Taikomoji kalbotyra, 20: 5–8 eISSN 2029-8935
https://www.journals.vu.lt/taikomojikalbotyra DOI: https://doi.org/10.15388/Taikalbot.2023.20.1
Meilutė Ramonienė
Vilnius University
meilute.ramoniene@flf.vu.lt
Jūratė Ruzaitė
Vytautas Magnus University
jurate.ruzaite@vdu.lt
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Copyright © 2023 Meilutė Ramonienė, Jūratė Ruzaitė. Published by Vilnius University Press.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence, which permits unrestricted use,
distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
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This special issue of Applied Linguistics is dedicated to the papers presented at the 6th International Conference on Applied Linguistics “Languages and People: Problems and Solutions”. The conference, organised by the Lithuanian Association of Applied Linguistics (Lietuvos taikomosios kalbotyros asociacija, LITAKA) and the Department of Lithuanian Studies at the Institute of Applied Linguistics, Vilnius University, took place on 29–30 September 2022. The conference was held at Vilnius University, Faculty of Philology.
The conference brought together 90 speakers from 19 countries – Latvia, Poland, Finland, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Hungary, Italy, Estonia, India, the Philippines, the United Kingdom and others – to present their latest research in various areas of applied linguistics. The conference featured 16 sessions and two thematic colloquia. Plenary lectures were given by world-renowned scholars Annick De Houwer (Harmonious Bilingualism Network (HaBilNet)), Victoria Guillén-Nieto (University of Alicante, Spain), and Marcus Callies (University of Bremen, Germany). This special issue contains 10 papers in English and 4 papers in Lithuanian, reflecting the wide array of topics covered at the conference. These include research on applied linguistics by scholars from different countries in a wide range of disciplines: language policy and planning, multilingualism, language use, foreign language teaching and learning, corpus linguistics, and others.
The special issue starts with the topic of multilingualism. In their article “When family language policy and early bilingualism research intersect: A case study”, researchers Anna Verschik and Reili Argus from Tallinn University examine the issues of family language policy that are relevant to many post-Soviet countries by analysing the case of one family. The paper delves into semi-structured 1.5-hour interviews and 6-hour conversations of an ethnic Russian family living in Estonia to explore whether there are differences between linguistic ideology, language management and the natural use of languages in family communication. The authors investigate how the Russian-speaking father and the Estonian-speaking mother of the family adhere to their stated linguistic beliefs in their actual communication with each other and their children, and how linguistic ideology, language management and linguistic practices fit together in the family.
The second paper in this issue also focuses on issues related to multilingualism. Justīne Bondare’s paper “The use of English among Latvian adolescents: A study of multilingual identity and language dominance” analyses the impact of virtual communication among Latvian youth on language use and identity. The aim of the paper is to find out whether the linguistic attitudes and identity formation of young people aged 13-25 are influenced by the dominance of English in social networks. The study is based on the results of two surveys with 409 respondents and focuses on linguistic attitudes towards English and Latvian, the use of these languages in different domains and their role in the construction of national and linguistic identity.
The conference featured a lot of discussion on language policy and language planning. This special issue contains two articles on language planning issues in Estonia and Hungary. Lydia Risberg in her article “Recommendations for the meanings of words by Estonian language planning – justified and necessary, or not?” seeks to review Estonian language planning in relation to word meanings. The author asks whether there is a justification and necessity for recommendations on word meanings. The paper gives an overview of the development and current situation of Estonian language planning and Estonian common language, and focuses on recent research on word meanings in Estonian. The work is based on the theoretical approaches currently established in Estonian linguistics, namely usage-based linguistics and corpus linguistics.
Zsófia Ludányi and Ágnes Domonkosi, in their article “Language consulting and language management from the perspective of the Hungarian Language Consulting Service”, use a linguistic management theory approach to explore how a language consultancy service can serve to address the linguistic challenges faced by different language users. The paper discusses Hungarian institutional practices of language consultancy and the role of language consultancy services in today’s complex linguistic context.
Some of the texts published in this special issue focus on language learning. Gábor Tillinger’s article “Teaching the Hungarian accusative case to native speakers of Swedish – problems and solutions” discusses the errors of Swedish university students learning the widely used forms of Hungarian accusative. The study consists of a dataset of written and spoken language tests, essays and other types of assignments collected over a period of 15 years from 500 students studying Hungarian at Uppsala University between 2008 and 2023. For various reasons, the Hungarian accusative often poses additional difficulties for native speakers of Swedish (and to some extent Danish or Norwegian) who are studying Hungarian. The paper not only addresses the errors made by students, but also suggests ways to teach Hungarian accusative more effectively.
