Faculty of Arts School of Languages & Linguistics

Research Projects in the School of Languages and Linguistics

Examples:

 

A difficult marriage: gender, politics and the romance in literary accounts of German unification.

Chief Investigators

Associate Professor Alison Lewis

Type

ARC Discovery Project

Overview

This project focuses on the interrelationship between gender, politics and the romance in literary accounts of German unification. Through an exploration of how the political "marriage" between East and West Germany, with its conventionalised gender roles, is mapped onto literary marriages, the project examines the challenges and opportunities that unification has afforded men and women. It will yield insights into the ways in which unification has rewritten the scripts for femininity and masculinity and forced a transformation of intimacy. Its finding will enhance knowledge of gender relations in post-communist Europe and the relationships between gender, the nation and modernity.

Address in some Western European Languages

Chief Investigators

Dr Catrin Norrby, Dr Leo Kretzenbacher, Dr Jane Warren, Prof. Michael Clyne

Web Site

http://www.rumaccc.unimelb.edu.au/projects/index.html#address

Type

ARC Discovery Project

Overview

This project investigates how recent sociopolitical events and developments have impacted on the ways in which people address each other in French, German and Swedish. Comparisons will be made with Italian and Dutch and between nations using the same language. The is to date no comparative study of this kind. The project is innovative in its use of qualitative and quantitative methodology and will lead to a new conceptual framework for the study of address. It will provide insights for inter-cultural communication and second language acquisition as well as the relation between language, cultural values, and sociopolitical change.

Iwaidja and other endangered languages of the Coburg Peninsula

Chief Investigators

Professor Nick Evans, Prof.Dr Hans-Juergen Sasse (Universitat zu Koln, Germany)

Web Site

http://www.mpi.nl/DOBES/WebpageDobes1/SubpagesTeams/SubpageIwaidja/

Type

Volkswagen Foundation Grant

Overview

Iwaidja is a seriously endangered Australian language spoken by around 200 people in the Coburg Peninsula, Northern Territory, Australia, and adjoining islands. This project is documenting Iwaidja in a wide range of settings, paying particular attention to traditional hunting, fishing and gathering ecological custodianship, kinship and geneaology, clans and social structure, knowledge of country and traditional sites, oral history, mythology and traditional song styles. To document traditional knowledge in these areas, relevant specialists are working alongside the core team of linguists and native language consultants.

Aboriginal Child Language Acquisition Project (ACLA1)

Chief Investigators

Professor Gillian Wigglesworth, Dr Patrick McConvell (AIATSIS),
Dr Jane Simpson (University of Sydney)

Web Site

http://www.linguistics.unimelb.edu.au/research/projects/ACLA/

Type

ARC Discovery Grant

Overview

This project involves case studies of three Aboriginal Communities designed to address the following questions:

  1. What kind of language input do indigenous Australian Aboriginal children receive from traditional indigenous languages, Kriol and varieties of ENglish, and from code-switching these languages as used by adults or older children?
  2. What effect does this have on the children's language acquisition and how the input is reflected in their productive output?
  3. What are the processes of language shift maintenance and change which may be hypothesised to result from this multilingual environment, as evidenced by the children's input and output, and the degree to which this reflects transmission of the target languages, the loss of traditional languages, or the emergence of new mixed languages?

The team is collecting data for the study in four main locations: Kalkaringi, Lajamanu, Tennant Creek and Yakanarra (all in the Northern Territory). We are identifying the kinds of interactions young children are involved in, the language they use at different ages and the breadth and variety of language the children are hearing.

Aboriginal Child Language Acquisition Project (ACLA2)

A longitudinal study of the interaction of home and school language in two Aboriginal communities

Chief Investigators

Professor Gillian Wigglesworth
Dr Jane Simpson (University of Sydney)

Other Researchers

Dr Debbie Loakes (postdoctoral researcher)
Ms Sally Dixon (PhD student)
Ms Therese Carr (PhD student)

Web Site

http://www.linguistics.unimelb.edu.au/research/projects/ACLA2/

Type

ARC Discovery Grant

Overview

This project will identify how well Indigenous Australian children manage the major change from a home environment, in which Standard Australian English is not the dominant code, to the school environment, in which it is the main code. This will allow us to determine whether, and to what extent, the different codes the children bring from home, and the demands made of them in the school, affect their ability to manage and fully participate in the school environment.

RQ1: What range of languages, and to what level of proficiency, do the children bring to school (e.g. Kriol, traditional language, Standard Australian English)?

RQ2: How does the full set of languages, registers and linguistic repertoires of Indigenous Australian children develop from age 5 to 9 as they move through the school system?

RQ3: During the early school years, what kinds of speech events do these children participate in, at home and in school, and which linguistic codes do they use when participating?

RQ4: To what extent are these children able to participate linguistically in the classroom?

RQ5: What are the processes for the children of second language/register acquisition, language shift, maintenance and change which may be hypothesised to result from their encounter with the different languages, the language events they participate in both at home and at school, and the language environments in which they operate?

RQ6: What are the implications of the answers to research questions 1-5 for the performance of children in the school environment?

Framework development for video-mediated L2 listening assessments

Chief Investigator

Dr Paul Gruba

Type

School of Languages and Linguistics - Grant in Aid

Overview

The aim of this project is to develop a framework for the use of digital video media as a mode of presentation in second language (l2) listening assessments. Significantly, building baseline research in this area would contribute to nascent efforts to design video-mediated listening tasks, understand candidate use of technology-mediated assessment instruments, and develop models of video-mediated listening comprehension.

Autism and written narrative: discourse analysis and the characterisation of higher level language disorder phenotypes

Chief Investigator

Associate Professor Lesley Stirling

Co Researcher: Dr Graham Barrington
Research Associate: Ms Susan Douglas

Type

ARC Discovery Grant

Overview

This project surveys written narrative capability in high-functioning autistic children attending mainstream schooling overseen by the Catholic Education Office, Victoria. It benefits from a unique collaboration between the fields of linguistics, cognitive science and community child health. It is innovative in its focus on written narrative and its use of techniques from the study of discourse to analyse narrative structure, marking of perspective, and the representation of mental states of characters. It will lead to a better understanding of characteristic language behaviours in children with autism, and to improved language and literacy interventions. It has theoretical significance for discourse theory and cognitive science.

 

 

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