Multilingualism Matters: Exploring Affective Aspects and Linguistic Distance in Language Learning
The research group Language and Cultures in Education (LaCiE) invites to a colloquium.
Classrooms are increasingly linguistically diverse, requiring heightened awareness from educators about how to cater to their students’ individual linguistic and affective needs and build on their existing language resources. Affective aspects such as language anxiety constitute an underexplored area in heritage language studies. Similarly, linguistic distance has not received much attention both from research and pedagogical perspectives. In our presentations, we will shed light on both of these neglected but highly relevant research areas within multilingual contexts.
Annika Schimpff – PhD Fellow
In my PhD project, I am exploring language anxiety experienced by young heritage speakers of German and French in an Australian and Danish context. Language anxiety can be defined as the apprehension or fear experienced when a language user is expected to perform in a foreign language or as in this project, heritage language. In my presentation, I will discuss the concept of language anxiety and its relevance for applied linguistics as well as my preliminary findings from my pilot study in Australia.
Nils Jaekel – Associate Professor of English Language Acquisition and Language Pedagogy
Research often oversimplifies lived linguistic heterogeneity as binary variables: native versus nonnative. Linguistic distance (LD) measures allow a fine-grained operationalization of linguistic diversity in education. I will present results from two studies investigating the associations of LDs of students’ home languages with German (majority language) and English (foreign language) skills as well as Mathematics attainment. Data were collected from a diverse sample of 5,130 Year 5 students in Germany. In this presentation, we will discuss the relevance of LD for (language) education and provide a brief outlook on other contexts where LD measures can provide valuable insights.
We look forward to welcoming you to this colloquium and discussing these matters with you!
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