Another article, related to the context of language learning, deals with an interesting topic, which has become particularly relevant in recent years due to the high prevalence of online learning: embodiment and sense of community in online learning. The author of the paper, Minna Intke-Hernandez, analyses 11 interviews with students at the University of Helsinki Language Centre in her paper “Embodiment and a sense of belonging in online language learning contexts”. In her paper, she addresses the following research questions: (1) How does embodiment manifest itself in students’ accounts of online language learning?, and (2) How are embodiment and a sense of belonging and community related in online learning? By analysing the links between the narratives of historical bodies and the contexts of online language learning, the author of the paper highlights the dominant discourses related to the research questions raised.
Several articles in this post-conference issue deal with the analysis of various types of textual problems. The aim of the paper “Automatic Part-of-Speech tagging of Tartu Corpus of Estonian learner English: Impact of learner errors on the accuracy of the tool” is to investigate the effect of learner errors on the automatic Part-of-Speech (POS) tagging in the CLAWS7 tool. The authors of the paper, Liina Tammekänd and Reeli Torn-Leesik, analyse a sample of 24,812 words from the learner corpus to investigate the relationship between learner errors and automatic annotation errors. The goal of their research is to identify the types of errors that can have a significant impact on automatic annotation errors, and the reasons that explain the impact of learner errors on the accuracy of the annotation tool. It also attempts to explain the main factors that may have contributed to the automatic annotation of part-of-speech errors related to student errors in the text.
Another paper based on learner corpus data is Olympia Tsaknaki’s study “Creation of an electronic learner corpus of French as a foreign language”, which presents a learner corpus of French as a foreign language built from the written submissions of the Greek National Foreign Language Examination. The corpus covers the period of 2018-2019 and contains student papers of different levels of linguistic competence (A, B and C). The paper discusses the features of the exam papers that constitute the corpus, the structure and specificity of the corpus, the importance of the corpus, and its applicability in solving issues related to language teaching.
F. Nihan Ketrez’s article “Asymmetry, but where? Terms of address in pet-, infant-, and child-directed speech in Turkish” examines the address forms used in spontaneous conversation with pets, infants and children. The work compares the frequency of diminutive and hypocoristic morphemes combined with different types of stems. It should be noted that the repertoire of diminutives and hypocoristics in Turkish is extremely limited. The aim of this paper is to investigate whether the distribution of different forms of address is determined by the type of the addressee and by the asymmetry characteristic of pet- and children-directed communication.
The article “Easy language for social inclusion: A case study” by Velga Polinska and Dite Liepa presents the ERASMUS+ project “Promoting Easy-to-Read Language for Social Inclusion” (PERLSI). The project participants are colleagues from three countries: Slovenia, Lithuania and Latvia. The article gives an overview of easy-to-read language for people with permanent or temporary reading disabilities, compares the possibilities of developing such language in the project countries, presents the profile of an easy-to-read translator, the easy-to-read language course developed by the project members, and the competences acquired by the students who have completed the course.
In addition to the papers written in English, this special issue also includes several texts written in Lithuanian. One of the papers in Lithuanian, as well as the afore-mentioned study on Turkish address forms, focuses on asymmetric communication. This issue is addressed in Laura Kamandulytė-Merfeldienė and Ineta Dabašinskienė’s paper “Asymmetric communication: How do we communicate with our pets and about them?”. The authors of the paper present a nuanced perspective on the facets of verbal communication in interactions involving pets. The paper analyses data obtained from an online survey, unveiling specific characteristics of pet-directed speech. The analysis highlights the use of onomatopoeia, diminutives, and adjectives in conversations with or about pets.
Jonas Stepšys’ paper “The acquisition of adjective agreement by bilingual children” seeks to identify and elucidate the challenges related to adjective agreement in Lithuanian among bilingual children. The paper analyses the results of a specially designed test that reflects the diversity of adjective and noun paradigms. Administered to 35 bilingual children aged between six and twelve residing outside Lithuania, the test brought to light the challenges these children encounter in adjective agreement.
Laima Jancaitė’s study “Identification criteria of adjectivized participles in Lithuanian” is based on corpus data. The paper presents the criteria for identifying participial adjectives and explains how such adjectives can be recognised on the basis of corpus data. The author argues that the identification of these words holds significance due to the absence of a well-established tradition in marking them in dictionaries, challenges encountered in data annotation, and incorporating them into the teaching of Lithuanian, both as a native language and a foreign language. The paper addresses the issue of adjectivization, delineates criteria for identifying participial adjectives, and presents a study in which such adjectives were identified in corpus data based on several objective criteria.
In the paper titled “The effect of auditory-visual stimuli in Lithuanian non-word repetition test”, author Eglė Krivickaitė-Leišienė compares the results obtained from the repetition test of invented words collected using different procedures. The goal is to assess how two distinct procedures impact the accuracy of word repetition. The analysis focuses on a data sample comprising 100 four- to five-year-old children and 45 adults who participated in the study. During one segment of the test, the invented words were recorded as auditory stimuli, while in another segment, the researcher spoke the invented words live, without covering the lips, providing both auditory and visual stimuli.
We express our gratitude to all the authors and reviewers who contributed to the papers. We hope that this issue will be of great use for readers with an interest in applied linguistics.