School of Languages and Linguistics - Research Publications

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    Selling Your Design: Oral Communication Pedagogy in Design Education
    Morton, J ; O'Brien, D (ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2005-01)
    Good design skills are the main focus of assessment practices in design education and are evaluated primarily by drawings and models. In some settings, design studio pedagogy tends to reflect only these content-oriented assessment priorities, with minimal attention paid to the development of oral communication skills. Yet, in many professional contexts, architects need both sets of skills: design competence and the ability to articulate designs for an audience. This paper explores two approaches to oral communication pedagogy in design education - a public speaking approach and a genre-based linguistic approach - and then applies one particular linguistic approach to novice design studio presentations. Based on the findings of this study, we argue that the linguistic, genre-based approach can best offer language-based, discipline-specific description of performance strategies, rhetorical structures, and the linguistic realizations of such structures. Such information can contribute to improved pedagogical practice in the design studio.
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    Context, culture, and structuration in the languages of Australia
    Evans, N (ANNUAL REVIEWS, 2003)
    ▪ Abstract  Using Australian languages as examples, cultural selection is shown to shape linguistic structure through invisible hand processes that pattern the unintended outcomes (structures in the system of shared linguistic norms) of intentional actions (particular utterances by individual agents). Examples of the emergence of culturally patterned structure through use are drawn from various levels: the semantics of the lexicon, grammaticalized kin-related categories, and culture-specific organizations of sociolinguistic diversity, such as moiety lects, “mother-in-law” registers, and triangular kin terms. These phenomena result from a complex of diachronic processes that adapt linguistic structures to culture-specific concepts and practices, such as ritualization and phonetic reduction of frequently used sequences, the input of shared cultural knowledge into pragmatic interpretation, semanticization of originally context-dependent inferences, and the input of linguistic ideologies into the systematization of lectal variants. Some of these processes, such as the emergence of subsection terminology and moiety lects, operate over speech communities that transcend any single language and can only be explained if the relevant processes take the multilingual speech community as their domain of operation. Taken together, the cases considered here provide strong evidence against nativist assumptions that see linguistic structures simply as instantiations of biologically given “mentalese” concepts already present in the mind of every child and give evidence in favor of a view that sees individual language structures as also conditioned by historical processes, of which functional adaptation of various kinds is most important. They also illustrate how, in the domain of language, stable socially shared structures can emerge from the summed effects of many communicative micro-events by individual agents.
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    Credit-Based Discipline Specific English for Academic Purposes Programmes in Higher Education Revitalizing the profession
    Melles, G ; Millar, G ; Morton, J ; Fegan, S (SAGE PUBLICATIONS LTD, 2005-10)
    In the UK, North America and Australia, credit-bearing discipline specific English for Academic Purposes (EAP) courses are seen as a challenge to remedial views of English as a Second Language and a key element in revitalizing a profession on the periphery of the institution. However, the EAP field has to confront not only institutional challenges to its acceptability as a discipline but also tensions within the field. In this article we examine the tensions which underpin current and future directions in the field, review the development of credit-based EAP courses in the US, UK and Australia, and illustrate our discussion with a case study from the University of Melbourne. We conclude by arguing that discipline specific credit-based EAP offers promising hope for the future of the EAP discipline in higher education, but that to achieve this end the field and practitioners need to find a position between critique of and accommodation to discipline specific content.
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    The rise and fall of modern Greek in Australia's universities what can a quantitative analysis tell us?
    Hajek, J ; Nicholas, N (SAGE Publications, 2004-12-01)
    In this article, we look at the state of Modern Greek in Australian universities, focusing on quantitative analysis of its rise and fall in the relatively short period of 35 years since it was first taught as a university subject in Australia. We consider the possible reasons behind this trajectory, in particular correlations with changing demography and a concomitant decline in the study of Greek in the secondary sector. We also ponder the future of Modern Greek in Australia’s tertiary system.
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    Missing Afrikaans: 'Linguistic longing' among Afrikaans-speaking immigrants in New Zealand
    Barkhuizen, GP ; Knoch, U (Informa UK Limited, 2005-12-01)
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    Mundari: The myth of a language without word classes
    Evans, N ; Osada, T (Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2005-12-01)