so make sure that you book your accommodation as soon as possible.

Please visit our web page for updated information about the conference! 

http://www.vc.ehu.es/eurosla2004/

Looking forward to welcoming you in Donostia-San Sebastian! Bon voyage!

A Call for Papers
...from the General Editor of Language Learning

In our continuing desire to widen the scope of Language Learning, but without giving up our core identity, we wish to actively encourage  and invite submission of manuscripts that treat the broad area of cognitive neuroscience of language acquisition and language processing.

The language sciences, as part of the sciences of human behaviour are facing daunting new challenges in the questions raised and in the ways these questions are answered. The questions lie at the interface of the life sciences and the social sciences and humanities, and represent substantial challenges both at the empirical and theoretical levels. The issues are deceptively simple: What questions to ask, how to look for answers and how to communicate the results of this quest.

John Schumann et al. in their recent book ( The Neurobiology of Learning, Perspectives From Second Language Acquisition. 2004, Lawrence Earlbaum, Mahwah, N.J.,  London) have this to say: "If our thinking about second language learning is not constrained by the biology of learning, and if it is only constrained by an analysis of the product of that learning, then we can say almost anything about underlying mechanisms. .......we can invoke, as though they were real, mechanisms such as an affective filter, cognitive operating principles, noticing, monitoring, pidginization, nativization, cognitive strategies, learning strategies. But ….. should we limit ourselves to metaphors? We can constrain our metaphors with biological knowledge. Second language acquisition is a subfield of Applied Linguistics and is as much psychological as it is linguistic. But just as we are making our links with psychology, psychology is becoming radically biologized...."

The unprecedented advances in imaging technologies and computational capabilities give  real hope for  major breakthroughs in the coming years in the understanding of human behaviour.  In other words, for the first time there is a real possibility to establish direct relationships between observed behaviours and their neurobiological substrates, thus allowing for first-order explanations of these phenomena. A true revolution in the way we conceptualize and think about the complex proposition called human existence. The thrust of this exciting new development, of course, is that we can now look at this process in radically new ways, taking full advantage of the dramatic discoveries in the neurosciences and in computer science.

We at Language Learning - A Journal of Research in Language Studies, as a leading journal in applied linguistics, wish to give concrete expression to these convictions. I am writing now to invite you personally, you, your colleagues and your students to share with us the fruits of your research endeavours and consider our journal as a possible venue for publishing your work.

These are truly exciting times.

Alexander Z. Guiora
General Editor
Language Learning
A Journal of Research in Language Studies
aguiora@umich.edu 
http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/journals/ll

Manuscripts should be sent to:

Prof. Kathleen Bardovi-Harlig
Editor, Language Learning
Program in TESOL/Applied Linguistics
Memorial Hall 313
1021 East Third Street
Indiana University
Bloomington, IN 47405-7005
USA