The Clarion Online
Issue 2 | Summer 2005

Welcome to the Clarion Online, Issue Two!

Welcome to the second issue of the Clarion Online. This issue was supposed to appear rather sooner than now, but, alas, I had some difficulties squeezing copy out of the willing but overworked colleagues whom I had approached for contributions – and whom I deeply thank for their time and efforts amidst the demands of their busy lives!

The menu this time around is as follows: we have an appetizing account from Marta Medved Krajnović of what awaits us in Dubrovnik; we also have some impressions of last year’s conference from Lorraine Gilleece, a doctoral student based at Trinity College Dublin; and finally we have a fascinating account of three days in the life of that academic dynamo and man about town, Jean-Marc Dewaele.

Enjoy!

I shall bring out the next issue of the Clarion Online as soon as I have managed to gather together some further material. Anyone who would like to write a piece for the magazine – of whatever length on whatever topic - is most warmly invited to contact me at dsnglton@tcd.ie.

David Singleton

EUROSLA 15: 15th Annual Conference of the European Second Language Association.

Marta Medved Krajnović
Dates: 14th–17th September, 2005
Place: Dubrovnik, Croatia
Organizer: University of Zagreb
Venue: Hotel Dubrovnik Palace

How It All Started
SLA events are not new to Dubrovnik. For several years in a row during the 1980s, Dubrovnik was hosting SLA summer schools and conferences which were a gathering of both established SLA experts and novice researchers (some Clarion readers could certainly confirm this). After a break during the 1990s, it seems that time has come to bring SLA back to Dubrovnik. Well, what could serve that purpose better than a Eurosla conference – prestigeous and already world famous, but still somehow intimate, with a distinctive European touch, just like Dubrovnik itself. 

The Present
Since the EUROSLA 15 conference is already so close, and since many of us will very soon land at Dubrovnik airport, maybe the best way to present the conference is to follow some hypothetical Eurosla members (let us call them Mr Form and Ms Function) from the moment they land, till the moment of their departure back home.

The story might go like this. 

On Tuesday, 13th September, after landing and collecting safely arrived luggage, Mr Form and Ms Function find themselves in the bus which takes them from the airport entrance to the north gate (the so-called Pile) of the Old Town of Dubrovnik. The mentioned colleagues are left speechless in front of the monumental city walls, but there is no time to explore the Old Town yet; first the accommodation has to be found.

Mr Form, who has alreday been to Dubrovnik, takes a five minute walk from Pile to the International Centre of Croatian Universities (ICCU, or MSHS in Croatian). The Centre is situated in a historical building close to the old town and, in addition to conference facilities, offers completely renovated and very nice rooms for academics and students, and at a very reasonable price.

Ms Function, on the other hand, takes the bus No 4 (the line that connects the Pile gate with all major hotels to the north-west of the Old Town) and after a 10-minute ride finds herself in front of the entrance to Hotel Dubrovnik Palace where her accommodation is and where the conference is taking place. Having refreshed themselves, Mr Form takes a short stroll across Stradun (the main street within the city walls), and Ms Function decides to register for the conference in order to avoid crowding next day.

Next morning (Wednesday, 14th September), our guests meet other colleagues and friends in the conference area of Hotel Palace. It's nice to exchange news with people not seen for some time, but there is no much time for chatting, since a very interesting pre-conference event is starting - the Language Learning Round Table Conference on Individual Differences in Second Language Behavior. The convener – Jelena Mihaljević Djigunović has decided to bring together the following speakers: John Schumann (topic: Neurological Bases for Individual Differences), Andrew Cohen (topic: Coming to terms with language learner strategies: What do strategy experts think about the terminology and where would they direct their research?) and Peter MacIntyre (topic: Willingness to communicate in the second language: Individual and intergroup processes). These interesting plenary talks are followed by a challenging discussion led by Robert DeKeyser, Marianne Nikolov and Jean-Marc Dewaele. In between the two parts of this event, Mr Form has a light lunch on the hotel terrace and Ms Function enjoys a swim in the crystal blue see (the conference venue has it own beach and indoor and outdoor swimming pools). Some very organized members of Eurosla community manage to have both.

