Key Notes

Confirmed Key Note Speakers

Opening Key Note: Dr. Marjolijn Verspoor (University of Groningen)

The dynamics of language development in education

Taking a usage-based, emergentist perspective on language acquisition and using techniques and insights from dynamic systems theory, I will show how Dutch learners in an instructed context develop their language over time. What our data on about 500 learners shows is that beginners use whatever resources they have to make meaning and that includes especially the L1. Even though there is a great deal of variation, there are common stages the learners go through. From the beginning, they use almost all constructions that they will use as they become more proficient. What changes is not the kinds of constructions but their relative distribution. We will look at the development of constructions at the sentence, clause, chunk, phrase and word level. We will also look at errors in general and transfer errors. At every level we see irregular budding patterns, reminding us of fractals.

Marjolijn Verspoor's primary research interest is second language development within a usage based, emergentist perspective. She uses methods and techniques from dynamic systems theory to follow the development of different linguistic measures longitudinally and has published in several major journals on the topic.

Another research interest is how insights from Cognitive Linguistics can help improve language teaching. She has written several overview articles for encyclopedia that show how Cognitive Linguistics may be used in teaching.

Finally, she is interested in transferring her own theoretical insights to her own students and has written and co-authored several textbooks. She co-authored a cognitive approach (construction grammar) to sentence analysis and a very popular, general introduction to Cognitive Linguistics, which has been translated (and re-authored) into several other languages: Afrikaans, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Korean, Polish and Spanish. Recently she co-authored an advanced resource book about Second language Acquisition, which gave the original impetus to applying dynamic systems theory to language development research. The most recent book that has appeared is a new textbook that shows how to do such language development research from a DST perspective.

 

Key Note: Univ.-Prof. Dr. Gisela Brünner (Technische Universität Dortmund)

Angewandte Diskursforschung - zukünftige Perspektiven

Der Vortrag zielt auf eine Einschätzung der aktuellen Situation und der zukünftigen Perspektiven der Angewandten Diskursforschung, die einen wichtigen Teil der Angewandten Linguistik repräsentiert.

Ich skizziere zunächst kurz die Entwicklung der Angewandten Diskursforschung, ihre Fragestellungen und Ziele sowie ihre methodischen Spezifika.

Anschließend stelle ich das bisher Erreichte, aber auch die bestehenden Desiderate dar: Zu welchen Untersuchungsbereichen liegen praxisrelevante Ergebnisse vor, welche sind nicht oder ungenügend untersucht? Wie weit ist die Entwicklung und Umsetzung von Vermittlungskonzepten, um gewonnene Ergebnisse für die Aus- und Fortbildung aufzubereiten und in die Praxis rückzuvermitteln? Steht für die Belange der Angewandten Diskursforschung inzwischen eine ausreichende Infrastruktur zur Verfügung?

Schließlich werde ich zukünftige Perspektiven thesenhaft umreißen und Impulse geben.