číslo 10/2003, vyšlo 01.10.2003
EUROCALL 2003
EUROCALL 2003 – New Literacies in Language and Teaching
University of Limerick, 3 – 6 September 2003
As an academic working in the field of languages and exploiting the media my university offers, I had a chance to participate in the above mentioned event. The conference focused on the changing concepts and practices concerning literacy brought about by technological developments. The conference programme included over 150 presentations, papers, show and tell presentations and poster presentations. There were eight parallel sessions, which provided participants with a wide variety of topics, including presentations based on corpus-based approaches, languages for specific purposes, the virtual classroom, and the implications of this changing environment for language teacher training programmes.
Besides the parallel sessions there were three plenary speeches. The first was given by Professor Mike McCarthy from the University of Nottingham and University of Limerick. In his talk he concentrated on the key characteristics of speech in contrast to writing, which are as follows:
- writing is centripetal; speech is centrifugal;
- writers orient more towards back; speakers more towards each other;
- writing is off-line; speech is on-line;
- speech lacks "sentences", incomplete utterances occur but many utterances are jointly produced.
Moreover, Professor McCarthy exemplified some of the differences between writing and conversational speech, especially in the areas of grammar and lexis. In his opinion grammar of speech is elliptical, flexible, full of structures unnoticed in the past, forbidden structures, such as double negative. As far as the vocabulary is concerned, he emphasized smaller core of words (high frequent words) than in the written speech, higher interactiveness and idiomacity/creativity than in writing. Finally, he drew attention to re-definition of skills teaching, especially speaking skills, where the notion of listernership would become a significant element of "listening skills".
The pleanary presentation was then followed by several different areas of the parallel sessions, one of which was aimed at the spoken and written corpora, including various topics, for example, Can corpus consultation improve advanced learners "writing skills"?. This presentation summarized the results of a research project involving students of French at Masters level, who were given the opportunity to improve a short text which they had written in French by using concordancing software to consult a small specialised corpus (180,000 words) of texts by native speakers on a similar subject. Of course, after being introduced to the programme by having been given detailed guidelines. Another very interesting session in this area was on Corpora and human language technologies for language learners. The speakers demonstrated how modern Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) technologies can
improve learners´ language learning by materials development; determing the difficulty level of audio and video resources; finding resources at an optimal difficulty level for individual learners; building native language corpora; or providing a mechanism for applied linguistic researchers to search automatically and manually transribed learner corpora as a preliminary step to futher analysis.
Each evening was then concluded by a social programme where the participants could continue informal talks on the issues raised during the session while enjoying the Irish music and food.
Blanka Klimova,
Faculty of Informatics and Management,
University of Hradec Kralove
blanka.klimova@uhk.cz