Another pre-conference event, the already traditional PhD workshop, is held in four sessions in the late afternoon. Ms Function is one of the discussants and her feedback given to PhD students presenting methodological problems in their research is proving very useful to other students attending the workshop and being at different stages in their PhD studies.

Meanwhile, Mr Form has decided to register for the main part of the conference (to avoid crowding up on Thursday morning), go back to his hotel, refresh himself, have a stroll in the Old Town and then come to the pre-conference reception at the Sponza Palace – yet another historical building within the city walls. After the reception, dinner in one of numerous (and very reasonably priced) family restaurants, and in good company, is maybe the best day to end the evening.

Next morning (Thursday, 15th September) the main part of the conference starts. By now many of the participants have already registered and after the official opening the plenary speech by R. Gardner follows. The theme of the talk is The socio-educational model as a research paradigm in second language acquisition. During a coffee break, a quick consultation of the programme helps Mr Form and Ms Function to decide which session to attend next. A panel about Vocabulary development and the four skills organized by K. Haastrup or three other sessions (one mainly on grammar, one on phonological acquisition and one on pragmatics) are the options. The day goes on, rich in presentations, and another thing that has to be singled out is the time slot for putting up the posters. Participants with poster presentation have two hours (6 pm – 8 pm) to arrange their posters for the next day poster session.

Friday (16th September) is a very intensive day: two plenary talks – Mike Sharwood Smith's attempt at An ntegrated theory of language acquisition, and Kenneth Hyltenstam's discussion of the relationship between Formulaic language, learner age and near nativeness; G. Kasper's panel on SLA in interaction; the poster session with close to 50 presentations; parallel paper sessions on different SLA topics and, in the end, EuroSLA annual general meeting (AGM). Participants are warmly invited to the AGM since there will be elections for the new Eurosla Board. Fortunately, after such a long and intensive day, a delicious dinner on the terrace of the hotel Excelsior that has the best view over the Old Town will restore all their strength. Those not feeling tired and into something different than the conference dinner, can attend the Linđo folklore dance, a very lively performance by Dubrovnik youth. Linđo performance is a gift by The Town of Dubrovnik to the conference participants. This performance will take place just outside the Old Town walls.

The next day is Saturday (17th September), the last day of the conference. Just to check, our first day friends, Mr. Form and Mr. Function are still there, eager to hear some more, and not tired at all. One more plenary talk, this time by the host reasearcher, J. Mihaljević Djigunović on The relationship between language processing and language anxiety, one more panel session, by M. Kovačević on The relationship between form and function in bilingual development, several more paper sessions and the official closing. And after the closing, those who want to spend more time together with their Eurosla friends, can join one of the two interesting trips to the historical places of great natural beauty in the nearby area, or do some serious sightseeing of everything that Dubrovnik's rich political, artistic and cultural history offers. And some Eurosla participants will certainly decide to just lie on the beach. Everything listed sounds inviting.

The next day (Sunday, 18th September) Mr Form and Ms Function leave in the morning hours, full of impressions and determined to attend the next year Eurosla conference too.

The Future
We hope that all Eurosla members will have enjoyed the conference and conference-related events. So, why not come back? For example, the International Center of Croatian Universities (the one where our hypothetical Mr. Form was situated) offers both - very good conference facilities and accommodation. We consider it an ideal place for a smaller scale conferences, seminars, workshops and schools on different SLA topics.

See you soon!
 

Impressions of EUROSLA 14
Lorraine Gilleece

As Eurosla 14 was my first experience of an international linguistics conference, I was unsure of what to expect. In addition, I had the added worry of a poster presentation. However, arriving in the beautiful Basque country a few days before the conference opened, I began to think that maybe international conferences weren’t so bad after all! A visit to the Guggenheim in Bilbao and a few days on the beach in San Sebastian convinced me that the life of a researcher might suit me quite well. The only problem was trying to tear myself away from the beach when the conference began.

