Spring newsletter 2012

Welcome back to the New Year and to the Spring Term.  For both new and continuing students (not to mention staff), minds traditionally tend to focus on assessment and its various demands during this term. By this stage, however, your understanding of your chosen field will have developed considerably, even if the results are not immediately obvious. We hope that you continue to enjoy learning about language and linguistics, and to use the challenges posed by assessment to further your knowledge.

Dr Malcolm Edwards, Head of Department

Our BA Linguistics and Languages and BA Linguistics and Culture courses are now open for online applications. The programmes offer the opportunity to gain expertise in linguistics, combined with either learning a new language in French, Japanese, German, Spanish or Portuguese, or an in-depth study of European, Latin American and Japanese cultures which are taught in English.

Online applications are open for the CertHe Linguistics and Japanese in March. This programme offers an introductory study of linguistics and gives you the opportunity to learn beginner's Japanese. Completing the programme will allow you to enter into the second year of one of our BA programmes should you wish to further your study in the field.

Studentship applications for 2012/13 are now available for MPhil/PhD students and those students undertaking the research years of their NewRoutePhDs.

All Applied Linguistics and Communication courses.

From 2012, getting a university education is accessible and affordable for everyone, whether you choose to study part-time or full-time. Most Birkbeck undergraduate students will be able to access government student loans to cover the full cost of tuition fees. Birkbeck has a generous financial package for students in need, that will complement the new student loan scheme.

Postgraduate course fees will be unaffected by these changes.

Come to one of our Preparing for University: Finance and Study workshops, where we will give you the facts on tuition fees and student loans, and give you the chance to consider the potential challenges and opportunities of studying at university.

The Multiple Identities of Multilingualism

Jean-Marc Dewaele, (Department of Applied Linguistics and Communication) and Derek Hook (Department of Psychosocial Studies) will be discussing The Multiple Identities of Multilingualism, as part of this cross-departmental lecture series exploring the boundaries of identity.

Date: Tuesday 20 March 2012
Time: 6.30-8pm
Venue: Birkbeck, central London campus

Further information and how to book.

Professor Zhu Hua attended the 2011 recruitment fair for doctoral students in Beijing, China, on behalf of the UK national consortium for NewRoutePhD. The fair, which was held on 26-27 November, is the largest international event specifically targeted at doctoral candidates.

Dr Penelope Gardner-Chloros was recently interviewed for an article on the BBC website discussing the possibility that the word ‘mademoiselle’ could soon be disappearing from the French language. Read the article.

The Centre for Multilingual and Multicultural Research hosted a number of talks by prominent researchers this term.  Professor Rosa María Jiménez Catalán (University de la Rioja) talked about CLIL in primary and secondary schools in La Rioja on 20 January. Professor Ema Ushioda (Warwick University) talked about Motivation in Second Language Acquisition on 2 February. Our Honorary Research Fellow, Professor Peter Skehan, talked about The effect of planning on L2 production on 9 February.

There is a further talk by Prof. Alex Housen (Free University of Brussels) scheduled later this term entitled A framework for investigating the effects and effectiveness of instruction in SLA.

Congratulations
The department would like to congratulate three recent graduates from the new MA TESOL/Language Teaching degree who have all put their postgraduate studies to good use:

• Michelle Pielorz has secured a post in teacher development and supervision as Academic Manager at GEOS in Boston, USA.
• Lara Mushkat will take up a post as a Lecturer II at the Hong Kong Baptist University Language Centre in August.
• Florence Beckett was appointed as the Higher Education Study Support Assistant at South Thames College, where she is in charge of a study area for students of International Business. Florence is also submitting a paper based on her dissertation about blended learning to the Japanese Association of Language Teachers (JALT) conference at the suggestion of the software developer of the system that she studied.

Forthcoming publications
Code-switching and pausing: An interdisciplinary study by Penelope Gardner-Chloros, Lisa McEntee-Atalianis and Marilena Paraskeva, is shortly to appear in the International Journal of Multilingualism.

Find out more about staff publications and presentations.

• Department of Applied Linguistics and Communication
• Contact us
• Higher Education Introductory Studies
• Academic Writing courses for native English speakers
• Academic Writing courses for non-native English speakers
• Open evenings