The pre-conference Language Learning round table event on the Age Factor was most enjoyable. It was very interesting to actually hear the speakers in person, having read so much of their work before. Sometimes it is easy to forget that there is a person behind the long list of publications and seeing the speakers in person reminded me of that.

When the conference opened on Thursday, I was surprised to find such a wide mix of people in attendance, from the plenary speakers and people whose names were familiar to me from journals and books, to other postgraduate students in a very similar position to me. I was also surprised by the number of people in attendance who weren’t presenting. I quickly realised that everyone was very approachable.

I thoroughly enjoyed many of the presentations, particularly those of the plenary speakers. Ellen Bialystok’s presentation on the cognitive effects of bilingualism was especially fascinating as this was something I knew little about beforehand. The poster session was not nearly as daunting as I had imagined, as people were very supportive of my work. I was very pleasantly surprised at how helpful people were in emailing me after the conference with references and even the offer of photocopying a hard-to-find chapter from a book!

Even though the weather may have taken a turn for the worse over the course of the conference, it didn’t spoil the social side to the event. Not even a thunder storm could dampen the mood – it simply meant that the evening receptions had to continue until the rain was over! The conference dinner proved to be a very interesting and enjoyable evening. It’s not very often that postgraduate students in Trinity see stone-throwing or hear Basque choirs so that was a new experience for me. The food was delicious and it was nice to discuss our research in a more informal setting.

Overall Eurosla was an extremely positive experience for me. The week in San Sebastian certainly increased my determination to write an abstract for Croatia!

Three days in the life...
Jean-Marc Dewaele

Thursday. The household stirs at 7.30 am. Livia, my 8 year-old daughter barricades herself in the bathroom, to remind us of her importance in the family. After breakfast my wife, Katja, goes to work at the Belgian embassy in Eaton Square where she is a secretary. The diplomat she works for is nice, but she dreads his departure and the arrival of a less pleasant “boss”. The stories she brings home about vain and hierarchy-obsessed diplomats and politicians never cease to amaze me, and every time I praise my luck for not having chosen to become a diplomat as I had intended from childhood. An innocuous remark by my professor in international law that I had no chance of convincing the members of the recruitment commission because of my baby face made me decide to get a PhD in applied linguists first and reconsider a diplomatic career at a later stage. Needless to say, I never looked back. Once Livia’s lunchbox is ready, we set of for Garfield Primary, a local state school. She used to have school dinners but declared them inedible. This is not surprising given that the average amount of money spent on a school meal in the UK is the equivalent about one euro. I take my bicycle, and Livia climbs on the back. I respect the unwritten rule of not speaking French to her as we enter the playground. More than half of the 285 pupils in the school don’t speak English at home, and although linguistic diversity is officially appreciated, the only lingua franca among the children is English. The nice thing is that Livia’s trilingualism doesn’t stand out (she speaks Dutch with Katja). She is top of the class in numeracy and literacy; a fact that I use in talks to anxious multilingual parents who fear that too many languages may overburden their child’s mind. Livia might be a fully functional trilingual from birth, but her dominant language is clearly English. Parents can’t provide the kind of input she gets from her peer-group. Regular trips back to Belgium do help her maintain her French and Dutch. I greet a few parents and then set out for my usual tour following Pymmes brook toward Trent Park. I get my best research ideas cycling through parks and woods. I stop at the obelisk facing the manor of Trent Park that is now the central building of Middlesex University. The view is nice here and the terrain is flat and dry: excellent for stretching and some karate katas.

I’m home at 10.15, shower and spend some time reading and answering emails from friends, colleagues and students. One of the aspects I like best in our profession is to be part of that international brother/sisterhood of interesting (and often brilliant) people with whom ideas, papers and jokes can be swapped without fear that someone will run away with your idea and hit the jackpot. These friends are very very dear to me, and I’m always looking forwards to conferences to give them all a real hug rather than a virtual one. I’m also regularly struck by how “small” our applied linguistic world is. All the more reason to earn respect, to reciprocate favours like reviewing manuscripts for journals and for friends, writing letters of reference, accepting external examining jobs and posts in professional associations. You might have noticed the previous reference to David Lodge’s delightful novel “A small world” about joyful and libidinous behaviour at academic conferences. It seems I was born too late in that sense. People of my generation seem to have much stricter sexual ethics that those who are a bit older. We enjoy ourselves, but we don’t seem to mess around. Are we boring or just more responsible? It’s my absolute conviction that sex and applied linguistics don’t mix. I spend the next two hours working on a paper on communicative anxiety and preparing an abstract for a future workshop. Birkbeck being an evening college means the staff usually goes to work in the afternoon. That’s what I do after a quick lunch and nap. I read a paper to review in the Tube (Piccadilly line), run up the stairs in Russell Square to avoid the queues. I like Bloomsbury where Birkbeck is based. The School of Languages, Linguistics and Culture is located in Gordon Square: a lovely little park full of students and staff from University College London at this hour of the day. As I enter my office, I remind myself that it might be small and a bit shabby, but it used to be Virginia Woolf’s back kitchen. The full professors have the best rooms with ceiling decorations and view on the park in the middle of the square. I prepare Powerpoints with tonight’s lectures and keep an eye on the email as my American friends come on-line. It becomes really busy from 5 pm when students come to talk about their research projects, ask for references. All my colleagues in the UK envy our mature students. The youngest are in their twenties, the eldest got her PhD in French literature at the age of 85. They are tremendously motivated, coming in for classes after a long day at work. They also bring a huge capital of linguistic, social and cultural experience to classes. Teaching sociolinguistics and bilingualism to a group of no more than 25 students from various European countries, Japanese, Chinese, North-Africans, Africans and Mauritians is very rewarding: there is never a lack of illustrations of the phenomena under discussion, of enlightening anecdotes. I often feel more like a conductor and moderator than an ex-cathedra teacher. The environment is also very informal and friendly. London being such a multicultural city also means that people are tolerant of other points of view and beliefs. This is also the main moral message of my teaching: observe and describe, try to understand, don’t condemn.

I eat a sandwich and then carry my faithful iBook to the classroom. The first session (6 – 7.30 pm) is a BA class “Language and Society”, the following one is a MA class “Second Language Acquisition”. I enjoy the teaching but I’m always exhausted towards 9 pm. I don’t need a watch to know how late it is, by 8.50 I become aware of French words slipping into my English, and as a tired acrobat I want to come down from the rope that is the English language, and land softly in my native tongues. I come home at 9.45pm. Livia was picked up by a friend’s parent at school at 3.15 and then by Katja at 6 pm. We watch the news on BBC, I struggle to stay awake and rush off to bed.

Friday. Slight drizzle today but not enough to keep the bicycle in the shed. As I wait in the school’s playground, watching Livia marching into the building and waving, I exchange a few words with the Ms Wellings, the headmistress. I joined the school board as a parent governor and have been amazed by the headmistress’s professionalism and dedication. She manages a budget of 1.3 million pounds, has to keep an eye on personnel, children, curricula, trivia and tons of regulations from the local authority. Admirable. After my cycle ride, I shower, change into my “formal” clothes (not including a tie) and take the tube to Liverpool station where I take a train to Colchester, and from there a bus to the university of Essex where I am an external examiner for a PhD viva. The thesis deals with extraversion and vocabulary learning in SLA. It’s one of my pet subjects and the work is excellent, so I enjoy meeting the supervisor, whom I hadn’t met before, and talk to the candidate, a future SLA colleague, about the fine points of individual differences.

I return to London at the end of the afternoon, eternally amazed at how low the level of comfort is in British trains. Meanwhile Katja has taken Livia to her drama-class in Muswell Hill. Livia enjoys acting a lot (she really is my daughter!). I’m a bit tired of linguistics by now, so I plunge in the paperback every Londoner takes along on underground and train journeys (you never know how long they can take and there is nothing like a good book to have privacy on crowed public transport). This one is about the wives and descendants of Henry VIII: a fascinating topic. The religious fanaticism of the period strikes me again. How could people walking in the streets I’m crossing now be so intolerant of other interpretations of the faith, and go as far as kill or prefer death rather than give in on such an abstract point? As I get home, I check the email which has accumulated over the day. There are messages from Penn State where I’ll be teaching a module in the Summer Institute in Applied Linguistics in July, before heading to AILA in Madison. I obtained a J1 visa to be able to work for 2 weeks in the US after a marathon of form filling, fee paying and queuing at the American consulate in London. Katja and Livia will join me after the AILA conference and we’ll do a tour of the great lakes. We’ll be back at the end of August when I’ll need to prepare my paper for the L3 conference in Fribourg, my intervention at the Language Learning Round Table preceding the EUROSLA conference in Dubrovnik, and my paper for the conference itself. Too many conferences, Katja complains, a view echoed by Livia and my Head of School. I explain to the latter that I’m taking PhD students along, and that this is the best kind of input they could have. I add that the paltry 300 pounds I receive once a year from Birkbeck to attend conferences covers less than 10% of what I spend on conferences. Applied linguistics is my most expensive hobby.

Saturday. Livia and I put on our Gi-s (the white robe) and head to our karate-class in Muswell Hill. It’s one of the highlights of my week. Livia started last summer, and after a few weeks of watching her practice I decided to join in. It’s GKR karate, non-contact, meaning that we stand in rows with the sensei (instructor) in front and we practice the moves in thin air. I had always imagined karate as being a testosterone-fuelled sport for machos. I discovered that children, parents, housewives and men practise it, generally for fitness but also for self-defence. It’s great fun. I realized that I hadn’t learned a new physical skill since the age of 18 (driving and wind-surfing), and that at the age of 40 it was time to learn again. Inevitably I was thinking about age effects and critical period as I watched the younger learners picking up complex series of movements with apparent ease and relatively little discipline, while older learners, sweating profusely, struggled with grim determination to direct arms and legs and toes in different directions as generals sending motley battalions into battle. Livia and I are both orange belts now (7th kyu: meaning 6 more to go to black belt). After lots of stretching, we practice the basic moves: blocks, punches, kicks yelling loud “kiais” as we strike. Then we go through different katas (formalised performance of a sequence of karate moves against imaginary opponents). The session ends with a sparring session for which we wear mitts and pads. It’s really hard, because you need to land a strike within 5 cm of the opponent’s gi or face. If you make contact you’re reprimanded, if you’re not close enough you don’t earn a point. I’m covered in sweat by the end of the session and we return home to shower and change and pick Katja up. We head to Hampstead where we have sushis and noodle soup, browse in the books of the local Waterstones, and buy an ice-cream. We love Hampstead, which retains a village feel despite having been absorbed into mega-London. It’s impossible for us to live here: the price of our terraced house in Bounds Green would buy us a minimal basement flat in Hampstead, but we can walk! We follow the Flask walk where many authors live, towards the Heath, up Parliament Hill where there is an excellent view on London. The Heath is enormous and beautiful, with swimming pounds for men, for women and one mixed one, all dating back to Victorian times. One of the reasons we came to the UK was the beauty of the parks. We haven’t been disappointed. Yet, there are some things we miss about Belgium, such as waffles, French and Flemish music on the radio, the churches of Bruges, the polders around Damme, the seaside in Knokke, a certain way of life. However, we realize that we would miss a certain number of things if we were to move out of London and the UK: the Sunday Times, which offers the reader enough sections to keep him/her happy for a whole rainy Sunday; London’s museums and many lovely corners, the international atmosphere of the city, the richness and diversity of people.

After crossing the Heath, we have tea and scones with clotted cream (no waffles...) at the terrace of Kenwood House at the north side of Heath. We glance at the magnificent Vermeers and Gainsboroughs through the museum’s window. Then we return home after a stop at Marks and Spencer to buy provisions for the coming week. Katja and I are happy “multicompetent” Belgian expatriates, Livia considers herself as a “London girl” rather than Belgian or English. But she would happily move to anywhere in order to have a bigger bedroom!